The very best Christmas present of all!!!!!

HO HO HO...we think that Joey is the best looking Santa that we have ever seen! What a doll. We receive this pictures from our agency yesterday and were estatic, he looks wonderful. Obviously not missing any meals at almost 14lbs. He looks happy and content. We leave in four days for our visit trip and are SO excited! We have enough packed for an army and cannot wait to spoil him rotten. We are also looking forward to sharing this exciting news with his big sis when we return home. For those of who check the blog frequently we will be posting pictures (i am sure many many many pictures) from Guatemala. Thanks to Johns tech skills we will be able to send and receive emails from our hotel room in the Marriot Guatemala. We hope each of you had a wonderful Christmas and wish you a HEALTHY AND HAPPY New Year!

Love,

Lee and John

AHHH the stresses of adoption

AHHH!! It has been a difficult few weeks with the adoption process. Our case has been trapped in Family Court for almost seven weeks (pretty unheard of) and now we found out that the social worker in Guatemala has just left for a one month vacation! Therefore the report will not be completed until January 15th. This setback delays our case about two months! To say that we are disappointed would be a major understatement we are really disgusted and we have not even reached the difficult part yet...PGN.

On a bright note we do leave on January 3rd for our five day visit trip. We will have custody of Joey for the entire visit and cannot wait. I have packed enough stuff for ten babies, but I cannot help it! Sarah will certainly have a blast while we are gone thanks to her grandparents, I just hope they can all keep up with her (lol). We had originally hoped to begin explaining the adoption to her upon our return home in Jan. but now with this setback we may delay that. It is just too confusing and the time is too unpredictable. We will blog and post pics while in Guat. so keep checking for updated pictures. Have a very Merry Christmas and say some prayers that our case gets back on track.

Lee Anne

IT'S A GO FOR OUR VISIT TRIP

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!! We wanted to share that we have been cleared by the agency to travel to Guatemala for our first visit trip. We will be leaving on January 3rd and staying until the 7th. We will be staying at the Marriot that we stayed in back in September which is very nice. The foster mother and an attorney will be bringing Joey to us on the third after we arrive and we will get to have physical custody of him for our entire visit!! Since our agency only allows one visit trip we will be bringing down lots of goodies for Joey and his foster family, I am sure that the airline will be very annoyed by the weight of our bags, but oh-well!! Take care and enjoy this holiday season!

November Pictures!!

Hi all,
We received the November pictures of Joey today!! He looks so great and well cared for!

We cannot wait to get down there and hold him. His Christmas package is going down this week, with lots of good stuff for him and his foster mom! Keep praying for a speedy process.

Love,

Lee Anne and John

IT'S A MATCH!!!!!

Hi all,
We received the wonderful news this evening via mail that Joey is a DNA match with his birth mother and our case can now be approved by the US embassy and proceed to the final court (where unfortunately the longest wait is yet to come). The US embassy has been notified of the DNA match and will now have 30 days to issue pre-approval for the adoption, basically telling us and the Guatemalan Government that from a US standpoint the adoption is cleared. Once this has been done the case proceeds to what is called PGN. Here the case is reviewed, each and every paper for content, clarity and accuracy. Everything must be perfect for it to be approved and PGN is extremely unpredictable, it completely depends on which case worker is assigned to the case. Some cases are through in as short as four weeks, and others are stuck there for six monthes. Some reviewers are picky and others seem more forgiving, we are praying for an nice and easy one, the rest of this long road has been difficult enough. There really is no set standard for how long a case can be reviewed in PGN and that is certainly one of the issues with Guatemalan adoptions. All we can do it pray that it passes quickly with flying colors!

We also received a medical update for Joey and I can say with complete certainty that he is being well fed. The report is from his seven week check up (10/5/06) and at that time he weighed 11.5lbs and was 56 cm long. There should be a photo coming next week, hopefully in time for Thanksgiving. We sent down a package with some friends that were picking up their daughter, Ava and inside the package were some turkey items so I can only imagine what his foster mom is thinking! :) They obviously don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so we are sharing some of our culture with them as well!

We will continue to keep you posted on our progress, the next two monthes should be pretty eventful as we look forward to planning our first visit trip with Joey hopefully in January! Yay, we cannot wait to hold him!
Take care,
Lee Anne

LEGAL UPDATE

Hi all,
We received a legal update from Guatemala that the DNA test will be conducted on November 6th. During the test swabs will be taken from the mouth of both Joey and his Birth Mom to make sure that they match. The DNA test is typically processed in five days by the lab and then the results are forwarded to the agency, the attorney in Guatemala, the US embassy and us. The DNA match is a critical step in the adoption because it is at this time that the Birth mother will have her second and third opportunities (out of four) to change her adoption plan and decide to parent. Usually after an adoptive family finishes DNA they are in the clear regarding the birth mother changing her mind. Once we have the match and the social worker in Guatemala completes her report we will then have to wait for the US embassy to issues us PRE-APPROVAL. Basically pre-approval is the embassy's way of saying that the adoption is approved by the United States, and we will then move onto the final stage of PGN! Oh, don't worry if you are having trouble following me...I can barely keep up with this insane process. Just keep your fingers crossed that DNA goes well!

Our new pictures!! So handsome!

It is hard to believe that Joey celebrated his 2 months on this earth yesterday. We are dying to see him. Here is a link to his new pictures.

