Most of our adoption
process has been an exercise in patience.
But in an unprecedented turnaround, we found out on Monday that Vera’s
Decree of Guardianship arrived – a whole month
earlier than expected!
Explaining what this means
and why it is significant is a little complicated… stick with me here for a
minute:
Even though Vera was
placed directly with our adoption agency upon her release from the hospital,
her birthparents were still her legal guardians for a bit – until 30 days after
they each signed the “termination of parental rights” paperwork. After those 30 days were over, they could no
longer change their minds and decide that they wanted to parent Vera (you may
recall that July 27th was that magic date). At this point, the risk of the adoption being
disrupted was over (whew!). Once July 27th
came and went, our agency was able to officially petition the courts for official
guardianship of Vera. Usually this process
takes about six weeks, so we were shocked to hear that it was done in only two
weeks!
What does this mean? Well, our adoption agency now has official legal guardianship of
Vera. They have delegated her daily care
to us and we are, practically speaking, Vera’s “official” parents. However, guardianship will not legally be transferred to us for another
six months or so. Between now and then,
we have to work with our lawyer to get her a new birth certificate (with her
new name) and a social security number, petition the court for a date to
finalize the adoption, etc. At some
point (likely about six months from now), we will go to court and stand before
a judge and legally adopt Vera. This is
all good news – there is no more risk of the adoption being disrupted, and we
simply need to finish out the final parts of the legal process over the next
several months. Hooray!
Here are nine of our
favorite pictures starting from when we first met Vera when she was one week
old, up through today (when we tried on her baptism dress - adorable!). At the end, there’s also a
video included at the end that shows you her happy personality – if you’re on
facebook, you likely saw it posted there earlier this week. :)
