Home studied

We are officially home studied! We had our second meeting this morning at our house and the 2+ hour meeting was mostly comprised of individual interviews. Cale and I both felt like they went well and are feeling very relieved to have that huge piece of this process almost completed. Our social worker will get our report written up in the next few weeks (in the midst of her daughter getting married!) and we will meet with her one more time to go over everything.

We also received our Child Protective Services clearance in the mail today. That means that we have EVERYTHING done for our home study! Now I need to get busy on all the dossier paperwork waiting for us! Honestly, it has not been bad at all. Yes, there are a million little details, but I'm thankful and amazed at how fast we have been able to get things compiled. I'm hopeful that the rest of the paperwork process will go just as smoothly!

-kate-

And a special thanks to Jenny who pointed out to us that there was no place to leave a comment. We've been wondering why no one has left any! Problem fixed!

First Home Study Visit

We had a very successful first home study meeting at our house on Tuesday. We really like our social worker and we felt like we were sitting down with a new friend. She had a good deal of background information about us because we had already submitted our autobiographies. We spent a lot of time talking about our motivation for adoption from Ethiopia, how we intend to talk about adoption with our child, how we might educate ourselves about Ethiopia, parenting style, grief and death and our home. Haven could not have behaved better during the two hour meeting and I was so thankful for that.

The best part of our meeting was finding out that we were able to schedule our second (and last!) home visit for Monday, June 23. We are flying through this process and I couldn't be more excited about that. We will sit down with her one more time once she writes the actual home study report and then we can submit it to USCIS and get that ball rolling. Lots of progress this week and we are praising God for that!

-kate-

Dad's day

Well, today is father's day, and it's got me thinking a bit about being a dad (well, I am a dad already, but... you know what I mean). I was thinking about what the Bible has to say about dads:

1. Women and children need taken care of. James 1:27 tells us that those who take care of widows and orphans are considered to be truly of God. One of the primary duties of a man (dads in particular) are to provide for, love on, and take care of people, and that isn't limited to those in one's immediate family. Everyone out there needs someone to help them out, watch their back, be in their corner - this is what dads are for.

2. God is our Heavenly Father and dads are made in His image. What an honor and a calling it is for us to be made in God's image! That is true in general, but even more so for dads. Jesus, though not a dad in the sense that we're talking about here, made it his main goal to emulate what he saw his Father doing. How much more should we then strive to be like Him!

3. Dads are blessed to have kids. The Bible says in Psalm 127 that they are a reward, and dads are blessed to have "a quiver full" of them. Now I know that kids can be trying and exhausting (and I only have 1 at this point), and require a lot of sacrifice to love and care for - and that is exactly why they are a blessing: God uses kids to train us in righteousness. You can't live an independent, self-centered life when you have kids; you are (for better or worse) forced to live sacrificially and seek the best interest of others. We would all be blessed to live this way more often.

So being a dad is a big job, and it is a great honor to be one. I'm constantly challenged by the calling to be a father, but it has so many joys and rewards. I have a long way to go, but the Lord has definietly brought me a long way by His grace. Hopefully next June I'll have another child in my home which I can joyfully father.

--cale

Some information and a correction

More things crossed off the list this week: physicals, blood work, random paperwork stuff. I'm very aware that we are in a hurry up and wait scenario. I'm surprisingly okay with that. We received an update from the African Director of America World today. She recently spent a month in Ethiopia to see first hand how things are working over there. Positive things happened during her time there including our agency working with a new orphanage. Here are a few excerpts from her email that I thought would be interesting to share with everyone:

As most of you know Adoption from Ethiopia has grown popular in the past year. In the last two years the number of adoptions from Ethiopia by US citizens has increased by 100%. While there were only a handful of US adoption agencies working in Ethiopia two years ago, there are now over 30. Most people are attracted to the program for the same reason: compared to other countries it has proven to be the quickest and there is a need for adoptive families as there are many orphans. Because of this increased interest families should expect to wait longer for a referral than some of the families who adopted a year ago when the number of prospective adoptive families applying to the Ethiopia program was not so high.

As most of you know, power is currently rationed throughout Ethiopia because of the lack of rain. There is no power two to three days out of the 5 business days. This has created all processes to slow down. For instance MOWA cannot write recommendation letters to court on some days because of power outages resulting in rescheduling of court dates. Or the Vital office cannot issue a birth certificate because of the same problem. Families should expect some delays after a referral and leading up to travel because of these reasons.

The current wait time for both infant girls and boys is 7-9 months. The wait time is also 7-9 months for toddlers and children up to 5 years old.

So if you think of it please pray for rain for Ethiopia, not even because there's no power but because people are dying from lack of food. Crops won't grow, food costs are astronomically high and there is literally nothing to eat. It is a desperate situation for an already desperate country. Read more here if you're interested.

And one more thing...I have had a number of people ask me recently if there would be a chance that the child we adopt will have HIV. My answer was no and I explained that Ethiopia doesn't allow children who are HIV positive to be adopted out of country. Children that are put up for adoption are generally tested twice for HIV. I read something today that contradicts that information so after a bit more research I discovered that I have been misinforming people. It is possible for Americans to adopt HIV positive children if the petition for and receive special permission from both the US government and the Ethiopian government to do so. With that said, it is not our intention to adopt an HIV positive baby at this time. I stand corrected and I apologize to those I misinformed!

-kate-

Progress, slow but sure

We've got quite a bit of our paperchase done in the past couple of weeks. Here's a list of accomplishments:

• fingerprinted by USCIS
• written our autobiographies
• completed half of our Hague training online
• each read a book off of our required reading list
• had our home inspected by an official from the fire department
• had our local and FBI background checks conducted
• scheduled our first home study in-home visit and physicals
• had our daughter tested for TB
• verified my employment
• had umpteen documents notarized
• several other things (I'm sure) that I'm forgetting

Getting each piece done isn't that overwhelming; when you look at the hundred or so things that you have to do, then it's overwhelming! But we're getting through it, and it's not actually that bad. We're pretty optimistic that we'll be able to submit our dossier by the first of August. We'll keep at it!
--cale

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-