We reached another milestone today!! We got confirmation that our court petition to adopt Daniel has been filed with the Moscow region court.
For most families this milestone would have been reached sometime during their first trip to Russia. However for us it was a little different. When Daniel's mother abandoned him at the hospital, she didn't sign any forms formally terminating her rights. This placed Daniel in a little bit of a limbo state. He was legally available for adoption, but only after it was formally recognized that his mother had terminated her rights.
Since Daniel's mother and no one from her family had called or visited him, they had effectively terminated their rights. Therefore it fell to the city government of where Daniel's mother claimed to have resided to 'legally' terminate her rights. Like many things in Russian government, it takes time and a little prodding to get things done. If no one prods, nothing gets done. The longer things don't get done, the more chances there are things will go wrong... But, thanks to Svetlana and her staff, we've got the paperwork squared away. This was the last hurdle to getting our petition filed in the court.
As you can imagine, this takes a huge amount of stress off of us. We're glad to have this hurdle behind us.
Next step, waiting for a court date!
gah
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2 comments:
The court petition procedure varies from region to region. We had to wait almost 4 months for ours because our agency is allotted a certain number of court hearings per week and many of the agencies families are in this region.
Heather
www.russianblessings.wordpress.com
Yay!
Hooray for paperwork that's taken care of! That's one more piece of paper that you don't have to worry about now!
Hope that your wait is very very short!
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