JOE CLARK

He looks so alert and really well cared for. We have complete confidence that he is really loved down there by his foster mom. We appreciate that she took the time to dress him in an outfit that my mom sent down and lay him on blankets that we sent. He is surrounded with toys that we gave him and even the photo album we filled with pictures of the people who love him. We were laughing looking at the picture that has the album in it...its our first family photo.

Things have been crazy in Guatemala over the last 48 hours. The police were raiding the medical clinics and hotels where the adoptive families stay looking for babies and their foster moms. They were detaining and harrassing the foster moms and taking the children into "protective custody" (I use that term jokingly). The government down there is really against international adoption and this was yet another ploy to frusturate and scare those involved in the adoption community. The attorney's have since rectified the situation and the government states that they have recinded the order. We will see how the next few weeks play out. We just pray that Joey can have his DNA sample taken so that we can proceed with the next step of this process. He also has a physical next week so we should have new measurements soon. At last check on Sept. 25th he was almost 8 pounds! Keep the prayers coming. You have NO idea how much we appreciate the support of our friends and family.

Yay!! Alittle progress

Well good news, we have made alittle progress. Yesterday we found out that the US Embassy in Guatemala has authorized for DNA to be done. This means that our attorney may now contact Joey's birthmom and arrange for her DNA to be matched with his. During this process she will have her second and third of four opportunities to change her mind. Most agency officials say that after DNA you are pretty much in the clear as far as the birthmom goes and once the match is confirmed we will be allowed to visit him!!! That is the best part. We are also anticipating updated photo's and a medical report this week. Our dossier is still in translation (week three of a four week process) and once that is complete we will be registered to enter family court.
Hopefully we will have new pictures to post this weekend.

Turmoil in Guatemala

The stress of adoption is unlike anything I have ever experienced!! Yesterday while up in Mass. I found out that the president of Guatemala had plans to issue a moratorium on 10/1/06 to stop all international adoptions!! This was apparently planned out and signed by the president and/or his wife and was to be issued as an Executive Order therefore bypassing the Guatemalan Congress. I immediatley began contacting everyone that I know and was able to get some info from our agency late yesterday afternoon. Our contact there informed us that the situation in Guatemala was changing minute by minute and that she had no concrete information. She urged us to contact the State Department and our senators so that pressure could be put on the Guatemalan government to stop the moratorium. I contacted the State Department and was put in touch with the gentleman who oversees the International Adoption Unit for Guatemala. He tried to assure us that he had spent the day talking with heads of government in Guat. and that there was no plan at this time to stop international adoption, although this could happen in the future.

I ask everyone who reads this to please say a prayer for all of the children who are waiting to come home to their families, that the government officials in Guatemala realize that the children need their loving homes as soon as possible.

Keep Joey in your prayers!

Lee Anne

Our first trip to Guatemala

9/24/06
John and I are exhausted from our whirlwind trip to Guatemala this weekend, but we had a wonderful time. We received word about two weeks ago that if we were willing to travel to Guatemala to sign our Power of Attorney paperwork it could bring our son home four weeks sooner. Power Of Attorney or (POA) is the paperwork that must be signed to authorize the attorneys in Guatemala to work on our behalf. Typically the paperwork is sent to the US in Spanish and must be translated to English, then signed by us, notarized, state certified, authenticated by the Embassy, and then translated back into Spanish. As you can probably imagine this process takes a ridiculous amount of time so we chose to travel to sign it, thereby skipping ALL of the steps (yay). We left on 9/22, just the two of us. Sarah stayed at home with my sister Kelly (thank you so much Kelly) and they had a blast. The trip down was fine, only five and a half hours and we were able to get to the Marriot hotel there with no trouble at all. We met our attorney, Miriam that afternoon and she was WONDERFUL! We were both so impressed with how up front and sweet she was. But she was not happy when we told her that we were planning on spending the next day just sitting around the hotel and hooked us up with one of her paralegals, Karla. Karla met us the next morning in the lobby and we hopped in her car and headed out to Antigua (no not the island). What a wonderful woman, we are so blessed to meet such people! She really took care of us on Saturday, showing us all of the landmarks, securing us a safe meal to eat and most importantly helping me shop (as she translated and bartered for me). We really had a wonderful time with her and without that experience would not have seen anything beyond the hotel gates.

Guatemala is a beautiful country and the people are amazingly kind, but it is completely impovished and my heart broke as I watched small children living amoung farm animals. John and I truly feel thankful for everyperson and thing that we have been blessed with, we are very fortunate. The hotel was great and full of American families seeking out their new family member. The lobby was like a superhighway for strollers and I must have smiled a thousand times just looking at the babies. They looked so happy and content.

Sunday was spent primarily in airports or on a plane playing Scrabble or watching 24 on our DVD player. We got in late and are exhausted, but renewed at the same time. It made us want to bring Joey home even more than we did before: and I did not think that was possible.

Referral Day 9/1/2006

Today we met our son for the first time and he is amazing. This afternoon John and I received the referral that we have been waiting for via e-mail from our agency. Neither of us could believe how we just fell in love with him. His name is will be Joseph (Joey for short) and we cannot wait to meet him and hold him. He was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala on August 17, 2006. He was born 6lbs 12ounces and from his assessment by a pediatrician there has been deemed healthy.

The process will now officially begin. After MONTHES of collecting the correct paperwork, having it notarized, state certified and authenticated by the Guatemalan Consulate we will now begin proceedings to bring our son home. Typically this porcess runs 6-8 monthes long! Now is the time that I must really practice my patiences that many of you know I am lacking.

Keep us and Joey in your prayers! Keep you posted on our progess.

Lee Anne