Happy Birthday Pappa - You Have a Court Date!

Woo Hoo! Yippee! Hip Hip Hooray!

WE HAVE A COURT DATE - CAN YOU HEAR ME SHOUT?

What a most wonderful birthday present for Don!

You know, if anyone has a doubt that our Angel is not to be ours, they just need to look at our story and all doubts would disappear. We have been in this process for over 3 years and we have definitely faced many challenges during our journey. But now, as we receive our court date, we know it was all in God's timing - we were just a little ahead of Him in our planning! Ha!

We slowed our adoption process down because of financial and health reasons in the fall of 2007. In January and February of 2008, we heard from our agency wanting to know our plans. We prayed about it and decided we should get our documents updated and resubmitted to Russia. We spent March through August updating our homestudy and dossier. Our timeline for the past 1 1/2 years looks like this:

• August 12, 2008 - Dossier to Russia (3rd times a charm!)


• September 15, 2008 - Heard from our family coordinator about an older girl


• September 16, 2008 - Contacted our family coordinator that we were open to an older girl, our little Angel


• September & October 2008 - Worked on regional documents hoping to be registered


• November 12, 2008 - Registered in Nizhny Novgorod Region


• December 4, 2008 - We got the call - referral for a little Angel


• December 5, 2008 - Phone consultation with International Adoption Physician


• December 8, 2008 - Accepted referral for our little Angel


• December 16, 2008 - Received travel itinerary


• January 9, 2009 - Left US for Moscow


• January 12, 2009 - MOE appointment and met our Angel (my birthday) Found out our Angel's birthday is the same day as my father's


• January 16, 2009 - Returned home


• January 17, 2009 - Let the fundraising begin!


• February through April 2009 - updated documents preparing to travel


• April 2009 - Unable to travel lacking finances - continued to fundraise


• May, 2009 - Updated documents hoping for June court date - Judge on vacation


• June, 2009 - Unable to get June court date - updated homestudy and dossier hoping for
  July court date


• June 18, 2009 - Documents sent for Apostilling lost


• June 19, 2009 - Told we would not be able to receive July court date


• June 24, 2009 - Documents still missing - began redoing all 22 documents


• June 27, 2009 - Missing documents arrived to our home via USPS - very strange


• June 27, 2009 - Updated documents sent for Apostilling - found documents sent to agency


• June 29, 2009 - Documents received by agency and sent onto Nizhny to be submitted to
  court on July 3, 2009


• June 29, 2009 - State unable to Apostille our updated documents because they ran out of
  Certificate paper - honest it really happened!


• July 1, 2009 - Documents Apostilled and sent FEDEX overnight to our agency


• July 2, 2009 - Documents received by our agency and sent via DHL to Russia - hoping to
  arrive in enough time to be submitted to the court on July 10 so we can get
  a court date in August


• July 10, 2009 - Heard our documents were submitted to the court


• July 16, 2009 - Heard our documents we okay but something was needed for our little
  Angel's documents


• July 19, 2009 - We received our court date!!! (Don's birthday)

Whew!!! And that was just the past 1 1/2 years!

Now, I don't want anyone just starting the adoption process become discouraged by our experience. We have had many many unusual things happen and our process is definitely not typical.

Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4

Praising God and Dancing the Happy Dance,
Elizabeth and Don

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