A long awaited update: the final steps of the journey

Sorry that it has been so long since we have updated!  Things have been SOOOO busy.  Jason got the call on Wednesday, February 6th that the judge was signing our paperwork.  He flew back to Pasto on Thursday and signed the paperwork only to find out that the child defender still had not signed.  They allowed him to get Claudia's new birth certificate with her new name :) and us as her parents :) on it.  On Friday, our translator went back to the courts at 11am, when the child defender was supposed to be there to have our Sentencia signed and stamped.  The defender was not there and our translator had to drive all over Pasto to find him.  In the end, he ended up at ICBF headquarters, found the defender, had him sign, THEN went to the notary, had the paperwork notarized and several copies made AND made it back to the hotel so that Jason could catch his 1pm flight.  This is a lot in such a little amount of time considering the airport is about 45min away from the city!  Jason flew back to Bogota on Friday and had to wait until Monday to continue the adoption process.

On Monday, our facilitator picked Jason up to go get Claudia's Passport.  There was a bunch of misprints on our paperwork, they had my name as Angelina... ugh, and had our address wrong.  They had all of that fixed and said we could have her Passport on Tuesday.  Our facilitator went to ICBF to get some more paperwork, which ended up being wrong as well.

On Tuesday, Jason and the facilitator went to pick up Claudia's passport and then to the doctors office to pick up here medical paperwork.  With that all in hand they could email the US Embassy to schedule an appointment with the Embassy to get Claudia's Visa to come home.  Late Tuesday night, Jason got a call from our facilitator that they had an appointment with the Embassy at 2pm on Wednesday! It usually takes about 2 days to get the appointment, so it was wonderful that they could get it so soon!

On Wednesday, they went to go get Claudia's visa at 2pm and were able to pick it up that same day.  They waited around for a little while until it was ready.  Sometimes, you are not able to get it until the next day.  This was the final step in the process in Colombia.

When Jason and Claudia got home from the Embassy, they called the airline and had their flights changed for that night!  They packed up and waited for the time to go by until they could go to the airport.  Jason and Claudia left Colombia around midnight and arrived home at 11am on Thursday, February 14th, Valentine's Day!  What a wonderful gift, to have everyone together again!Valentine's day will forever be the day that Claudia came home.

She is adjusting very well, she now has many more age appropriate toys and keeps busy with them.  I will let the pictures speak for themselves:

I will try to add videos later.