Tentative Court Date

We just found out today that we have a tentative court date of April 3rd. If all goes well it'll be 3-4 weeks after that we'll be traveling to get them. From what I understand It doesn't always go through the first time. I guess what they do in court is review all of the documents. The mountain of paperwork that Ann and I did, Our agency out of Minnesota CHSFS, Our local social workers home study report. Then they review the Ethiopian orphanage paperwork and the CHSFS over there. They also have to review reports on the birth family. I've recently heard that quite often the birth family is sometimes required to appear in court. After reviewing this The court will then declare them orphaned. And the rest of the paperwork starts Birth Certificate and U.S. stuff.
Needless to say a lot can go wrong. Just today, There was a group that was supposed to go through court (7 from our agency) and apparently a government office MOWA is moving and is shutting down for this week. They have now been rescheduled for March 19th. I also heard that there are just 2 judges hearing the cases and 1 is out on maternity leave.
This is from a message board that someone who was part of the group that was rescheduled said
From what I can tell, there are at least three well-known agencies (Holt, Gladney, CHSFS) that have communicated to adopting parents that they should *expect* to be unsuccessful in their first court appearance, and plan on a new court date approximately six weeks later. From what I can tell, the new court dates for people who failed to pass court today have been rescheduled six weeks later, which would jive with what has already been communicated. My impression has been that these delays are due to a shortage of judges hearing cases (one is alleged to be on maternity leave), as well as increased MOWA requirements, including asking for birth parents or family members to personally appear in court. Seems to me there are a lot of legitimate reasons for court delays besides a pending closure.
and someone else wrote this My court was also post poned. But this was due to the MOWA moving. Also what I understand is that one of the judges is on maternity leave, this leaves only one new judge to handle all the cases. Although this causes delays in our cases it also shows me that the government is taking this seriously and not just pushing cases through. We need to remember this is a different country who deals with many hardships we can not understand..power outages etc. I also heard today that they are considering more judges which would hopefully speed thing up.

As hard as it is to wait and as much as i feel the need to bond sooner i am glad that they are making sure everything is checked out and is on the up and up for all involved. I'll try to go back over the last year and a half of this process and kind of make a time line as to what was involved to date and what is left.

Meet the Twins!!!!!