Good News, I think

Actually, maybe even two pieces of good news. First, it appears that travel approvals and referrals are continuing to come out, despite the lack of a prime minister.

Second, it looks like our time in Kathmandu may be cut a little bit shorter. The US Embassy has until now been waiting until families were in Nepal to begin their investigation (required to prove orphan status before a visa can be issued to the child to allow them into the States), which has caused a 3-4 week stay. It appears they are now looking to do that investigation before the family arrives (but after the travel approval has been issued), so the time in country may be reduced to more like two weeks.

Of course-- this is all information I have pieced together from various sources-- no official word from our agency yet.

The other side benefit is that this may give us more warning before our trip. For previous families, they sometimes would leave literally within hours of their TA-- can you say chaos? (not to mention expensive plane tickets!) I know we will want to leave as soon as we can-- I sure was ready to go get Lily as soon as we got our referral-- but this time some advance warning will be especially helpful since we'll have childcare, dogcare, and jobs to situate. We had dogs and jobs back then too, so I guess Lily is really what will make the advance warning helpful.

On another unrelated note, I had a dream last night that we were trying to adopt two children who were here from another country on humanitarian parole. It was an older girl who mysteriously spoke English and a toddler boy. How awesome would it be if Little Man had a big sister and Nepal let us adopt her too? As far as I know that is unprecedented and outside of their legal adoption parameters, so I'm thinking that instead of a prophetic dream, it was a borrowed storyline from a friend-of-a-friend who is adopting a brother-sister sibling group (4 and 8) from California (which is sort of a foreign country to me). Sigh....I still can't shake the thought that we have an older girl out there somewhere...