Adding to our Family!!!!!

Daniel and I have been in the process of adopting a child from Ethiopia for several months. Well, sometimes it seems like a few years. It was about two years ago, April 2008, that we seriously started looking into international adoption and having conversations with adoption agency's. That summer, as we were contemplating international adoption, we had the opportunity to buy my great grandmothers house in another city and decided to move about 3 hours away and buy our first house. We spent the summer, fall, and winter buying the house and working on fixing the house up. In the Spring of 2009, we started thinking about adopting from Ethiopia again (we never really stopped thinking about it), and again started talking with adoption agency's.

We finally decided to work with Holt International Children's Services, which is the agency that Daniel's parents used to adopt their daughter, my wonderful sister-in-law. We applied to Holt's Ethiopia Program on August 28, 2009. September 5th we got an introduction call from Holt and a few days later the first packet full of paperwork we had to start filling out.

It took us a few months to get all the homestudy requirements together, as I was distracted in the fall by taking a statistics class at PSU. Plus, it was all a little overwhelming. We were able to turn in all our paperwork at the start of 2010, and got our homestudy completed in February. A few days after our homestudy was approved, we turned in our dossier to Holt on March 9th, which was approved and sent on to Washington D.C. for further processing.

A few days after being officially placed on the waitlist for a child referral, there were rumors and news that Ethiopia was going to start requiring two trips to the country for adoptions. Previously Ethiopia had been a "one trip country", only requiring travel after the official court process. The trip is to, of course, meet your child and bring them home, but also to be at the Embassy in Ethiopia for the child's visa appt. This two trip talk from the Ethiopian High Court, is to have prospective adoptive parents come to Ethiopia and meet their child prior to the court processing, and state that they do indeed want to adopt the child. Then, the parents would return a couple months later for the visa appointment with the embassy and to bring the child home. There are many other countries that require parents to make two trips to the country for adoption, so it's not unusual. But, it was definitely shocking news. This would/will add, probably, $5,000 onto the cost of our already very expensive adoption process.

But, things are still up in the air regarding this new adoption rule. And in the mean time, our agency is working very hard to process as many children and families that are ready before the new rule is instituted. When we first went on the list for a referral, I was not very hopeful that our case would be submitted to the courts in time. In the last week, though, Holt has referred many children to waiting families, and we have moved further and further down the list of waiting families. If we are offered a child referral and accept the referral, and if our dossier makes it from Washington D.C to Ethiopia in the next week to two weeks, we might just make this deadline for one trip to Ethiopia.

However it works out though, we are thrilled to be expecting a little boy!!!!!!!