My oh my

Well, the news from Russia is not very good. We've basically learned three things since our caseworker returned from her maternity leave. (Praise God that she is back - I now have a clear communication channel again with the agency and she is very responsive.)

Here's the scoop:

1) The document we sent (twice) has not arrive either time. According to the FedEx tracking number of the second package, it was attemped to be delivered at 5pm last Friday and the business was closed, and since then every day it says "in transit". Don't know if that means it is on its way back to the U.S. or what. But they never received it at our agency's office in Siberia.

but that doesn't really matter because....

2) We also learned that even though we had talked with our director about moving our file from the new region (where we applied last August) back to Siberia, he never actually did it. This means the other documents that we updated last fall are also not in Siberia. We thought they were there already, since we were told to only re-do the one document.

3) Also, our agency cooperates under the auspices of another one for the Russian side of the adoption (staff in Russia, etc) and apparently that other agency did not have the appropriate updated documents for our case. I don't even know what this is about, but apparently it will be fixed within a week.

What this all means is....

Our file is not ready to be submitted to the Dept of Education in our region, despite our best efforts and our following of every instruction we were given. It is missing several pieces. By the time those pieces arrive (about a week for the stuff coming from the other region and for the stuff from the Russia-side agency, and who knows how long for our document sent by FedEx) it will be February. By late February all of our Siberia documents begin to expire because the signatures are over a year old. (We submitted all of them last time around in April 07, but the ones we obtained first were signed as early as February, and the rest in March.)

Folks, we are just about back to square one. We basically need to do all the paperwork once again. It is hard to believe. We are still promised that we will be first in line (at least within our agency's set of parents) when our documents are submitted, but they will not be submitted for a while because we need to get everything updated. It wouldn't be bad if it were just filling out forms, but we have to get forms from other people/gov't agencies. This includes stuff from our home study agency, and that is always a difficult situation because they are not usually comfortable with our many, detailed requests and it tends to take a couple of rounds to get anything done.

Please be in prayer for us. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: we need to rethink whether to stay with this plan or try something else. We will not give up on becoming parents, but we may need to change course.