All,
I just heard back from our awsome facilitator with preliminary news about Belle's paperwork...not good news so far, but its not totally hopeless yet. One person at the SDA that she talked to said that they had NO file on Belle at all, so they could not tell me when she would be available for adoption. Our facilitator also contacted the lawyer in Belle's region who handles registrations and adoptions and the woman agreed to research it and call her back with more info tonight.
Please pray that they will find Belle's paperwork and that the SDA will make an exception to let us adopt Belle as she will be 14 years old this summer and will never be adopted by a Ukrainian family.
If they do not find her paper work, one of two things could happen - they could let us get her registered, let us adopt Cinderella, and then come back for Belle later, or they can deny us both sisters since we cannot adopt them together at the same time. The letter from the SDA made it sound like we could adopt Cinderella without her sister, but the orphanage director says it is not possible to seperate them. I hope we don't have to - my hope is that we can bring them BOTH home on this trip. If not, we need to at least bring Cinderella home and sign something promising to come back for Belle.
My husband is a total wreck about this; having nightmares and not sleeping. He said the other day "maybe this would have been easier if we didn't know the kids we were trying to adopt" and I told him that this would be difficult either way and that the only thing that has kept ME going is the faces of MY kids and the promise I made to them in my heart. If I didn't already "know" my kids, I would have thrown in the towel on Ukrainian adoptions months ago.
