Another Z on the way!

We are DTE today! Basically that means that our dossier is on its way to Ethiopia. We have officially been added to the list! We are so thankful that this day has finally come and are praising God for His perfect timing. We have hoped for almost a year that we could be at this point in the process by the end of August. We just made it!

So from this point on we will be referring to ourselves as being "paper-pregnant". We're about 9 months away welcoming another beautiful baby into our family (5-7 months wait for referral and then 8-10 weeks to pass court and then travel). We are so excited!

We're off to celebrate. Let the wait begin!

Out of our hands

And it's off! Our dossier is on an overnight trip to our agency's office as we speak. I went this morning and made 3 copies of everything and then we crammed it all into a flat rate Express Mail envelope. Honestly, it's not as much paperwork as I thought it would be, but I am still impressed with our stack.

Three sets of everything!

Haven wanted to carry it down to the post office (we walk to ours), but then decided it was too heavy for her.
Not our best family portrait, what with the sick Cale, the glaring glasses and the goofy girl, but it's a historic day in the history of our family and we wanted to remember it. (Sadly, this is the best picture we could get after several tries!)

And just like that, it's out of our hands. It's certainly been in the Lord's hands all along, but physically letting go of all that we've been working towards for the last 5 months is a huge moment. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that all these pieces of paper some how will add up to us adding another child to our family. I'm not quite there yet, but I've got a 5-7 month wait ahead of me to figure it out.

-kate-

We got it!

The mail this morning contained an especially happy piece of mail: the I-171H that we've been waiting on for exactly 4 weeks! We were so excited, and actually surprised by it's presence, that we decided to just drive up to Columbus today to get the necessary certification. Thankfully we made a few calls before going and knew exactly what we needed to have before we got there or we would have been in some trouble. So a few stops near home for a notarization, a county certification and we were off. It was really a quick and easy process once we got there and we couldn't be happier.

Tomorrow I will go make 3 copies of every document we have and hopefully by tomorrow afternoon all our paperwork will be in an overnight envelope on it's way to America World's offices.

We are officially done paperchasing! Praise the Lord!

-kate-

Ethiopia at the 2008 Summer Games

We watched the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics the other night (on 8/8/08) and saw the atheletes from Ethopia march in. They have 22 competitors this year, all but one of which are distance runners (the other is a flyweight boxer). We're excited for the distance running events to start in a few days. We'll be cheering them on!

Still waiting on the I-171. Hopefully it will show up soon!

-- cale