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Well, our prayers have been answered, praise the Lord! Today's court appearance went very well.
First and foremost, Olivia will be able to stay with her foster family!!! We're actually thankful that she has the chicken pox, it helped with the judge's decision to keep her with the family! Isn't God's timing amazing?
Secondly, he ordered that there be one more attempt at finding someone in her birth family before he would grant us a Certificate of Abandonment (CoA). We assumed they were going to do this. This means, they have until June to locate them. The next court date is in June, (not sure the date yet). If no one is found by that time, the judge will then declare Olivia as "adoptable" and grant the CoA. From that point the case will be turned over to the CNA and they will process it from there.
The other awesome thing is, that we've been given the greenlight to go to Guatemala and visit her!!! FINALLY!!! We're hoping to go either in March or April, we haven't pinned it down yet. We're so thrilled! We finally get to meet our little girl after almost 2 years of waiting!
This is really the beginning of our process and we have a long way to go before she comes home, but we are ready to do what we need to, to make that happen. Today was a huge hurdle and with God in control, we cleared it.
Thank you for all your prayers, keep 'em comin', we're not done yet!Yes, today was a GOOD day.
To update our post from yesterday. Olivia will be presented to the Court tomorrow, chicken pox and all. We've been told that our former attorney Mr. Gallo (who has not been on our case for about a year), will be taking her and presenting our case, not our current attorney, Beyla who has been preparing for almost a year for this appearance.
Anyway, apparently the following will be decided at this hearing:
That the case will immediately proceed to an abandonment ~OR~ they will once again continue the search for the birth mother.
Also, that Olivia will be able to stay with her current foster family through the duration of the process ~OR~ that she will be removed from that home and put into an orphanage. (This could really happen, and would be devastating to her.)
We are praying that obviously we get the go-ahead for the abandonment and that she's able to stay where she is. We also pray the judge is compassionate and will make the right decision.
Olivia needs all the prayers we can get right now!
We will post again once we know the outcome.
Today we found out that Olivia is sick with the chickenpox. I feel so bad, because we should be there for her, poor little thing. We do know she's being well cared for though, which is a comfort to us as well as to her, I'm sure.
So, after finding this out and feeling sad that we can't be with her to nurse her back to health, we got another email from Lymaris, our agency director stating:
" ...I wanted to let you know that after my last email, I got an email from your previous attorney saying that he had gotten a citation to present her (Olivia) within 48 hours. It seems the CNA is going over all the registered cases and so I immediately called Beyla (current attorney) to ask what we need to do...She is trying to talk to the CNA head person today and hopes to have some guidance later on today as to what they want and what we should do. This is where I will really need your prayers, that this is not an attempt to move her to an orphanage and that it is merely their verification of the existence of the child, etc... However - I do not want to get ahead of myself although I am worried, and of course the timing could not be worse with her sickness and all. I will be getting back to you as soon as I have some concrete info..."
It sounds like this may be a very big deal or no big deal. If you would, please pray very hard for the latter to be the case. If they have to take Olivia out to meet with officials while she's so sick, I'm very concerned. If they don't take her out to meet with officials because she is sick, could be even worse. Our hope is that this is just part of a verification process and that they don't use this as an attempt to take her away from the foster family.
Anyway, not the best news. Hopefully we'll get more info soon. Thanks everyone for your on-going prayers and support!
Two years ago today we officially embarked on this adoption journey. At that time we were excited at the prospect that we could potentially have our new daughter home with us by years end. That wasn't to be. Now however, we're excited once again because in 39 days we will be meeting Olivia for the first time! Bryan, Emily and I will be flying down to Guatemala on April 6th and Olivia will come to stay with us at the hotel while we're there.
