Court

We were submitted to court for Baby D as part of group E yesterday.
Wouldn't it have been so much more alliteral (my adjective creation out of the word alliteration) if she had been submitted in group D on the 4th??

When we were referred Baby D on the 1st of March we heard there was a group being submitted to court that week. I would have to go back and read the emails but I thought that we were told she would go with that group. I didn't hear otherwise so I've just assumed we would be in that group and hear our court date late this week or sometime next week.

Nope. We were just submitted yesterday. So now we begin the two week wait. (That's optimistic me talking. It could be a 3-4 week wait to hear a court date.)

For those of you not in the adoption obsession and therefore blissfully unaware of how the next steps work, here you have it:

1) Referral (check! March 1, 2010)

2) Baby's case submitted to court (check! March 15, 2010)

3) Baby is assigned court date (waiting to hear court date - usual wait is 2 weeks after submission)

4) Court is held in Ethiopia (on average 6 weeks following submission to court-April 26th?)

5) Baby's case either passes or fails

6) If case fails we get assigned another court date a few weeks later and they try again (on average 60% pass first try and 40% take more than one try)
Note - we are not worried that Baby D won't pass court at some point. We just know that anything can cause her to fail on the first try. Holiday in Ethiopia. Missing letter from Ministry of Women's Affairs. Sick lawyer. Endless possibilities.

7) If case passes we wait for court documents to be produced (court decree, birth certificate, etc)

8) Case is submitted, with court documents, to US State Department in Addis Ababa

9) Case is investigated by State Department (special new step as of last month)

10) State Department hopefully decides that Baby D is not being trafficked and is legally ours (which she is in Ethiopia as soon as she passes court)

11) US embassy in Addis Ababa issues embassy visa appointment (impossible to know when this will be - average is 6-10 weeks after passing court...so if all goes very very smoothly, June?)

12) We travel to pick up Baby D and attend her visa appointment at the US embassy in Addis Ababa (we are interviewed and issued visa)

13) We come home!

Some families slide right through this process in about 12-16 weeks. Other families get snagged at every step and it takes them 6 months. We have no way of knowing how it will work out for us until we make our first attempt at court. If we pass on the first try I think we can continue working on a more optimistic end of the timeline. So please pray that we will be assigned a court date soon and that every piece will fall into place on that date.

I would love it if you would leave your referral-homecoming timeline in the comments. It would satisfy a lot of over-anxious curiosity! Thanks!!

~A