June Baby... Maybe?

Today we met with the Magistrate--the top official who heads the adoption system in Prague--and got some new, surprising info.

The short version is: we may meet and bring our daughter home as soon as early June.

For anyone who is interested in the details, here's the scoop. Because we've finished with the adoption training, there are no more hoops to jump through. Today the Magistrate asked us some final questions about what kind of child we are hoping for. Our answer

• a girl
• no older than 1 year, but preferably younger than 6 months (2 months is the minimum adoptable age for babies because they have to have no contact from the mother for 6 weeks before they are available)
• Roma or other minority ethnicity (could be Roma, Vietnamese, Africa/Czech or some combination thereof...)
• no major, non-correctable health problems

These parameters will be entered into their database and we will be matched with available babies. Almost everyone we've talked to has said that once they were in the database, they had a call to come meet their baby within weeks. We've told the Magistrate that we won't be ready before June 1st, because both of us have teaching committments to that time. I actually am contracted to teach through the end of June, but June is a less important month than May, so if I have to take maternity leave, it's probably okay in June.

So, the next steps are to talk to my school and give them the heads up, buy some last minute baby supplies so we'll be ready (although we have a lot, we still need some items like a high chair, diapers, formula etc.), and check with the Baptist Seminary about when will make sense to move on campus.

One surprising thing was that the Magistrate didn't seem overly worried about checking that we have a new valid visa for the coming school year. We are hoping that will prove not to be an issue and that we can get the baby while the visa is still in process. That would be a huge answer to prayer because we have been very worried that the visa would hold everything up.

How are we feeling about all this?, you might ask.... I think we're still a little bit shocked. I've lost the sense of imminent reality about it which I had about a month ago when I was feeling terribly ready to "just get started already!" The visa setbacks discouraged me quite a bit and I think I shut down the part of myself that was feeling ready, or rather put it on hold for a while. So now I'm going to have to build up that sense again in the next month or so. I think that will be plenty of time.

Matt seems excited--in his slightly muted, Matt way. He's more patient with all the changes and uncertainty than I am. We were both pleased today to learn that we will be able to visit the baby home in the next few weeks to see what it's like. He's especially looking forward to that and I think it will make it more real to him.

Well, that's our latest. Feel free to email or call (or post comments here) for more details. We love hearing from you guys!