Why Ethiopia Video

I keep seeing videos like these that other adoptive families have put together and are posted and reposted on adoptive families blogs. Actually it is something we see almost on a daily basis now as we blog-hop and wait. This is something our kids watch with us as well and we hope to never stop exposing them to God's heart for the nations, the poor, the oppressed and what our role can be in joining Him to redeem them. Anyway, I thought I would re-post another family's video on here to give those who are interested a taste of what we are invested in now!

1 Month Waiting

Hi Everyone! Our official DTE date was 12/10 so yesterday marks our first month of waiting! It went by super fast thanks to the holidays. Since everyone is asking us what is going on with the adoption I will write it out here. From our DTE date we have a 4-6 month wait until a referral of a child. When we get our referral, our agency sends us a picture of our child along with any information known. We then would accept the referral and our agency applies to Ethiopian court for a court date. There are only so many per month so there could be a wait again there. We hope no longer than 2 more months. Then we travel for the court date and meet our son and come back home. Our son will stay there at our agency's transition home. When we pass court, our agency applies for appointments with the U.S. embassy in Addis. Again, there are only so many appointments given out so there is another wait there. We hope for no more than 2 months again. We would travel a second time to the Embassy appointment and then be allowed to take our son home! These waits can be shorter or a lot longer than expected and there is a variety of factors that can hold up the process depending on our child's specific situation with paperwork, what region of the country he is from, or anything else that comes up! So there really isn't any way to predict the WHEN of this process. However, at the soonest, we could get a referral in April and travel June for 1st trip, and AUgust for 2nd trip and bring him home. OR, we could get our referral closer to July which would then hit the Ethiopian court closure (Their court system takes a break for 6 weeks or so during the rainy season). If this happened and we hit that, we would most likely not get a court date until late fall or winter and would be bringing our son home this time next year!

Meanwhile, we continue to prepare ourselves for this, read other people's blogs and see their kids and pictures from their time in Ethiopia and pray for our son. Hudson has been really into the Opi doll we have and has started sleeping with "Opi" (as well as his toy tools). Maddie is so sweet in praying for Opi all on her own.