What's Going On Right Now?

Okay, I will not be posting on this thing everyday or anything, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief! It's just that my first post didn't really give an update of what was going on in the adoption process. We really do need some prayer right now, so I thought I would fill you all in and ask that you guys remember us in your prayers. I'll start from the beginning, but I'll try to be short and sweet.

In February 2007, John and I started the process to adopt a little girl from India. Shortly after we completed the initial application and got approved, we found out that India changed their adoption laws and we no longer qualified to adopt from that country (we are not old enough). We quickly changed our paperwork to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia. We spent the next 9 months or so filling out paperwork, visiting with social workers, collecting birth and marriage certificates, getting background checks, getting physicals and generally showing everyone that we were financially, emotionally, spiritually and physically ready to take care of an orphan from across the world.

Around Thanksgiving last year, the adoption agency that we had been working with told us that their channels to place children from Ethiopia might be falling through and they were working on getting things fixed. After Christmas, they made it official and told us that they could no longer place children from Ethiopia. If we wanted to continue the process, we would have to find another agency to work with. Many people ask me if we could have changed countries. The answer to that is yes, but we would have had to start over from the beginning. Each country is different in what they require and all of our paperwork was Ethiopia specific. Plus, we didn't really want to pick another country. We had spent the last 10-11 months in this mind set and we have gotten attached to the idea of a little girl from Ethiopia.

We found another agency to work with (one that has a social worker here in Tucson) and started the paperwork with them. We filled out their initial application and had our old agency send our paperwork to them to review. We were hoping it would be a smooth transition and that we would be almost done with this chunk of the process. It turns out, I was being a little optimistic.

We found out about a month ago that the home study we had completed with our previous social worker had never been returned by our county's court system (a requirement for the state of Arizona). Our new social worker told us last week that if we didn't get it back soon, we would most likely have to redo our entire home study (an expensive part of the process). She also didn't really know how much of our other paperwork we would have to redo.

Well, we heard from our new social worker on Friday and they received the paperwork back from the county that they needed! This is a very good thing since now we won't have to redo the home study. We will have to do an update, which means that the new social worker will come to our house to check us out since it has been a year since we met with the previous social worker. She is sending the rest of our paperwork (called our dossier- pronounced dos-ee-ey) to our case worker in Virginia to review. She will let us know what else we need to redo. So, that's where we are now.

Prayer:
Please pray that as much of our paperwork as possible will transfer over. It took us a long time to get everything together and we would like to move to the next stage of the process.

Please pray that anything that we need to redo would be done quickly with no delays.

Pray that we would be very proactive from this point on. Sometimes John and I don't like to push people and that has caused some delays in the past. Pray that we would be bold for our little girl!

Pray for our little girl in Ethiopia. She is most likely already born and waiting for us. Pray that she would attach and bond with someone taking care of her to ease the bonding process with us. Pray for protection and good health and that God would be shaping her to fit in our family perfectly.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. I will try to do this more regularly so that it's not so long next time. We love you all and thank you so much for your support during this long and rough process! We could not do this without you.