Marching to Finalization

Well everything is set.  Our finalization hearing in Los Angeles County Court will be on Friday March 5th.  That will finally be the end of this long legal process!  I called the court yesterday and found out they were going to set our date today.  The guy I talked to was so nice.  They only do Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Coming from Arizona Friday works best because it gives us time to do the hearing, meet up with Sabrina's birth family, and visit friends we have not seen in a while.  I guess they are not supposed to allow you to pick your own date, because when I asked for the first available Friday he said "Call me back tomorrow morning before we open so we can talk off the record".  OK...so I did.  He let me pick the date and time I wanted.  I would have done earlier, but March 5th is the first available Friday morning.  The really amazing thing is, it will happen exactly one year from when we had our first contact with "Lucy" and learned about Sabrina's impending birth.  Freaky huh?  It even made Sabrina stand up and take notice...(which she's been able to do for about a week now, in 30-60 second intervals)

Oh well nothing lasts forever!

No, Please, Take Your Time

Here we are now in January of 2010.  Sabrina is closing in on 9 months old and her adoption is still not final.  It should have been done when she was somewhere between 6-7 months, so we've been trying to get this finished since the end of October.  First our lawyer (who actually, I love and think does a fantastic job) took a long time to get us the documents we needed to sign.  Since he's in Northern California and we're here in Righteous Town AZ, we couldn't just go get them.  We signed and sent them in and got them back about mid December.  (I'm sure they were slowed down by the War.  No not that one.  The War On Christmas.  You need to watch more Fox News...)  I had to get some copies, then sent them off to the adoption agency.  They were closed the last two weeks, so they only just sent their part off to the court yesterday.  Once they finally get there, we'll be able to get a date for the hearing.  I'm telling you, if you had to do all this to have a baby every time, the History Channel's "Life After People" would be happening in one generation.  I just hope we get it all finished before the end of the month.  I can see it now, "Sorry Sabrina you can't go to the Prom, we have to go finalize your adoption".

Does It EVER End?

Here we are now with a little girl about to turn 8 months old in a few weeks.  And we are still not finished with her adoption!  Our last step is the finalization, which is a court hearing where a judge gives his blessing, signs off on the paperwork, and makes the adoption final.  We were supposed to be in court in California around the beginning of November.  It took 3 weeks for our attorney to get us the paperwork we needed to send to court.  Throw in the Thanksgiving holiday, and now we're in December.  We mailed our forms in; now we need to wait until they come back to see when our hearing will be.  I spoke to our counselor at the IAC and he said that since California is on a budget crunch and only has family court three days a week, the chances of us getting a court date before the end of 2009 are pretty slim.  We'll still get to claim a bunch of adoption expenses on our taxes, but we won't get the full adoption credit until we file our 2010 returns.  Ugh.  Luckily we're independently wealthy and don't care.  We'll have a good laugh about it with Oprah and Bill Gates at our next Billionaire Bowling Club.

For today I'm home with a stuffy and coughy little girl.  I hate hearing her breathe like that over the baby monitor...I hope she gets better soon.  So far no fever, so that's good.  We started decorating for Christmas this weekend and we will get our tree this week so maybe that will help cheer her up.  Just like her dads, she likes twinkling lights!