A surprise!

This is what greeted me when I walked out the front door this morning:

The following poem was stuck in the basket:

Little Black Z****

Little black baby left at your door
Little black baby will cry no more

Little black baby don't drop on her head

Little black baby come put her to bed

Little black baby a Z**** to be

Little black baby for a nominal fee

To whoever left this on our doorstep- thank you so much! It has made our day and it's so wonderful to know that people are supporting us!

**To those of you that know our last name the poem sounds better when you insert in the appropriate spot. For those that don't, sorry! *Z* is all you get!**

Forms and fingerprints

Progress is being made as we cross things off the list in preparation for our home study. Our long weekend got extended due to flooding in Cale's office so we made the most of him being home this morning and went and got our fingerprinting done. We have lived in Ohio for many years, but because we had that brief stint in Namibia, we haven't been here for the last 5 consecutive years. This isn't a huge deal, but means that we had to do BCII and FBI fingerprinting which really just means to us that it cost more! Hopefully there won't be any other complications in light of our international travel.

Other exciting news (to us!) is that we got our appointment with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office for next week. We have to go there to "have our biometrics taken." (I know- three set of fingerprints seems silly, but we're just following the rules!) This is the office that basically approves us at a national level for adoption and once our home study is complete we wait for their clearance. That magic piece of paper called an I-171 is what holds many a family up in submitting the dossier. We are already praying that our case gets processed through this office in a timely fashion with no major bumps along the way.

-kate-

Home Study Orientation

We spent a good part of yesterday driving in the car and attending our home study orientation. Thankfully, we were able to drive up with the Wings which made it a fast and fun car ride. Not that I don't like to get to spend alone time with Cale, but I could not tell you the last time the four of us sat and had uninterrupted conversation. It was nice!

The meeting was really informative and helped me to have a better grasp on where we're at in the process and what we need to do from here. I didn't really get that we could be working on and submitting things to her piecemeal. If I had understood that I would have had a lot more done before we went last night. But I've more then made up for it and have gotten a ton of it written and gathered today. By the end of the weekend we should only have a few things left to do and will be able to schedule our home visits.

I really like our social worker, Therese, and look forward to working with her. She is very relatable and has been doing this for a long time. She was so helpful with all our questions and is going to know more about us then most of you do when we're done with this process!

So today I'm thankful for making lots of progress and for friends that are along the journey with us!

Paperchasing

The paperchase is in full swing! We got our dossier packet in the mail on Monday and we've already started gathering the appropriate documents. The dossier includes birth certificates, marriage license, financial standing, letters of recommendation, proof of health and life insurance and a ton of other stuff. We will spend the next few months compiling all of this paperwork (hence the name paperchase) and that packet is what gets sent to Ethiopia's Ministry of Women's Affairs. There's also a complicated process of things being notarized, then certified and then authenticated. I don't fully understand how that works, but I'm trying to remember that we aren't there yet so don't need to worry about it!

In the last two days I've managed to get Cale's birth certificate, our marriage license and a promise from our insurance provider to send us a letter of proof of coverage for us and our adopted child. Cale's written his proof of employment letter and hopes to get it signed and notarized later this week. I need to make a trip down to our court house to get my birth certificate sometime in the next few days. We are praying about who to have write our letters of reference and hope to get that started sometime in the next week or so. There's lots to do, but my goal is to get something at least started every day. We would love to have our dossier ready by August 1, but there is only so much that we can do to make that happen. So we'll do our part and trust that the Lord will work the rest out in His perfect time.

-kate-

Two thoughts

This Mother's Day my mind has been mulling over two thoughts in particular. The first one- that by next Mom's Day I will hopefully be a mother to two. This is exciting and wonderful and fills my heart with joy as I think about who Haven will be a year from now and who else will be joining our family.

The second thought has been about who are adopted child's mom is. Is she pregnant already? What's going on in her life right now? Does she have any idea of what circumstances are going to change her life and bring her to a place where giving up her child is a reality? I can't even imagine what her life is like...but my heart is heavy for her today. I don't know who she is or anything about her but I've been praying for her a lot the last few days.

Two thoughts that have been dominating my mind- one impossibly joyful and the other makes my heart hurt. But I think I'm really starting to understand that that's the reality of this whole adoption thing. Pain on one side and joy on the other. Someone is going to go through great agony and heartache to ultimately bring us the great joy of a new member of our family.

And isn't that what God Himself endured in sending His Son so that we could be adopted into His family for eternity?

"For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves."

Ephesians 1:4-6

-kate-

Baby steps

Well, we're one step further along in the process; tomorrow we will submit our USCIS I-600A form - Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition - to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This informs the USCIS that we are intending to adopt a child from Ethiopia and gets us signed up for FBI fingerprinting. We had to dig up our marriage license and birth certificates and send in a copy of them; it's pretty interesting to see the info they recorded back in the day - FYI, I was born at 11:40PM. Anyway, off it goes!

We also are in the process of getting started with our home study. We have a (tentative) first meeting with our social worker next week. This orientation meeting will be one of three with her and serves to get the ball rolling and cover the basics (we assume). The next two meetings will be here at our house to look the place over and get into the nitty-gritty of parenting an adopted child from another culture. We'll let you know how things go and what's next.

-- cale

Because He/She doesn't have the same ring to it

When we first started talking about adoption I always imagined us bringing home one little Ethiopian baby to be part of our family. Cale had a different idea. From the start he has wanted to adopt a sibling group. Initially that made me laugh because he couldn't possibly be serious. Then I started to think about it more and realized it would be wonderful in many different ways. We weren't 100% sure that is what we were supposed to do, but wanted to be open to it if that is what the Lord had in mind. So for the last several months we've planned on saying that we're open to a sibling group, but one is fine too. Kind of a "leave it up to the Lord so we don't have to make a definitive decision" thing.

Only a few weeks into the process and we feel like there is some clarification about this. Ethiopia recently passed a law that there must be 24 months between and adopted child and a child already in the home. We weren't totally surprised as we had heard this might be happening, but it started to clarify things for us. To continue to be open to a sibling group the children would have to be approximately 15 months and younger. That is very, very rare. Not impossible, but doesn't happen ever really. The reason that this is an issue is because we have to start filling out paperwork and stating how many children we plan to adopt. To put one child down and then get referred two would mean a whole lot of backpedalling, extra money and agony as we tried to get our paperwork changed. It isn't such a big deal to put that we hope to adopt two and then only get one, but we are feeling like we just need to make a decision here and now. To move forward saying maybe siblings, maybe not when it's not really a possibility seems like it will only bring confusion.

So, we are going to apply for only one child. We certainly believe that the Lord can do anything He wants and if He wants us to adopt two kids then He'll make it happen. But we feel like we need to look at this realistically and set aside our hopes of a sibling group (for now.)

Which brings me to the title of our little blog--Bringing Them Home. I realize using the word them infers more than one and since we are only going to (probably) adopt one child right now, it doesn't really fit. But neither does Bringing He/She Home. So we're sticking with Bringing Them Home and calling it a day.

-kate-