A little recap...

Our Timeline to Ethiopia…

In January of 2009 Russ and I first discussed the idea of adoption and my feeling called to adopt
In February, March and April Russ and I both spent time in prayer trying to determine if this is what God had planned for our family. It was also during this time that we became more and more drawn to Africa and specifically Ethiopia.
In May we decided this was what God was calling us to do and we took a leap of faith and began the process.
June and July were spent gathering more paperwork than you can imagine.
On August 20, 2009 our paperwork had been signed off on by the American government (Hilary Clinton specifically), was translated and sent to the Ethiopian government. This date is called your DTE date and becomes “your place in line on the waiting list”.
On November 19th we received an email to let us know that we were “on deck” which basically means getting near the top of the list and to be prepared for a referral in the next 1-3 months.
Our next step will be to receive our Referral. A referral is when a specific child is matched with our family and we find out who he is! We will be given a name, approximate age, medical information and any history that is known. We have requested a boy under the age of 2 and the agencies and Ethiopian government have that information when making a match for our family.
Once we receive a referral………we still have to wait. We will wait to be assigned a court date. The court appointment is in Ethiopia and our agency goes on our behalf. It generally takes 6-8 weeks after referral to receive a court date. If we pass on our court date (about 65% of cases pass on the first time) then we will be given our travel dates. Generally these are 3-4 weeks after passing court.
We will go to Ethiopia to pick up our son and will spend one week in the country. We will travel with a group and will be with people from our adoption agency the whole time.
January 12th was a BIG day. We received our referral for a beautiful 2 month old baby boy. We have 2 pictures of him and love just staring at them indefinitely. Now we must wait for the court date which I mentioned above.