Big News!

Welcome to our adoption blog! We look forward to sharing our journey with you as we begin the process of bringing home our baby from Ethiopia!

We began the process about a month ago, after God clearly laid it on our hearts that this is where he wanted us to go. We found an agency that we liked, and (since it was an out of state agency) had to then find a second one in MN that could do our homestudy. Since then, we've been working on all the paperwork for both agencies, getting references, having things notarized, going to the doctor, getting fingerprinted (three times!), and talking to adoption workers! Now that we're nearing the end of the initial paperwork, I'm actually a little disappointed because I'm running out of ways that I can make things move along. Now we have to wait through the processes and formalities to the day when we can go to Ethiopia and bring our baby home!

We chose to do an international adoption because we knew we wanted to adopt again, and - though we could have called up our county and had another foster baby placed in our home - we didn't feel emotionally ready to go through all that we just finished going through with Isaac...uncertainty, visits with birth parents, etc. Ethiopia was the country that God just seemed to be leading us to. We are excited that this gives Isaac a sibling that shares his African heritage, which we feel is important for him.

Although there is no way of knowing how long this process will take, our agency says it typically is between four and seven months for the whole process (we're definitely thinking it will be more like seven). We'll see! We're hoping for a referral of an infant; babies in Ethiopia are referred as young as three months. After accepting a referral, it will be another couple of months before we can travel to bring him/her home.

So that's our news! We'll keep you posted as we know more, and if there's nothing to report about the adoption, I'll just post pictures of Isaac. :)