Unexpected News....A REFERRAL!!!

It has been long four months since the last post but, honestly, nothing much has happened on the adoption front during that time. It seemed that most of the news out of Ethiopia was that wait times were getting longer and referrals were less plentiful. This was due to extra bureaucratic measures put in place by both the US and Ethiopian governments.

So Tami and I started discussing that maybe we should expand our age range beyond 0-3. In early July Tami called our agency and talked with them at length about this. We decided that we could handle expanding our age range because the referral was probably going to be further out and Carson would be turning 4 in January which wouldn't compromise the birth order of the family. We agreed to change it to 0-5 and told the agency that we would have our home study updated to reflect the age change, since this is the document that drives what type of child gets referred to a family. We then called our social worker in Fort Wayne to tell her we wanted to update the home study.

Fast forward 3 weeks...I come home from a business trip on Tuesday, July 27th. Tami and the kids are in Michigan visiting some good friends of ours. I check the answering machine and our agency is on there telling us that they have a child for us to consider. This is 3 weeks after we had the conversation with them and the home study isn't even updated yet!!!

So, needless to say we are going to be bringing home a 4 year old little girl soon!!!!!! We will call her D for now and she is just beautiful. Faith is so happy that she is going to have a sister, even if it means sharing her room and toys.

There is still quite a process to go through. We will have to travel twice to Ethiopia and will hopefully bring D home late this year or very early next year.

There are so many details to share about what we learned in the referral, what is to come and the events that happened the evening I got the message and the day following. I will save that for some future posts. That way I have material to keep posting instead of long layoffs between posts. Unfortunately we cannot post a picture of her until she becomes legally ours which we hope will happen when we travel there sometime in October/November. So stay tuned for that to happen.

Thank you God for the abundant blessings you have showered upon our family, especially the special gift of D! We don't deserve what we have bestowed upon us but we rejoice and praise you for the wonderful things you have done in our life! We promise to give great effort to following your will during this wonderful journey we are about to set out on.