This week we found out that the orphan court in the district where Kristine’s relatives live must now rule on the issue of us adopting Kristine. Once that ruling is in, the orphan court in Riga will be able to rule on the matter. Our attorney says it will take about a month to get the first ruling. We’re not sure how long after that we’ll get the second ruling. So now we have to sit tight and wait. It’s a little frustrating considering we were supposed to be leaving for Latvia tomorrow! :-( However, now that we know we won’t be traveling until next month sometime (hopefully), we can put this all aside for a little while and relax a bit. All the ups and downs were making us nuts!
We’re told that the orphan court rulings will most likely be in our favor but you just never know when there are foreign governments involved. In Latvia, the law states that preference is given to Latvian families in adoption cases. Luckily, the child’s wishes carry a lot of weight so that’s in our favor. Kristine has made it clear to everyone that she thinks of us as her family and wants to be with us. The relatives are strangers to her. This all just reminds us that the whole matter is in God’s hands.
One bit of good news we got was that Kristine didn’t have to be moved to another children’s home (at least not right now). We had first been told that they already moved her but then the next day we found out that they didn’t move her after all. We were able to talk to her on Tuesday morning and she sounded so good. This time she said she was happy, much different from the last time we talked when she said she wasn’t okay.
As you can imagine, we were also concerned about the money we could potentially be losing now that we have to change our flights and hotel. Thankfully, I was able to call the hotel in London (we had an overnight layover on the return trip) and they agreed to cancel our reservation and not charge us. This was big because we had booked a non-cancelable, non-refundable room to get the cheapest rate. We needed a hotel at the airport and those are very expensive so this saved us about $250. WHEW!! We had booked our airfare through an online travel agency so they canceled our reservation for us and will apply a partial credit when we book our next trip. We won’t know until we make our new flight arrangements how much we’ll lose on the flights. Delta charges $200 per ticket change fee for international flights and then we’ll have to pay the difference in fare, plus a small travel agency fee for ticket processing.
When the time comes to book our new flights, I’ll just explain our situation again and hopefully I’ll get a compassionate person on the line who can adjust the fees. Another good thing is that we didn't lose money on the apartment we reserved in Riga. We hadn't paid any money for that yet so they simply canceled our reservation.
So now we wait and pray.
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