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.

...and still waiting

Wow, it has been awhile since my last post. We are now entering our 7 month of official waiting time and I must admit that it has gone fast. There is not much to do but wait patiently and I feel like God has been giving us the patience needed. I am ready to start on the nursery but need some input from talented family members.

Good friends of ours just got their referral for a baby girl in Korea which made me think of this blog. I am very excited for them and their referral reminded me just how real this whole process is and that soon enough, we will be shouting out the same news. I'm a little envious but know that we must go through this time. Going by the current wait times, we have another 9-10 months of waiting ahead of us. That will help make the cold mid-west winter go by.

We are hoping to take a trip somewhere warm this winter as a celebration of our 10th wedding anniversary this coming year and also as a 'this may be the last chance in awhile' sort of trip. I have discovered that I am not much of a blogger so I apologize for not having many updates.

We are hosting our cooking club get-together next weekend and we picked Africa as the theme for the meals. Craig and I will attempt an Ethiopian dish along with Injera, an Ethiopian pancake-like bread that is very commonly eaten with most meals. I hope we can pull it off! Until next time...

Fingerprints

We go this week to get our fingerprints done on the national level.  I guess last time was just for the local area.  This is for immigration for the baby.  

Hard to believe but this is our last thing on our list (that I know of) besides getting some appointments to get the shots we need to travel to Africa.

So looking forward to updating this blog with our referral and photos!

Childcare 101

Craig and I attended a baby care class this past Saturday at Children's Home Society.  It was nice to be amongst other first-time parents-to-be.  I can't say that we learned anything that we hadn't heard before or that we won't figure out on our own but maybe that was an important lesson in itself.  The best part of the class was imagining myself bathing our baby or feeding them, etc.  

A friend of ours works with a man from Ethiopia who I have gotten in contact with.  We hope to make plans to meet he and his wife in the near future.  This will be such a great thing for us as he said he is very happy to tell us about his country and answer any questions.  He thinks it is great that we are adopting a baby from Ethiopia.  It has been awesome to see the support and we both appreciate the encouragement.

We just got to review our home study report and it is kind of strange to see your life wrapped up in a neat little document but our social worker had some really kind things to say about us.

Boy, does it feel good to be on the other side of the paperwork!!!!

We Are Approved!!!!

Today is a cause for much celebration - our dossier was received and approved at our agency!  Now it gets sent on to the Ethiopian Embassy and then forwarded to Ethiopia.   I am so relieved that nothing had to be redone - I feel like we just got an A+.  Now we are officially waiting for a child.  We have learned that the waiting times have increased to about 13 months and are projected to increase to 18 months.   This was quite disheartening to read but I am just going to try and take it in stride.   I am still ecstatic to have gotten this far and to know that the majority of paperwork is FINISHED!  Now we just need prayers for patience :)