No Court Date Yet

There have been a number of people who have been asking about our court date.  When will we get it?  When will the date be?  How long are we planning to stay?

We have spent the last few weeks attempting to get answers from our agency on the when's.  There seems to be some problems with our file, and we are currently waiting for that problem to be rectified.  At this point, we are unsure what the problem is, but it is something that we are looking into along with our agency.  From what we understand, it is not anything to do with us, but rather an oversight on someone's part, or extra paperwork on the Ethiopia end or something along those lines.

This past weekend Hilary and I went away for the weekend to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.  While on this trip, we felt that we needed to make some decisions regarding what our plans will be for court, and then picking up the girls.  We have made a decision that we will pursue staying in Ethiopia for the "long stay" if we pass court the first time.  So what this means (provided all the issues fall into place like we hope they will), we will head out for a court date (which could potentially be any time now), and we will hopefully pass court on the first try.  We will take custody of the girls immediately after passing court, and then will begin our life as a family of 4 in Ethiopia.  This means that we will only have one trip into Ethiopia, but our living expenses out there will come close to matching what we would've paid anyway for a 2nd trip.

Weighing the pros and cons of this decision, we felt that being able to take our kids out of the institutionalized care, and into our loving care was too important to delay for a few months.   The major negative in this situation is that if we take custody of the children, we are no longer able to come back to Canada, until we can bring the girls back.  This would only be a problem if there is some sort of emergency back in Canada, at which we would not be able to come back.  When all was said and done, we felt that this was a risk we needed to take for the well being of our girls.  This will also be a chance for us to start the attachment that will be needed with our girls.  It will also give us a chance to explore some of their country and culture, Ethiopia.

Please continue to pray for us as we continue to move towards decisions.