It's a Girl with a plot twist...

Who knew it would turn into this? We have been blessed to receive a referral for a beautiful little girl who is 30 days old... from Guatemala! Now I know what you're thinking. Guatemala?!? What? So God threw us a curve ball. Good thing we had our glove down. Ok ok, I'll explain...

Monday, our agent called and said that she had an odd situation for us to consider. Guatemala is rumored to be closing its doors on April 1, 2007 to international adoption for an undetermined amount of time. Any adoptions that are in process (meaning that a Power of Attorney is in effect upon receiving a referral) by April 1 would be honored and facilitated to completion. No one knows for sure if it's a rumor or truth, but to be safe, our agency wanted to find families for the babies that they have in foster care in Guatemala. There were a few. It's always better to have families waiting on this side, rather than babies waiting for families. Even though we were part of the Vietnam program, we were the next on the list for a baby girl. Our agent felt compelled to present the circumstances to us and see if we were interested.

After discussion and prayer, Ed and I decided that this little girl felt like ours. We're not sure why or how, but she was supposed to come to us. After the decision was made, we had to move fast. The POA must be processed through Guatemala by April 1. It takes a week on their side and we needed to get the POA notarized, verified by the Sec. of State and authenticated by the Guatemalan consulate in Chicago. Thank goodness it's spring break. We would have been hard pressed to get all of that accomplished in 3 days otherwise. So Ed is on the road today and tomorrow to get the POA in place for our sweet girl. This must be why people refer to it as the paperchase! How appropriate.

We would love to introduce our daughter, Gabriella Sol. She is precious and tiny and we can't wait to get her home. We celebrated by shopping for some comfy clothes for her and having Mexican for dinner last night. I'm not sure where you would get Guatemalan food in Chambana. So we settled for Mexican.
We hope to have her home in less than 6 months. And don't worry. We haven't abandoned our plans to adopt from Vietnam. We will go there for our other children. We just feel that in this case our daughter was in Central America, not Asia. No harm, no foul. Just pure elation that our dream of being parents is finally coming true.