Henry, Monica, and Grandpa Buzz painted M and E's bedroom today. One thing down, 99 to go to get the house ready for our new additions to the family. We're one month away from the court date and we still have a lot to do. Nothing like a deadline to spur one to action.
We just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! We are spending Christmas with Henry's parents, sister Sarah, and our niece Eowyn. We're having a nice visit.
We have several family members serving in the military overseas. Sarah's husband Daniel is serving in Iraq and he is missing Eowyn's first Christmas. My little brother Jeremy is in Korea, missing his first Christmas with his wife Stephanie and step-daughter Hailee. My baby brother Josh, his wife Kim, and daugther Autumn are in Germany. You are all in our thoughts and prayers and we appreciate your service to our country. We love you all!
We got an update on our boys and a new picture from Gladney yesterday, just in time for Christmas. :) Here is part of the update...
“M and E are doing well. M is now more outgoing and seems comfortable with his housemates and surroundings. E can still seem shy, but that goes way in a few minutes. As I am typing this, he is pulling on my goatee and trying to type on my computer. They are sweet little guys! I hope you have a very merry Christmas.” -R
We can't post their names until we pass court. M is the older one and E is the little guy.
Merry Christmas to all!
I was listening to Third Day's "Christmas Offerings" at work and when this song played I had to stop everything. This song hit so close to home that I almost cried. It's so hard to wait now that we have the referal and the court date.
I was so surprised by a call from our case worker today since we weren't expecting to hear from her for at least another week. She said that we have a court date on January 27th! That happens to be my niece's first birthday. What could be better than two new cousins for your birthday? We're hoping and praying that all goes well on the first court date, but we know to expect delays as well.
We need to speed up the getting ready process now! :)
We are so thankful for all the love, support, and encouragement we have received from family, friends, and the on-line adoption community. It means so much to have so many people sharing our joy and excitement with us.
Thank you so much to all of you who offered to look through photos from your Ethiopia trips for pics of our boys. I think we e-mailed everyone who offered and was in Addis after our boys were there. We appreciate so much the time that some of you took to do that for us and we loved having a few extra pictures shortly after our referral!
I can't believe it has already been a week. It went by quickly, but I can already tell that this part of the wait is going to be much harder than the wait for the referral. I keep looking at their pictures and want so badly to meet them now. At least for now we have so many things to do to get ready for the boys that will keep us busy for awhile.
Today, we reached 6 months on the wait list. We had convinced ourselves that we had another month or two to wait so we were taken by surprise when our caseworker, Jessica, called with our referral- two adorable little boys! They are 3 1/2 years old and 2 years old and so precious! We are beyond excited! :)
As of Monday, we have completed six weeks of our wait for our referral. This weekend, we also celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary! So we are moving on to week 7 of the wait and year 7 of our marriage, hopefully the year our family finally grows...
I am a teacher and the first four weeks of our wait encompassed the last four weeks of school. The end of the school year is always super busy. On top of the usual end of year craziness, we packed my classroom full of ten years worth of teaching materials and moved it all home into our attic and garage. We decided that I should go ahead and resign since I want to stay home with our kids and I don't want to be in the place to leave a class of first graders in the middle of the school year.
Sitting in my empty classroom at the end of last week with blank walls and no kids was a little sad. I know I will miss being in a class full of students and watching them learn and grow throughout the year. At the same time, I am so excited about what lies ahead, watching my own children grow and learn throughout many years. As a little girl, I had two dreams - to be a teacher and to be a mom. I have been blessed to experience my dream of teaching for ten years so now I am moving on to the next dream of being a mom. I can't wait to see what that brings!
The first four weeks of our wait flew by! We know we have many, many more weeks to go so now I am looking for things to keep me busy for the rest of the wait. For now, I am working on cleaning out rooms, drawers, and closets in our house, catching up on reading, and catching up with friends. That should keep me busy for awhile!
As of today, we are on the Gladney wait list!!! We are waiting for young siblings, so we are expecting a long wait, but we are so excited to officially be on the list! :)
On Friday, we attended an International Adoption Meet and Greet at Gladney. It was great to meet the Ethiopia staff and other families in various stages of the adoption process. We especially enjoyed getting to meet our case worker, Jessica, in person and hear her heart for Africa and the children. We've talked so many times on the phone and through e-mail, it was just so nice to be able to sit down face to face and chat for awhile. For any families in proximity to Gladney, I definitely recommend attending a Meet and Greet at any stage of the process. I think we all came away with new information regardless of where we are in the process.
When I got home today and checked the mail, I found our CIS approval, the I-171 H! This means we are approved to bring two children into the U.S. from Ethiopia. We are so excited! Our friend, Jennifer, was very gracious and allowed us to come to her house with last minute notice to notarize our approval. After that we went to dinner with my parents and some friends to celebrate my dad's birthday - lot's to celebrate today! :) Finally, we went to Fed-Ex to send our approval to Kate at KBS Dossiers. Our approval will have to be authenticated by the Texas Secretary of State. Then our whole dossier will be ready to go to Washington D.C. for federal authentication. Hopefully we will be on the Gladney waitlist within the next couple weeks!
This Saturday we had the monthly get together of DFW area families who are in the process of adopting or have adopted from Ethiopia. We met up at the Fournet's home for a wonderful evening of Ethiopian food, fellowship, and fun. We enjoyed catching up with friends we've met at past gatherings and getting to know new friends. It's great to have so many people in our area going through the same thing and it will be wonderful for our future children to have friends who were also adopted from Ethiopia. It was so fun to watch all the kids playing together and having such a good time. We can't wait to add our kids to the mix!
We received word this week from Kate at KBS Dossiers that all of our dossier documents have returned to her authenticated. Everything is ready and waiting for our CIS approval. Once we receive approval from CIS (Immigration) and get it authenticated our dossier will be ready to go to DC for more authentication and then on to Ethiopia. That is when we will officially be placed on the Gladney wait list. So for now we are waiting on that one piece of paper so that we can officially wait!
We were fingerprinted for CIS exactly 6 weeks ago today so I think that approval could be coming any day now, but it could also potentially take several more weeks so I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high.
Welcome to our blog! We are Henry and Monica and we are hoping to grow our family through adoption from Ethiopia. We will use this blog to share our adoption journey with friends and family.
