Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow

I don't even know where to begin. So many amazing things have been happening. Since we had our international adoption awareness meetting we have, told my family about the adoption, we had dinner with our ethiopian adoption in Georgia yahoo group, we submitted our formal application and we are waiting axiously to tell Rudy's family.



To tell our families we have decided to print out the Ethiopian Flag and make flags with our blog address on the back. The first person we told was my mom while she was visiting us last week. We handed her a flag and said Happy Hannukah. She looked at us with a confused face, so we told her to read our blog address "the gleasons are growing" thinking this would give her a clue. Well she was still a little confused and thought I was pregnant. So we told her "NO", but we are going to have another addition to our family, and that we are adopting an infant girl from Ethiopia. She was so excited. We then sent the flag as an e-mail attachment to my brother and sister-in-law along with the blog address. They figured it out when reading our blog. We told everyone else in my family over the phone. Everyone is very excited!!! It is so excited being able to talk to my family about this wonderful event in our lives. We are getting ready to tell Rudy's family on Christmas Eve. We are going to do the same thing hand each family a flag and see if they can guess first, if not we will solve the puzzle and tell them the amazing news.



We also had dinner with the Ethiopian Adoption in Georgia Yahoo group. This was the most amazing experience!!! Approximately 20 families in the metro Atlanta area that are adopting from Ethiopia met at an Ethiopian Restaurant in downtown Atlanta to get to know each other better, and to celebrate the 7 or so referrals that have recently taken place. We met so many wonderful people. We are so excited about this community of friends that we are going to have for us as well as for our children. We can't wait to meet up with everyone again in January.



On Monday December 17th we mailed our formal application to our adoption agency. We called today to make sure they received the packet; and they did. Maybe next year Kennedy will be celebrating Christmas with us. The formal application took us awhile to fill out, but we were really excited about. Our next step is having our consultant assigned to us. We will also begin our home study process after the New Year when we return home.



We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Very Happy New Year!!!

Adoption Awareness Meeting

On November 16, 2007 we faxed our preliminary adoption application, and on November 17, 2007 we watched as the mailman took the preliminary adoption application. I consider this the official start of the adoptions process. Today, we had our scheduled International adoption awareness meeting with our agency. A dear friend watched Lawson and Eli while we had an hour and a half phone meeting about the ins and outs of international adoption. The meeting was informative, exciting, and exhausting for me. Our next step is to complete our formal application and submit it by December 21st.

Right now we have not told our families that we have started the adoption process. It's Killing me, we are so excited, I want to tell everyone; but we are going to wait for the holiday's when we will be together. It's going to be soooo... exciting to share this news with them.

The Quest for Kennedy Starts

At the end of October God showed us the path to Kennedy. While sitting and waiting for the church service to start, I noticed an annoucement in the bulletin for First Friday's. First Friday's is a group of community members who meet to support each other throught the adoption process of a Chinese child. We attended our a First Friday's Meeting on November 2, 2007 to find out more information about adoption. Everyone we met and talked to was a blessing; by the end of the meeting we were sure that now was the right time for us to start the adoption process. We spent many hours on the internet and on the phone talking to many different adoption agencies about adopting an international child. Finally we decided to use AAI to adopt a baby girl from Ethiopia. We are going to use this space to log the process. We hope you enjoy the journey with us.