A Purchase for Olivia

I have been seeing lots of the (product) red items at the Gap and have really been wanting some but I was waiting to see if they would go on sale. (for those of you that know me you know I have to find a deal before I can buy something) Well when I went to their website the other day I found they were having a great sale so I decided I just had to have a couple of them. Half of the proceeds from this purchase go to help fund Aids research in Africa. I bought this adorable onesie and also a shirt for our little girl once she comes home. I thought it would be really neat for her to have these outfits. One thing that I have learned throughout this adoption process is PATIENCE. We are still patiently waiting for our packet to arrive that contains all of the details that we need to re-do our paperwork for our dossier. We did find out from our caseworker that we are now in the DCFS computer system which is good to know that our fingerprints did not get lost!! However, she has not received our DCFS foster care license yet but hopefully soon she will. We have families from AWAA that are getting ready to travel to Ethiopia and I just ask that you would pray for these families as they prepare to leave and for their safety while they are gone and to have wonderful reunions with their children!!

Dinner With Other ET Families

On Monday night Travis and I had the opportunity to meet families in the area that have or are in the process of adopting from Ethiopia. It was great to be able to talk with other families that have already been thru the process and hear their stories. It was wonderful to see the little faces from Ethiopia. They were so cute and so full of life. We are hoping to continue to meet on a monthly basis which will be a great opportunity for our children to get to know other children from Ethiopia. We are hoping to even go to some Ethiopian events and a restaurant. It is amazing the bond that you can feel with someone who is going thru something so similiar. We are still anxiously awaiting our packet from AWAA that includes all of the paperwork that we are to complete for our dossier. I am hoping this will not take too long to complete. But, as we have found out with international adoption everything always takes longer than expected. And we just always have to remind ourselves that in God's time we will bring our baby home. It seems that Travis is reminding me of this much more than I remind him. It is funny how our roles have kind of reversed with the adoption. Normally he is very impatient but with the adoption he is the one with the patience and has to constantly remind me that God is in control!!

We went yesterday to Springfield to get fingerprinted for DCFS. Our baby will come home with an IR-4 visa which means we have to have a foster care license. We have already completed our paperwork for the license we just have to wait to get our approval back. Right now the turn around time is around a few weeks and our caseworker should receive our approval. This is the main thing that we are waiting on before submitting our paperwork to Ethiopia. The rest of the paperwork that we have to complete will not take us very long. It is mainly updating everything so that it has a current date on it. With all of the fingerprinting that we have had to do we should be in just about every system possible!!!

Our Adoption Journey

As many of you know our journey has led us down quite a winding road. We started our journey in June of 2006 with our hearts praying for our baby that God was going to bring home to us from El Salvador. We were able to move quite quickly thru most of our paperwork. However, in November and December it seemed like there was always something that was keeping us from getting it completely ready to send to El Salvador. Looking back now we know why, God had a different plan for us. When we received the email from our program coordinator explaining the situation in El Salvador, I just cried and cried because for all of this time we have had this baby in our hearts and now it seemed that the journey of bringing them home was impossible. Travis was a saint thru this, he was so calm and made sense of our whole situation. After a lot of praying and talking we felt that God was temporarily closing the door to El Salvador and opening our hearts to a wonderful little girl in Ethiopia. It is amazing how he can make us feel such a sense of peace when we listen. Once we "officially" left the El Salavador program, we were accepted into the Ethiopia program in just a couple of days. We are now busy completing our paperwork for our new journey. We were able to transfer all of our paid program fees from El Salvador over to Ethiopia which was such a blessing. If we hadn't been able to we would not have been able to start this new journey. We are hoping within a month or so we will have all the paperwork completed and everything will be ready to send to Ethiopia. Looking back on our journey since June you can see where God was leading us and it is so much easier to see when we can turn everything over to him. I think that God was preparing our hearts for two little children, one in Ethiopia and one in El Salvador. Eventually we will start this adoption journey again and bring our baby home from El Salvador. We look forward to sharing our journey with you.