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.

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!!!!