We celebrated tonight!

All weekend we prepared for our social worker for our home study to visit our home today. As usual our social worker for our home study is great, real easy-going. The morning began with me waking up before everyone and not being able to go back to sleep, so I started getting breakfast ready for our visit. Finally, I heard Lawson waking up, so I went to get him and the day began; soon after we were all up and going.

Then the phone rang it was our social worker, she almost forgot we had an appointment. When we scheduled it, we were both in the middle of something else, so I can understand. So she was just confirming the appointment and checking if it would be okay to bring her 3 girls with her. Of course I didn't care; our house is kid friendly, there are plenty of toys to entertain and we did not want to cancel the appointment. Rescheduling the appointment wouldn't happen until July because our schedule is so busy until then.

The visit was about an hour, just after she arrived, we ate breakfast while discussing a few things such as the final home study processing, what our community is like, etc,. After that we showed her all around the house and that was it. Nothing to it. I really enjoyed the home study process and am looking forward to reading the report. We will get the report in approximately 3 weeks. Lets pray for a quick return, in other words shorter than 3 weeks.

It felt so good to have this part our the process completed, at least on our end; so we celebrated by going out to dinner. Our next celebration will be when we get our I-171-H form back from USCIS.

So what's next: we are going to fax our dossier documents to our agency to have them check them for errors, etc. When they are complete I will get all our notarized documents authenticated and sealed.

This was a big day for us and we are so excited that things are going so well.

The First Set of Tears!

The adoption process is amazing experience with both joys and disappointments. Monday I shed my first set of tears related to the adoption. Rudy and I have been working really hard collecting all the documents for the home study, USCIS, and the dossier. Now that we are almost finished I called my agency to figure out one of the forms for USCIS. Well little did I know this form can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to get back. That sent me over the edge. Lately I have been pushing us along to get things done so we can get on the referral list, in other words I want the paperwork to be in Ethiopia and I want to be waiting for our little girl to be matched with her family. I know the referral is going to take awhile since the adoptions in Ethiopia are slowing down, but I just want my paperwork to be their, and I want to be on "The List for a Girl from Ethiopia" NOW!!!

Rudy was great when I called him at work on Monday while the boys were napping to tell him this news. Of course he could tell right away that I was upset. We both thought we were going to get our dossier in Ethiopia sooner than we are. Now I am just praying that we can get our dossier in to be processed in Ethiopia before the government shuts down for 3 months (August-October) and that they get enough rain to keep the office open full time.

In the meantime we have scheduled our last home study visit, which will take place at our house on Tuesday. When we are done with this visit our caseworker can write her report and we can hopefully submit our documents to USCIS, etc. Our caseworker has a family and job that keeps her very busy, hopefully she will be able to get the report done quickly; she has already been so great at accommodating our schedules. I will keep you posted on how this goes.

Finally, the last bit of news, we are so excited friends of ours are going to pick up their little girl in Ethiopia this week. We can't wait to meet her.