Congratulations to Chris, Rebecca, Laurie, Shane, Nikko, Nancy, Melissa and their families! All of these families from our agency got referrals for babies ranging in age from 20 days to 13 months old. What great Christmas presents!
All I can say is PLEASE read this familiy's blog. I have been so amazed, touched, challenged and excited by this blog. They have seen the hand of God in every step of their adoption of twin baby girls and a young boy, but they also saw God's hand and heart in their trip to Ethiopia. If you want to be blessed beyong belief, read her post "My new son at Kolfe". It includes a couple of letters that the young man on the far right wrote her. Then scroll back to her posts while she was in Ethiopia - goodness read her whole blog as you have time. Here is the address http://jobsdaughters.blogspot.com but I also have it in my links on the right side under Job's daughters and pass it on to anyone adopting from Ethiopia or interested in what the Lord is doing with His children.
We still pray for things to work out with the other families waiting for Zambia, but at this point adoptions are still not proceeding. I have been the one holding out hope and Javier, being from a third world country himself, has been much more skeptical. For multiple reasons and after much prayer and waiting, we have decided to switch to Ethiopia. The last week in November I started working on our dossier (a boat load of legal paperwork that is needed to make the adoption final in Ethiopia). Monday, December 10 we got it all certified at the Secretary of State's office and then off in the mail to Washington DC. From there it will go to the US State Department and to the Ethiopian Embassy. Once it clears their offices, it will be sent to Ethiopia for translation. The kids have been troopers while I have worked hard to get all of these documents gathered, notarized and certified.
We are excited to think that our boys are in Ethiopia. We can't wait to see their pictures and receive our referral. Luckily, this new agency is pretty fast. We should have our boys by summer, but we are hoping sooner.
We took a 3 day vacation to San Diego that turned into a 5 day vacation. We saw all of our relatives that live there an went to a Science Museum/ Balboa Park. We planned on going to Legoland with some tickets my cousin gave us (Thanks Kris), but when we got to Legoland on Tuesday it was closed Tuesday and Wednesday. We had planned to go home to AZ on Wednesday, so this meant we had to stay until Thursday to go to Legoland. Luckily my grandma let us stay at her house an extra couple of days. It was perfect going there in the middle of the week, when most kids are in school (this is a great benefit of homeschooling - we take breaks when everyone else is in school). We rarely waited in a line and the few times that we did, we never waited longer than 5 minutes! Often times, we just stayed on the ride and they let us ride 2 or 3 times in a row since no one else was waiting. What a blessing of great family time that we really needed! We got home around midnight and all of our kids traveled so well. We read an adult book about Ethiopia, There Is No Me Without You, the entire way to San Diego and then they slept and sang most of the ride home to AZ.
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