Adoption 101

While this blog is designed for you to laugh along with our daily chaos that is life, it is also to share with you the arrival of our third child through adoption. Daily we are asked, "so where are you in the process?"

That my friends is a great question and one that i will try to answer.

We are in the paper pipeline, paper trimester, and notorizing stage. This is broken into three parts that sorta all go in the same direction...

1. The Datz Foundation- our homestudy agency that comes to our house via a social worker and does follow up

2. The Gladney Agency- the actual adoption agency we are working with (also known as your placement agency, they are based in texas and since we don't live in texas Datz does our homestudy, they are a local adoption agency that works with Gladney)

3. The Dossier- our paperwork for the Ethiopian Government.. in layman's terms

Soo..

1. We have started our homestudy, kim our social worker is great, one social worker visit down, two more to go, for that we've had police background checks, fbi background checks, doctor's visits for all four of us, and letters of reference from friends, co-workers and pastor

2. We are currently filing similiar paperwork and background info, submitting pictures, offical copies of birth certificates.. doctor letters and reference letters.. working with them is fabulous, great staff who answers all my silly questions

3. You need a lot of the same stuff for your Dossier as the agencies and Gladney walks you through how to make those documents acceptable for easy translation and authentication (is that a word)....

anywho it can all be very confusing as some papers can be copies, and others have to be offical originals that are notorized. Also a lot of these are time sensitive so you have to do things in a certain order and within a certain alotted time, some places take cash only while others offices only want cashiers checks.. ahhhhhhhhh

What we are learning:

1. Tom and I have different styles of getting things done, i will leave him to tell you about that..hehehe so we are learning how to better communicate and depend on each other to get things done in a timely manner without forgetting why we are doing this and why we like each other

2. How much our God loves us and delights in us, despite our selfish, sinful nature

3. To cherish each day we have, enjoying the people right in front of us, while having a heart for those who are not in front of us.

Where we could use prayer:

1. Please pray that God would continue to show us how to depend and trust him with the many details that seem overwhelming (finances, paperwork, depending on other people to do your forms the right way the first time, daily duties, relationships, and responsibilities)

2. We are only one family in the process and have close friends doing the same thing, so pray that we would lean on each other for support and encouragment. That their process would be smooth too! Maybe we could even travel together.


3. That our daughters would feel loved and be excited about their new brother!!! Every night ellie prays for him and she tells people, "my brother is not born yet..." They then look at me a little funny..hehehe