Unfortunate News

We received an unfortunate email from our agency yesterday. Due to all of the uncertainty and turmoil surrounding Guatemala adoptions, our agency has decided to close its Guatemala program. Our agency has assured all of the families currently in the Guatemala program that they are committed to seeing all in-process adoptions through to completion. Our agency will be having a conference call this evening to give us further details.

We are in PGN!!!

We found out this afternoon that our dossier entered PGN yesterday! Hooray! Our caseworker informed us at the same time that there is yet another problem with our homestudy. Our homestudy states that "Mr. and Mrs. Ochs wish to adopt a female infant, newborn to three months at the time of referral, from Guatemala." This statement is true because Miranda was only 10 days old when we accepted her referral. However, the attorney is worried that since she is now 5 1/2 months old that the PGN reviewer will kick us out. We have contacted our homestudy provider to see if they can change just that one sentence to read "Mr. and Mrs. Ochs wish to adopt a female infant, newborn to twelve months at the time of referral, from Guatemala." Hopefully we can get this taken care of quickly.

We leave one week from today for our second visit trip with Miranda. We can't wait to hold her again, but most importantly we just want to bring her home. We also can't wait for everyone to meet her.

Finally Some Progress

On Tuesday afternoon we finally received the call that we had been waiting on for the last nine weeks. Our adoption caseworker emailed us to let us know that our attorney in Guatemala had received the final social worker report. It has been a long nine weeks waiting on this report. Typically this report is completed in one week. Hopefully we won't have any more problems with the guardianship information in our homestudy.

According to our caseworker our dossier should be submitted to PGN by the end of the week. During this process a reviewer goes through your file with a fine tooth comb. They can "kick" (called a previo) you out for a ton of different things: missing documents, expired documents, misspellings, not using the correct color ink, not including every variation of your name on the name affidavit, etc. Most of the kick outs are for ridiculous things, but it adds more time to your case. If your file is kicked out it typically takes about 6 weeks to be reviewed again after your resubmit.

After the reviewer signs off on the file it goes to the Director of PGN-Senor Barrios. He also goes through the file with a fine tooth comb and he either signs off on your file or rejects your file. The only problem with this process is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why he reviews particular files. He doesn't review them in date order so some people have waited six months for him to review their file. On the other hand, some people only wait four weeks.

We are crossing our fingers that our dossier goes through this process smoothly. We will take any and all prayers! We want to bring her home soon!