2 Trips

Well not much has happened since my last update. We are waiting for our homestudy to be finalized then onto our dossier. But as I said in my last post that Ethiopia was considering requiring two trips to complete your adoption we now know that this is the new law. Once we are referred our daughter we will fly to Ethiopia to attend the court hearing that makes our her legally ours=) Then you head back over there between 1 and 3 months later to bring her back home!! We are currently thinking that just I will go for the second trip. From all that we have heard from other adoptive families they really felt safe in Addis Ababa and I know of several other moms who went alone. We will continue to pray about it and see where the Lord leads us.
In the meantime we are very ready to get our other necessary documents to send over so that we can start our wait!!

New News

Our home visit has come and gone!! Everything went really well. I'm sure I went overboard making everything clean and perfect but it was a great catalyst to deep clean my house=) Anyways we only have one more document to turn in and then we can get going on our dossier!!
Stephen finally finished his Hague Training which I was VERY happy about. But during that training we both started to get concerned about this issue and that. So we just started praying and AGAIN the Lord confirmed to us that we are supposed to keep on. Stephen was on his way to work. His drive is about 40 minutes so he has a good amount of time to pray and just seek the Lord in quiet. On this particular day he was listening to love 89 and was about to turn it off so that he could focus on some different issues that were on his heart, namely our adoption. When he really felt impressed by the Lord to not turn the radio off. So he decided to leave it on. Shortly after a short bible message came on. He said the message was a very vague one but the gist of it was, if the Lord has called you to do something and it's getting hard, keep on. Don't give up!! He said he knew after that that he was free to turn off the radio. That the Lord had again spoken to him that this adoption is from Him and He alone will see us through. We are so blessed to see the Lord's hand in this and so thankful that He would use us to change someones life FOREVER and that He would bless our home with another precious child. To become a deadly sharpened arrow sent out from our quiver to change this world for the glory of God!! Praise the Lord~

PS. If you guys would please be in prayer about our adoption. We just found out from our coordinator that the Federal High Court in Ethiopia is debating on making 2 trips mandatory for each couple. The first trip would be to meet your child and attend the court hearing there that officially makes the child yours. The second trip would be to go get your child. We are not against getting to see our child any earlier, on the contrary I would LOVE to see them as soon as possible. But the cost of a second trip half way across the world and extra time off of work are what we are concerned about. I also would have a VERY VERY hard time finally meeting him or her and then leaving them there for several months=( All this to say, please pray that if this does go through that the time off of work and everything else will just fall into place!

Interviews

Well our interviews went great. It was actually a lot of fun to sit and talk about this adoption. The boys sat in the opposite room and Bethany sat on the floor in front of us playing with her toys. Stephen jr. was very curious after we left about all that we had talked about. They both are very excited about adopting and they also have tons of questions. So now our home visit is scheduled for the next week!!