So When Will You Be Able To Bring Her Home?

That is the Million Dollar Question. If only my crystal ball was working I would know the answer to this question. As we show off our new daughter to all of our friends and family members both near and far, the natural question to ask is, "When will you be able to bring her home?".....Not soon enough as far as we are concerned. Unfortunately we have at least 6 to 8 more months maybe more to get through the process in Guatemala. It has so far taken about 5 months to get to this point in order to get a referral. For right now, we needed to sign three documents and send them to our agency so the next stage of our adoption may begin. The three documents are:
Acknowledgement of Acceptance of Referral (this basically says that we have carefully reviewed the info provided about "Linda Maria" and after great thought and consideration of her medical and social background info and the risks involved we have decided that this is the right child for us to adopt and are ready to proceed.)
Power of Attorney (this document gives the attorney in Guatemala permission to act on our behalf. This document had to be notarized, State Authenticated (basically the State attaches a document attesting to the fact that the notary is in fact a notary. Then it has to be Consulate of Guatemala Authenticated. I Fed Ex it to Atlanta to the Guatemalan consulate so that they can verify that this is an authentic document.) I can't tell you what theirs says because it is in Spanish.
Agreement to Provide Post Placement Reports to our Adoption Agency we have to have a post placement visit to see how everyone is going and to make sure that we are caring for Olivia as promised.
Once these documents are received by the adoption agency they will send them to Guatemala along with our completed dossier (I'll explain the dossier in a later post) so that they can be translated and filed with Family Court.