The Beginning of Our Adventure

Here we are again starting another blog for one of our children...our newest one!  As many of you know we created a blog when Caleb was in the NICU to inform family and friends of his status and to ask for prayers.  Then we created another one when Eli was in the NICU and at Children's for the same reason.

Well, this is a bit of a different type of blog!  We haven't actually gotten our child yet.  We have, however, decided to start the adoption process to adopt a little girl!  We have felt God calling us to adopt a daughter from Ethiopia!  We are super excited and scared and nervous at the same time.  But we know we are supposed to keep our eyes on Jesus and he will lead us where we need to go.

There has been a lot of corruption and then attempted reform in the past few years in the Ethiopian adoption process.  This, sadly for us, has slowed down the process and the wait time for referrals to 2-4 years, depending on the agency that quotes it.  This is quite frustrating for us.  I have been researching agencies the past two weeks and it's been really hard finding one I feel comfortable using.  I have more agencies to research and contact, but seem to have narrowed it down to a couple we really like. It's just a long hard process. I understand that this slow down is supposed to help ensure that the children who are being adopted are actually truly orphans and don't have any family members who can take care of them.  I want the system to work and be ethical, but selfishly, I just wish the process could go quickly and easily for us!  But we are also leaning on God and know that I must have patience (not a virtue of mine) and we must keep following His lead.

We are so excited to be able to share this news with our friends and family!  We would love and need your prayers!  We need prayer for patience, strength, safe keeping of our daughter and finances through this expensive process!  We hope to update the blog as much as possible as we walk through the process to keep people who are interested informed! If you have any questions or want to "talk adoption" feel free to contact us!