Medical Update and Another Word of Warning

Unfortunately we didn't find any time to blog during the week, I guess we were just too busy. I went to meetings in Cloquet, Tofte, and Brainerd just during the first three days of the week! Henry's meetings consist of every few hours with a bottle of formula in Guatemala City. Then, as you can see by the pictures, a lot of sleep.

Like we said last time, we hope we are in PGN by now, although we can never be sure. A form had to go down there and then our pre-approval from the Embassy was going to be picked up. Of course, today was a holiday in Guatemala: Revolution Day. In October 1944 popular revolts were held around Guatemala to protest the military strongman who was the ruler at the time. The revolution led to democratic elections and a new, albeit socialist, leader. Anyway, what this means for us today is that no one will be around to work on our case! Erin found out online that one case had gotten all the way through PGN in only 10 days! So, if we also went through in 10 days, assuming we officially go in on Monday, we would be out by Election Day and would likely have Henry home by Thanksgiving! Let's not bet on that...

We did get a medical update on our bundle of joy. He was evaluated on October 5 and weighed 11 pounds, 8 ounces, with a length of 52 centimeters and a cephalic circumferance of 37 centimeters. A second dose of polio, triple meningitis and hepatitis B was administered. On September 2, Henry weighed 9 pounds, 10 ounces, with a length of 51 centimeters. According to the medical report: "The patient presents a normal physical and mental development, according to his chronological age, the patient is asymptomatic with no evidence of infectious disease at this time, and he presents a good nutritional and neurological state, according to his age." Now, the sentence that really gets us: "The baby smiles when someone laughs at him or when he sees faces." I don't need to say that we wish he was smiling and laughing at our faces! Okay, I guess I said it anyway.

We are truly blessed to have a healthy baby, even though he is thousands of miles away. And, we are also blessed to have a foster family that is caring for our baby. How truly blessed we are came into focus a little bit more in the last few days, when more disturbing news came from Guatemala. Apparently a "police directive" was issued stating that custody of a child in the adoption process was only legal if the custodian had a judicial court order. Because the placement of children with foster mothers is a purely private process, a foster mom will never have a court order. So, one possible interpretation of the directive was the police had free reign to "raid" foster homes. There were also reports of foster mother harassment and detainment outside of hotels, although we aren't sure how many mothers were actually detained, if any.

We have now learned that the directive was rescinded, so maybe now everything is okay. But many online forums are not recommending travel to Guatemala to visit children. We weren't planning to visit anyway, but of course we will make the trip down there to pick Henry up when it's time. This threat, just like the last one a few weeks ago, again looks like posturing from the anti-adoption forces in Guatemala. You have to wonder however when this whole thing will blow up. We feel pretty comfortable now because we are matched with a baby and are fairly deep within the process. However, I would not start a Guatemalan adoption right now and it's sad, but I can say with confidence that we will probably not be adopting a second child from Guatemala (not that we don't want to, but it just might be impossible).

So that's it from chilly Duluth. October is almost in the books already, but we have no idea if we will be getting a case update or more pictures sooner or later, since we didn't get our September case update until last week! Plus, some agencies are shutting down further medical visits (which is when new pictures are taken) because of possible harassment of foster moms. This just adds fuel to our fire of hoping that the adoption process will move swiftly. We should stress, however, that this latest hiccup doesn't seem to be affecting the adoption process. So, even though we haven't even started on the nursery yet, we wouldn't mind having the "problem" of Henry being home despite no nursery!

Sorry for the long post. We'll try to be more frequent. Happy fishing.