Here was our last court update on April 30:
Your case has been submitted to court as part of Group K. The court date will most likely be scheduled for 8-10 weeks from now. Once we are informed of the court date we will let you know.
So, if I use previous families' time lines... Our court date should be at the end of June. If we pass court that day, we should receive an embassy date about 4-6 weeks after(I know of a family who just passed court and got an embassy date 3 weeks later!). The embassy date is when we travel to Ethiopia to pick up baby E. If everything goes well, we should be bringing him home by the end of July/beginning of August!!
I still haven't heard what our court date is, but I'm hoping to hear about that in the next week or so. As soon as I do I'll let you know!
We had a little hiccup in the process last week. I was asked to send in a copy of our I-171H, which is our application for advance processing of orphan petition - basically our approval for our son to have a U.S. Visa. On this form it states that we have been approved and that the approval was sent to the U.S. embassy in the country we requested.
As I was getting ready to send this form to our adoption agency I glanced at the bottom where it said which embassy it was sent to, assuming it would say the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Not so. Instead it said that our visa approval was sent to the U.S. Embassy in
Guatemala City, Guatemala!!! What?!
So, after a week's worth of calling every possible person in the U.S. government(ok that's a gross exaggeration, but that's what it felt like!) I finally was forwarded on to some supervisor who -with just a couple clicks on her computer- was able to tell me that it wasn't, in fact, sent to Guatemala, and that it was not only sent to Ethiopia, but it was received and we even have a case number. Hallelujah! Apparently it was just a typo on the form and when someone meant to tell us it was sent to Ethiopia they just typed in the wrong country(sure...I get those two mixed up ALL the time).
Whatever the cause, the outcome was just fine and it ended up being no problem. I was super worried about it, though, because if Baby E's visa was waiting for him in Guatemala, we might run into a few problems along the way. Also, the I-171H takes quite a while, quite a bit of money, and quite a bit of effort just to get, so I was very grateful we didn't have to do all of it all over again!
Also, Baby E. is doing wonderfully! He's gaining weight and pulling himself up to walk along furniture. Most of the pictures we receive he is smiling and laughing. He even has a little buddy who shares his name that we've seen playing with him in a lot of the pictures. I did get one picture last night where our boy had the saddest face ever. He looked almost like he'd just woken up. Whatever the cause, that face broke my heart! I've never wanted to hold him more than I did when I saw that picture.
So, there's our update - sorry it isn't very exciting, but that's just where we are!
