Home Visit 1

We had our first home visit last Friday.  I was so stressed over nothing!  It was easy peasy!  A few questions, a signature here, a signature there, and that was that.  Our case worker was very nice.  We have home visit two next Friday and the final home visit about 2 weeks after that.  That will be the scary one!  She will interview us separately and interview the kids.  I hope they don't say anything too  embarrassing!  We have all of our paper work together and ready to go.  We are just waiting to add the home study to it.  Hopefully that will all be ready in about 6 weeks.

Let's get going....

Ahhhh......a sigh of relief.  Things are falling into place.  We received our formal acceptance to Adoption Associates yesterday.  I printed out all of our paperwork.  Not near as bad as I had imagined it would be!  I'm relieved.  I slept so much better last night knowing we had been accepted and feeling like this is the path we were meant to take.  I have been stressing out about choosing our placement agency.  Today, we were accepted by Illini Christian Ministries to do our home study!  First home visit is scheduled for next week!  Yay!!!!  That is so much better than having to wait until April!  We should be good to go since we have all of our paperwork finished.  There may be some things that are different or need to be redone.  I hope not too much!  I'm just so relieved that things are moving along now.  We have both of our agencies and are very happy and excited to begin working with them both.  Woo!!!!  I'm glad that is done!  I had no idea it would be so stressful choosing the right agency!

Exciting things are happening.......

Yes, that's right....I said exciting things are happening in our family!  We are getting another little girl!!!!!  After lots of discussion, we have made the decision to adopt an orphan from Ethiopia!!!!  We are so EXCITED!!!!!  We will be getting a little girl between 0-2 years old.  We are expecting the whole process to take 18 months - 2 years.  That is way too long!  We have signed with an agency called Adoption Associates out of Michigan.  We have already had a little agency drama!  I had not idea how difficult it would be to find a good, ethical agency, but not have to wait 3-4 years.  We did it though and I think we area working with a wonderful agency.  We are in the first stage of adoption, the paper chase!  We have already done tons of paperwork, dr. appt., fingerprinting, etc. for our home study.  We will soon be getting a whole new set of paperwork for our dossier.  Hopefully we will have our dossier complete in about 3-4 months and get on the wait list!  They have told us approximately a 10 month wait for a referral after we are on the wait list.  We will then receive a photo as well as any information they have on our daughter.  We will accept the referral and wait 3-5 months for our court date.  We will then travel to Ethiopia for about a week to meet our daughter and appear in court.  We will also have time to travel around the country and hopefully meet our daughters birth family. We will have to wait another period of anywhere from 2-10 weeks for our embassy date.  At that time, we will travel back to Ethiopia a second time to bring our little girl home!!!!  It is going to be a lot of waiting and I am not a patient lady!!!!  I already can't wait!!!!

Gotcha!!!!!

Yep!  Kian played with a mouse yesterday!  I know, I know......Gross! He kept telling me our cat, Dexter had a mouse or a tiger.  I just thought he was making things up.  A tiger?  Why would I believe that.  Well, he did have a mouse and boy was he having fun with it!  Now, I DO NOT like mice at all!  Kian, on the other hand, kept trying to pick it up.  Dexter wasn't having that.  That was his toy!  He caught it!  By the time Kian did get a hold of it, it was a dead mouse.  He picked it up for me, placed it in a bag and outside it went!  Thank you Kian!  Dexter looked for that mouse for about an hour after we threw it out.