Just a quick update for you all as we are in the midst of Holy Week.
We have had only a few new things over the last few weeks but so far all is going as we expected. Our case was approved at the regional level in Ghana and the 3 month in-country stay was officially waived for us. (Praise the Lord - that was a huge relief!) Then the paperwork was filed for approval at the new National Adoption Desk. We expected this to take about a month to be approved there and then we can get our court date set. Our paperwork has only been there 2 weeks at this point and the Bethany workers in Ghana have been in contact with that National Adoption Desk last week to check the status. They were told that it was not completed yet and they needed more time. The Bethany gang did not have any reason to believe it would take more than the 2 more weeks we were already expecting. So, that was promising. We are still planning on a court date sometime in the first half of May and we need to be there 8 days before our court date to meet our little girl and spend time with her in her country before court.
We did get some new pictures of our beautiful little one from a family that traveled for their court date in March and has a little girl at the same foster home. They reported back that she was energetic, happy and appeared healthy. (she also appeared to be tall - Cade may actually be shorter than she is and he is a big 6 year old!) They also said her foster mother was great and that we are all lucky our daughters are there. I cannot even begin to tell you how great it was to see those pictures of her and to hear that she was energetic and even a little silly... our initial report of her was that she was shy and reserved! She was not speaking English (besides them asking "how are you" and she replied with a "hi" :) to them but she is enrolled in school now so she may get a little more exposure to some English words.
Thank you to all of you who have offered up help with the kids when we need to head over to Africa. We just may be taking some of you up on that once we find out when we need to go! For now, please keep praying that she will feel loved and comforted from afar - she does not even know about us yet. Please pray for smooth travel arrangements once we find out when we need to be in country - it will most likely be short notice. Then, pray for safe and HEALTHY travels for Greg & me. (if you know anything about our family you can be sure that someone usually gets sick on a trip and that is a huge source of anxiety for me!)
Again, thanks for joining us on this journey to bring our little girl home. We'll keep you posted, hopefully by the end of next week we may have a court date set!
Robin
