Our wonderful social worker has written our home study, it has been reviewed by AAI, and is being sent to DCFS today!  Yay!!!!  I'm so glad we decided to switch and go with ICM.  We wouldn't even have started our home visits yet with the first agency we had decided on.  ICM has been so great!

There Is No Me Without You

I have to post this short book review.  I just finished up the book, There Is No Me Without You.  I absolutely loved it!  Yes, there were some parts that talked about the history of AIDS in Africa and the US that were a little slow reading, but as far as the story of Haregowin Tefferra, it was wonderful!  I'm not going to say too much about because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.  If you are at all interested in African orphans or adoption from Africa, read this book!  Haregowin was just woman who had had a pretty comfortable life in Ethiopia.  She had suffered some personal losses and was at the end of her rope ready to give up on life.  She was asked by a local pastor to take in a couple of children bc they had no where else to go.  She looked at this opportunity as God trying to save her.  It worked!  She loved those children and ended up accepting several more.  And the story goes on about how she accepted these children and had so many that she had to rent more homes.  It is a book full of emotions.  I laughed, cried, felt happy, sad.  She had many ups and many downs but she loved the children of her country.  She truly did her best to care for them and do what she thought was best for them.  It is a great read and I highly recommend it!

Home Study is DONE!!!!

I am a terrible blogger!  I had such good intentions when I decided to do this.  I get on here and have no idea what to write.  UGH!  Anyhow, we had our third and final home visit last Tuesday!  YAY!!!  It feels so good to have that one little thing finished.  At least we have something finished!  I believe our social worker has finished writing our home study already and has sent it to AAI for review.  Hopefully it will be sent to the state of Illinois next week sometime.  In the meantime, we will wait, wait, wait, and wait some more!  Did I mention, I am not good at waiting!!!!

Home Visit #2

Last Friday we had our second home visit.  It was just a training visit.  She went over a lot of good information with us.  We made some final decisions about our preferences for a referral.  We have decided to be open to two children between the ages of 0-4.  Older children tend to be harder to place for the simple reason people want babies.  We had originally planned to adopt on child age 0-4, then had our in person 2 day training class and quickly changed our minds to age 0-18 months.  Our instructor scared us away from older children a little bit, but the more I read and communicate with other families, I am learning that African countries treat their orphans different than countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria.  I Eastern European countries, the children are on a sort of schedule.  They feed them at certain times, changes them at certain times.  If they cry or need something in between those times the are generally made to just wait and cry.  Some of these children develop attachment disorders where they are unable to make an attachment to a caregiver.  This is very scary to a parent wanting to adopt.  From what I am reading and being told, Ethiopia is not like this.  Yes, the government orphanages are not the Four Seasons, but children are loved there.  In most cases, they are not placed for adoption because they are unwanted.  They are placed because there has been a death of a parent due to disease, or an accident.  They are placed because their family simply can't feed them and want a better life for them because they love their children.  After some of the conversations I have had with other adoptive parents, we have decided to go ahead and be open to a child up to the age of 4.  They highly recommend not going out of birth order, so that is a good age for us to use as our max.  Our third home visit will be in a couple of weeks and then we will be finished with that part of the process.  As soon as our home study is written, we can begin mailing off paperwork.  We will receive a fingerprinting appointment to obtain our I-171-H form and then we will be ready to have our documents sealed and sent to Ethiopia.  We are hoping to have our dossier in Ethiopia sometime in May.  Very exciting!!!!

I also listened in on a conference call last week from our agency.  The Ethiopia team from AAI just got home from a 2 week trip to Ethiopia to visit the orphanages they work with.  They had a wonderful trip and were very happy with all of the orphanages and the directors they were able to meet with.  They also visited their transition home, Jane's House, and met with several of the nannies and were able to see some of the children that have been referred and that are in the process of getting ready to be referred.  They are working on several referrals and expect to refer several children in the next couple of months.  It was very exciting to hear all that they had to say.