Oddly Anticlimactic but Still Exciting

It weighs eight and a half ounces.
It's got lots of flashy gold seals.
It has caused us more irritation, sleepless nights, and bitten down fingernails (not that I really need an excuse) than I care to remember.
And now I have to let it go and trust it to the impersonal hands of the united states postal service.

Goodbye, Mr. Dossier.
Hello, Guatebaby?

The cats are not sure what they think about this development.

The fine print: We can expect a referral sometime in the next 1-4 months. Hopefully, before we get the referral, we will have received our I-171H (authorization to adopt from Homeland Insecurity), as we cannot be pre-approved by the U.S. embassy in Guatemala without this. Once we accept the referral (more frantic notarizing, certifying, and authenticating) the baby and mother will be tested to make sure their DNA matches. Once we have a positive DNA match, we get to go to Guatemala and visit with Guatebaby.

Our documents will go through family court and then through PGN, aka the Guatemalan attorney general's office, where they will be scrutinized for petty excuses to make us redo documents for typos, notary errors, and etc. At any point during this process, the mom can decide that she wants to parent the child. Although it's not a frequent occurence, our agency has had moms choose to parent, and that was part of why we choose to work with them. The rule of thumb is to expect the unexpected, but most adoptions are completed when the baby is between six months and a year. There's a very detailed flowchart (pdf) here, for those of you who are information junkies.

Once Guatebaby is home (ack, still not totally comfortable with that phrase) with us, we'll do a readoption here, so that we're both legally his/her parents (thank you New York State, for not being run by evangelical freakazoids so that we can do this).

It's really hard, looking at this stack of paper, to believe it will bring us a baby. But I have to believe.