Step Five.

I said it before, I'll say it again... Adoption is only for the thick skinned and those who are masters at the 5 steps of coping:

Step 1: Denial
Step 2: Anger
Step 3: Depression
Step 4: Bargaining
Step 5: Acceptance

I'm sorry for not posting recently. It's been a rough week of trying to find out any details from Estonia about what's going on. Diana has been breathing down their necks like crazy and finally heard from Signe via email yesterday the following:

According Estonan Cityzenship Act child can have citizenship if there is clear h ehas no right to some other cityzenship. In our case the children has right to mother’s cityzenship and we have to fallow the Russian demands. Right now the application has been given to Russioan Embassy (in the first week of September) and next step is to give up the Russian citizenship on the reason to have Estonian one.

I will keep you informed about the situation.

So basically they're back to square one because Russia has a claim to their citizenship. At least they're not further behind because they continued the Russian application just in case Estonian naturalization wasn't going to work. Legally it might have been possible to get Estonian citizenship first and bypass the Russian process, but they say that the interpretation of the law is different depending on who you ask. Therefore they would hit roadblocks trying to do it that way. So now they'll go for the Russian citizenship, get it dissolved or signed away by Russia so then they satisfy the Russian requirements to have received that citizenship first, and THEN they will apply for Estonian citizenship. Then they have to get passports, then we have to wait for a court date. Yeah.

We finally have resigned ourselves to the realization that we aren't getting the information and answers we want. We just have to wait, and it will likely be several months from the way it sounds. We're just expecting the worst at this point. We've gone through the whole rants of "I can't handle weeks of not knowing how long it will take, week after week waiting for something to happen!", and that is not going to get us anywhere. What are ya gonna do? So we've just decided to expect it to take forever and then if it does, that's what we were planning for.

Don't know what we're gonna do in the meantime. We might go visit them in the winter when we're slow with work. Depends on what happens between now and then.

The only good thing is that everyone is still adamant about one thing: We will get the kids. That is not in question. It's just a matter of when. We might need to update our dossier. We might need to get an addendum for our home study and a new USCIS approval because Katya will be 13 next June and if there's a risk of it taking that long we need a new approval because currently we're only approved up to age 12. But that's only an issue if it takes until next year to get this done. So we'll see. It's all just paperwork, not anything failure-related. Unless you consider the longest ever Estonian adoption to be a failure! But MAYBE it won't be. (Oh wait, that's step 1... Oops.)

So that's the latest. I didn't want to talk about it all week, so forgive me for being in hiding. I wanted to hear something better before I updated everyone.

To answer other questions: We've not heard from the kids at all in 2 weeks. They haven't been on the computer at all, I assume because of school. I know they haven't been on the computer because Katya hasn't logged into her limpa.ru account (that social networking site like myspace.com), which I know she would have done had she accessed a computer at all!

I'll keep you all posted. Hang in there with me, all you emotionally invested blog obsessed readers! ;)

Love,
Molly