WE ARE OUT!!! Caleb is coming home!!!!!!

Our case has been approved by PGN! In other words, we've been given the OK by the Guatemalan goverment. Caleb will be coming home soon!

There is still more to be done, including the following:

1. Birthmother has to relinquish her rights for the fourth and final time.
2. A new birth certificate and passport has to be issued.
3. DNA testing has to be done (which takes about 2 weeks) to ensure that there wasn't a baby swap done after the 1st DNA test was done. We're not too worried about this!!!!
4. We have to have an appointment scheduled with the US Embassy.

THEN WE FLY DOWN TO GUATEMALA, PICK UP CALEB, AND BRING HIM HOME FOREVER!!!!!!!

GOOD NEWS! We're moving through PGN!

We just heard from our agency. We are "on the desk" of the Director of PGN. He is the person who looks at our adoption file and gives in the final approval. This means that we made it through the other reviewers (two, we think) and that there are no other errors in our file.

Granted - Sr. Barrios (PGN director) is known to take up to a month to approve a file, and there is still the possibility that he could find something wrong with the file (a spelling error, a missing accent mark, etc.) - but this is still VERY good news.

We'll keep you updated!

Kris and Keith

Update on our KO from PGN

We learned today why our adoption file was "kicked out" of PGN a few weeks ago. It turns out that the US Embassy listed an incorrect ID number for the birthmother on a document called Pre-Approval. In other words, the U.S. Embassy made a mistake, which caused us to be KO'd.

The good news, as always, is that our attorney in Guatemala got a corrected form from the US Embassy, and we were resubmitted to PGN on August 13th. AND, now we can honestly say "it's the government's fault" that our adoption is taking so long. :)

Have a great day, everyone!

Latest update, but not the news we wanted to hear

We learned today that our case was "kicked out" of PGN. PGN is basically the Guatemalan Attorney General's Office, that gives the final approval for all Guatemalan adoptions. When an adoption case is "kicked out", it means that something is wrong with one of the documents. So, our attorney has to fix the problem, and then we are resubmitted. Although we don't know what the problem was, we were resubmitted on August 13th.

As a general rule of thumb, it takes about 8 weeks to be approved by PGN (if we're not KO'd again). Then, it can take another 4-8 weeks after that until we are able to travel to Guatemala and bring Caleb home with us forever.

So now we are realistically looking at December. If we are KO'd again, we might not even have him home by Christmas. It's not the news we wanted to hear, to say the least.

Finally, here's a new photo of Caleb that we received. Love, Keith and Kris