Inspiration

I have been so impressed by other people's blogs! I need help in sprucing ours up a bit and making an effort to post more. If anyone has any great tips, please do share!

Friday morning, we get to drive into St. Paul and wait to do our renewed biometric fingerprints. I hope we don't have to wait as long as we did last year.

Craig and I have become friends with another couple adopting from Ethiopia and that has been a wonderful connection. Through these friends, I got to meet two lovely women from Ethiopia that are now living in the US and going to college here. They were so warm and encouraging to us. It is just great to be able to expand my horizons a bit!

Well, that is all for now. I am going to try and learn how to add some flare to this page.

Re-Fingerprinted and Updated

We got our third set of fingerprints done today. We will have 4 when all is said and done. Since it has been a year since our last sets were done locally, we had to do them again to do a background check. This is to make sure that Craig and I have not gone on any crime sprees since the last check (we have not).

We also had a conference call with our social worker to update our homestudy since that has also been over a year ago. The call took 18 minutes so it was way less than I expected. This was mainly to make sure nothing major has changed since last year ( nothing has thankfully). I feel relieved to have both done with.

Our new estimated wait time is 8-11 months for a referral from right now. Our social worker said to go with the long estimate so that we may be happy if it is less. Was hoping for a referral in 2010 but it may well be 2011 for it to come.

So, we just keep moving forward. As we like to say around our house now, we are one day closer than yesterday to meeting Baby Porter!

Spring and New Beginnings

We have just passed our one year mark of waiting at the beginning of this month. Lots of changes have been occurring in Ethiopia. It is now the most popular country to adopt from - leave it to us to jump on the bandwagon unknowingly. We will now be required to take two trips to Ethiopia instead of one. This news came as a little bit of a shock to me but I am actually looking forward to the two trips after letting go of the worry.

I have not received any updates on our wait time but if it hasn't changed, we have another 5-6 months before receiving a referral. I am bumping that back in my mind to another 8 months to play it safe.

Work on the nursery has begun! My sister is painting a mural and works on it little by little each week. It is going to be amazing! I am hoping that it will help me feel more attached to this process.

We so appreciate your prayers. I continually need patience and to remember that God's timing is perfect. Prayer for this child and their birth mother are always great. I had a dream recently that we met our child for the first time (it was a girl!) and I woke up feeling so happy. I am thankful for these little gifts from God as encouragement.