Court Date! - Sooner Than Expected

OK, this is all happening so fast! We got our referral call for siblings a couple weeks ago, officially accepted the referral this week, went ahead with scheduling our court date with acceptance pending on a few test results, and now we have our court date scheduled for June 30th. Whoa! Usually families are informed 2-4 weeks after referral about when their court date will be...not 1 week! And we were told to expect a court date 8-12 weeks after receiving a referral. Ours is four weeks. So, this is exciting! One important piece is that 40% of families do not pass court the first go, so it may get rescheduled 1-1.5 months from then. Please pray that we pass b/c we may fall into the season where the courts close during August, September, and part of October, and could not travel until late fall. If we do pass the first time we would be traveling sometime in July or early August.

Please also pray for some paperwork adjustments that need to be made. Our original homestudy approved us for a sibling set up to 50 months. We'll need to change that to reflect the age range and delays in paperwork can also delay your travel. So, please pray that goes smoothly as well.

More to come...

Referral! - Sooner Than Expected

Although we had expected to wait 10-12 months (the average) to get a referral, our referral has come at 7 months! We had been hoping for a sibling group, even though it is very rare that a referral for healthy, young siblings comes up. We got a call last Friday from our agency. They said a sibling group had come up that was a little outside the ages we requested (14-36 months) and wondered if we were interested. We were assured that we would not lose our place in line if we decided to wait for a child who was within the parameters we requested. We prayed about it over the weekend and felt like this could very well be God's plan for us.

On Monday we accepted the referral and got to see pictures of the girls. They are beautiful! One is four years old, and the other is three months old! We are thrilled! And we feel extremely blessed.

Now we wait for a court date. We hope to get a date soon, to pass court the first time (30% do not pass the first go round), and to be able to travel before the courts shut down in the early fall due to the rainy season.

We're grateful for your prayer for us and our girls!

Gina

Fall Maybe?

So we're in the waiting mode right now. Still. As we've been watching what's going on in the world of adoption with Ethiopia, we anticipate being able to head overseas in late fall of this year, or maybe winter.

Of course, there's really no telling how things will go. Many people are choosing Ethiopia for their adoption because it is one of the only foreign countries in which the adoption process is somewhat predictable and reasonable (as well as one of the few that is helping their children find homes). This means longer wait times, but at least more Ethiopian children are being adopted.

So, we wait in Nebraska, hoping not to have to update our USCIS status again. We would love to see the timing of the process pick up, but we're realistic. If someone had told us when we started that our adoption would take 3 years or longer, we never would have believed it. Nowdays, we know there may be more waiting and we'll survive it. We're not the only ones in this boat. Like the rest, we're anxious to see who God will be placing in our family, when He decides to.

Gina

Oh yeah, we adopted a puppy on January 1st. That's been nice for our family.

Flying Over the Atlantic!

We got an email yesterday (Friday, Nov. 7th) letting us know our dossier had been authenticated and was loaded with some other dossiers and FedEx was hauling the "box o' important papers" to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia! We had just mailed it a week ago and it's already on it's way! Needless to say we're very excited.

The wait time appears to be anywhere from 5 months (for a sibling group, which we're open to) to 10 months (for a toddler girl). So, we could travel to Africa as early as April or as late as September. Either way, I'm sure the time will pass quickly. We're looking forward to the day when we get word of a referral and get to see the picture or pictures! See, here's the little secret...we're actually praying that we could have a sibling group (one boy and one girl) so hopefully it will be sooner than later! But, we know it's God's choice, but He said to ask...

So, for now we wait and schedule our shots and load up on malaria meds! Thanks for your continued prayers.

- Dave

Out of Our Hands

We drove an hour to Lincoln yesterday and got our dossier certified. Today it is safely in Virginia at our adoption agency. We got word from our family coordinator that it will be reviewed, certified and authenticated, then shipped to Ethiopia within the next two weeks. It's so nice to have our part of the paperwork completed (assuming there is nothing they will discover that we forgot or did wrong). Until next time...

Gina

USCIS Approved...Still

On Thursday we got the call that the government had approved us for adoption in Ethiopia (being approved to adopt from Ukraine wasn't good enough), so we went to get the document Friday. Waiting for this has been stressful because Friday also marked the last day that our one-free-renewal of this document would be allowed. We would have been charged somewhere in the $1000 range for a new one.

We hope to be sending all our paperwork to America World in the next day or so. Soon after that, if everything looks okay, they'll send it on to the US embassy.

We'll keep you posted!

Gina

Hear that?

Prrrrt. Prrrrt. Prrrrt.
That's the sound of crickets chirping as we are STILL waiting for the US government to send our last document.