Praise God!  We got my passport today!  I was told 4 weeks minimum.  Again, God is good!  So we did some scrambling today and got all the other pieces of paperwork together and when Chad's employer letter arrives tomorrow (being over-nighted) the dossier should be complete.  So hopefully either tomorrow or Monday we will go in and have it reviewed, and if everything is good then it's off to GR to get each document "State Sealed"....then to Kinkos to make 4 copies of everything then to Bethany Corporate (thankful they are all near each other in GR).  The packet will get reviewed for a couple days and then it's off to Washington DC to the Embassy to be Authenicated.  From there our paperwork goes to Ethiopia!  So, We are hopefully that our dossier will be in Ethiopia in mid to late May....and I was hoping for August...yeah God!  Once the paperwork is in Ethiopia we won't hear for a long time....until we get our referrals.  We are told it is 6-24 months of waiting.  But we know God's timing is perfect and if He wants to place our children quicker, He will, we've seen that already!  We'll be sure to update when we know the paperwork is on it's way to Ethiopia.  Until then, God Bless!!

I flipped through the mail this afternoon not expecting anything good.  Then I saw it, and thought, "no way."  I ripped it open and started to tremble a little.  There it was on the bottom of the document I-171H.  THE golden ticket!  This pre-approval is supposed to take 3 months.  God got ours through in 25 days!!  I wasn't going to start watching the mail for it until July!!  We've been praying for the whole process and specifically that paperwork would go quickly and smoothly, but I never imagined less than a month.  God is so good!

So now to get the rest of the Dossier papers together.  We have to go to the Sheriff for our police clearances, get an employer letter and two reference letters.  Then the only missing piece is my (Lora's) passport.  I applied about a week ago and have been told 4 weeks.  So now we can specifically pray for the passport to come quickly!

I’m excited to report some of the decisions we’ve made….we want a pair of siblings from Ethiopia!!!  We are hoping for a brother and sister, but would be open to both children being the same gender.  I never pictured myself the mother of 4, but ever since we started talking about adopting, God has really opened my heart to it.  Now, when I think about adopting only one, it makes me a little sad.  Weird, but true.  

I’m also excited that our Homestudy is almost complete!  We have had to do some “running around” to get some of the paperwork were it needed to be but now I believe our case worker has all the doctors reports she needs (the lab messed up Chad’s blood work and wasted one of the blood draws on the wrong test, so he had to go back and to get poked….twice….they missed the first time and fished around a little and then went to the other arm…ouch! ….and the dr. office misplaced my paperwork so I had to wait for them to locate it.)  We have also both completed our required 8 hours of on-line training (some of it very informative, some just tedious).  We will meet with our caseworker next week to read and approve the homestudy which is very exciting (and expensive, because the balance of the branch fees are due).

The completed Homestudy is a large milestone!  Once we have the case study, we can start the Immigration Pre-approval process.  We send the homestudy along with our birth certificates, marriage license, and another big check so we can get finger-printed and have our paperwork processed.  This Immigration process usually takes about 3 months.  During this time, we will be collecting all kinds of paperwork for our Dossier.  We will also be doing more reading (learning), and visiting with others who have adopted (especially looking forward to meeting families in the program).

Welcome to our adoption blog.  A lot has happened even since the letter we're not even done sending out yet was written!  It's amazing how quickly this process evolves.  Since the writing of our letter, we've pretty much ruled Columbia out as an option.  There were nice things about the Columbia program, but the wait times were just too long (somewhere in the area of four to five years!)

We are also close to ruling out China.  We'd like to remain open to the possibility of adopting siblings, but with China, that isn't possible since giving kids up for adoption in China isn't legal!  In order to give up children for adoption, parents need to drop the kids off and run.  We do have a meeting this week to look at a few children waiting in China, but right now we're really not feeling like China is going to work out.

That leaves us with Haiti and Ethiopia.  At this time, we're leaning more toward Ethiopia.  Both countries have very good programs and it's going to be hard to decide.  Right now we're leaning toward Ethiopia because the wait for Haiti would probably be quite a bit longer.  We'll see what happens!