99%

We got an email from Luciana today.  I talked with her for while too.  Seems CEJA (Brazil's State Judiciary Commission on Adoption) looked at our paperwork on Friday and requested the translated homestudy addendum.  Luciana seems to think that this request means that CEJA wants to place the kids with us and just needs to make it all official.  She said they wouldn't have asked for it if they weren't serious.  (WAHOO!)  I expressed the legalized addendum (which arrived at our home on Saturday morning) to the translator in Oregon.  We figure she can translate it in a couple days and express it to Brazil before the end of the week.  Hopefully it will be in CEJA's hands in a week and a half or so.  After CEJA has it, we can be more like 99.9% sure.  The 1% uncertainty right now is the possibility of someone who is fully approved and ready to go submitting a petition for the same children between now and next week when CEJA receives our addendum.  Once they have our addendum, if someone else petitions, they will probably say, "we are already reviewing a family for those children."  I do not think we will get anything "official" granting our petition until after we're fully approved and we receive our invitation of invitation from Brazil.  But Luciana will let us know what she finds out.

She thinks we might be able to travel in mid-June!!

We have plans to go out to a super-nice restaurant tonight.  It's "restaurant week" in New Haven and lots of very nice eateries offer a prix-fixe menu at better-than-usual prices.  I've wanted to go to Ibiza forever and it's three weeks before our 7th wedding anniversary and we'd planned to celebrate early.  Now that we have this news, we're also going to celebrate our family--I promise we'll only celebrate 99%.