Moving on Up

Last Friday, our agency announced that they had matched another waiting family with their child, which moved us to number 29 in the queue (and in my mind, 29 seems ever so much closer than 30).

Progress

We are grateful to report that our agency has offered 6 referrals to waiting families over the past month (meaning that adoptive families “in front of us” are being matched with their children).  As we celebrate with these families, we are also pleased that we are inching ever closer to “getting the call” for which we are patiently waiting. 

We are currently number 30 (out of 120) in the queue waiting for our agency to match us with our child.  While we initially expected to be matched with our child around the first of this year (several months ago), we are now hopeful that we might receive our match by the end of the year.  Once we receive that referral, the process may move rather quickly.  We might expect to travel to Ethiopia for a court date two or three months later, and go back again in as little as six weeks to bring our baby home.

In the meantime, I’m working on a Christmas stocking for the baby (afraid we won’t need it for this Christmas unfortunately), and we just moved our two year-old into her new “big-girl room,” so we’ve got a nursery and a crib ready and waiting when the time comes.

Checking In

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted.  If I were actually blogging, I would have most assuredly forgotten how to do it…thankfully, you’ll remember, I’m not blogging.  I’m typing on a nice, clean, manageable Word document.  And if someone is reading this, then I guess “my people” still remember how to navigate that silly blogger dashboard.

The reason we haven’t posted for a while is because we really have no news to report.  We stand at around 25-30^th in the queue, waiting to be matched with our child.  There have been no referrals given by our adoption agency since the first of the year.  However, we are continually assured by our agency that Ethiopia is not “closing up shop” and that the children are there in the orphanages that are affiliated with our agency.  Orphanage staff is just “waiting on a piece of paper” for this one and “waiting on a family interview” for that one.

And so we wait, too.  In the mean time, we’ve been able to celebrate with some other lovely people in our lives, who have adopted little ones recently, both internationally and domestically.  What a treat to see these families grow. 

I guess that’s about all there is to say on the adoption front…not that the rest of our life isn’t plenty interesting enough to warrant a blog post.  I just can’t fit it in amid fishing cordless phones out of toilets, retrieving the two year-old from atop the loft bed (again), and chasing the dog around the table in an effort to discern what’s in her mouth.

All for now…

Still waiting

I apologize that we haven’t posted for a while.  So many people have been asking if there’s been any progress with our adoption.  I’m afraid there’s really not much new to report.  We’re still waiting for a referral, and we think it’ll still be several more months.  Our agency gave 6 referrals in November.  And 5 in December.  However, there have been none in January to this point.  We think we’re around 20-30^th in the queue to receive a referral (to receive a referral just means that a family is “matched” with their child…you get a photo, birth date, basic health statistics, etc).  So, we’re getting relatively close.  We are hopeful that we might receive a referral late spring or early summer (the first of June will mark one year since we turned in our dossier and officially became a “waiting family”).  I assure you, you won’t miss the announcement.  It’ll be a BIG deal to finally have an image of the little one that God has for our family.

In the mean time, we’ve enjoyed meeting with several other families who are also in the process of adopting children.  We’ve had the pleasure of meeting with a few couples who are early in the process.  We’ve enjoyed hearing the stories of their adoption journeys, and in a few cases, we’ve even been able to act as a resource, answering questions and sharing our experiences a bit.  And, we’ve had a couple chances to speak and meet with other families who are ahead of us on the adoption path…families who have their kids home or who have already traveled to Ethiopia to meet their children for the first time and who are awaiting clearance to return to bring them home. 

What a treasure it is to be surrounded by so many others who are walking similar roads.

Merry Christmas 2011

We had a lovely Christmas celebration and were glad to have some special time here at home, as well as visiting with our extended families.  We’re hopeful that this is the last Christmas that an empty stocking hook adorns our mantle.

In the meantime, this little sewing project will help pass the time J

A Good Day

Last Saturday, we had the opportunity to be involved in a massive service project at our church. 

 We had been hoping for months to partner with Numana, an international hunger relief organization, to host a meal-packing event at our church, with the food to be directed to a refugee camp in Kenya.  We thought we could pull off a 25,000 meal event, and we were so excited to play a part (even a small one) in providing emergency help to people involved in the dire drought and famine situation in eastern Africa. 

 However, our church staff encouraged (as they always do) that if Heartland was going to do this event, we were going to aim to do it really well.  They set a goal to package 100,000 meals (which would take about 600 volunteers and $30,000).  In order to accomplish this feat, we would be forced to wait until after the first of the year…we didn’t have an extra $30K in the 2011 budget.  We were excited by the prospect of being able to make a greater impact but were simultaneously heart-broken at having to wait (it is estimated that 2,000 people per day are dying of starvation in the Horn of Africa). 

 Then, God moved.

 A generous family from our church, approached our pastor about making an anonymous end-of-year gift of…you guessed it…$30,000.  They knew nothing about our hopeful intentions for this Numana event.  Our pastor prayed with this couple and offered some options about ways they might invest this gift.

 So, we got the call a couple days before Thanksgiving.  Our pastor said, “We’re gonna to do the Numana event.  We want to pack 100,000 meals, and we want to pack them on December 17.” (That was three weeks away and happened to be the weekend before Christmas). 

 With such short notice, during the busiest time of the year, we were hopeful that we could scrape together the 600 volunteers we would need to package 100,000 meals.  Suffice it to say, God had other plans for this event. 

 When the dust settled, 1,100 people had signed up to volunteer.  People from our church were inviting their neighbors, Cub Scout packs, and basketball teams to be involved.  People who had never been to a church before were planning to come help pack meals.  What a fantastic outreach opportunity and a way for our church to exhibit the true heart of Christmas. 

 We had not anticipated this “problem,” and we really didn’t want to turn people away who wanted to serve.  Logistics were reworked, more money showed up, and arrangements were made for extra food to package. 

 Bottom line, 141,288 meals are heading for the Horn of Africa.  It was a good day.

The atrium of our church full of workstations

 The boys with Grandpa and Mema

 Sarah visiting with friends who came to serve

 Ryan doing some "heavy" lifting

 Fun with hairnets

I hope they don’t eat seaweed

Good news.  Our adoption agency matched several more waiting families with their children in the last couple weeks, and we were able to remove more links from our paperchain.  There are currently 33 links on our chain (which we think roughly corresponds with the number of families who are waiting in front of us to be matched with their Ethiopian little ones).  So, we’re getting there.  We’re hopeful for a referral (that just means getting matched with our child) this coming summer, with travel to follow later in the year.

In the meantime….Ryan and I went to an Ethiopian restaurant several weeks ago for date night.  On the way to the babysitter’s house, we mentioned to the kids that Daddy & Mommy were going to eat Ethiopian food for dinner.  Our four year-old said, “Wow, Efiopia is going to take a long time.”  He clearly thought that we were going straight to the source of the Ethiopian cuisine.  Ryan explained that the restaurant was here in town and that they just serve the kinds of food that people traditionally eat in Ethiopia.  Just to see what they would say, we asked, “What kinds of food do you think people eat in Ethiopia?”  Our six year-old answered, “I hope they don’t eat seaweed.”

Well, they don’t eat seaweed so much as they eat a lot of “stew-type” dishes.  Ethiopian food generally consists of spicy vegetable and meat dishes, usually in one of two forms: wat, a thick stew, or tibs, a mixed, sautéed sort of dish.  The food is served along with injera, a large sourdough flatbread.  Ethiopians eat with their hands, using small pieces of injera to pick up bites of entrées and side dishes.  So, our dinner at the restaurant was served family-style and eaten without utensils (though they had them on hand in case we weren’t up to the challenge), but rather using the flat, soft bread to scoop.  We were both pleasantly surprised by how tasty the food was (some of it quite spicy), and I would assess that we were both able to feed ourselves about as well as the average Ethiopian 3 year-old. 

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