Okay....its been a week of relaxation, time to tackle the dossier

What a great weekend we have had as a family! Saturday we were blessed by being invited to a birthday party for our friends' twins, Owen and Poppy, who were adopted from Ethiopia about 6 months ago. This was our very first opportunity to spend time with families who have adopted from Ethiopia and to observe first hand the community of adoptive families in our area.

I told Mike that I might have looked a bit crazy to the other parents because I was totally enthralled with the 6 beautiful children running around and being delighted with helium balloons. There were 4 little girls all dressed beautifully for the party and I of course was immediately dreaming of what our little angel will be like. The children where happy and crawling around or calling for their mommas and daddy's and there were ecstatic grandparents totally in love with their adoptive grandchildren. Most of the children had only been home for around 6 months and they all seemed to be thriving. Although we were only there for a little over an hour we were able to informally introduce David and Sam to a concrete example of what adoption meant. As we walked out of the party to our car, David exclaimed excitedly, "Hey mom, I guess having a baby sister will be okay". Now coming from a 6 year old who has been pressuring his mother to adopt a boy instead of a girl - this was major progress!

On Sunday we were equally blessed with the opportunity to talk to a family who adopted a baby boy about 6 months agol. It was great to sit down and chat with them for two hours about their experience with adoption and about the challenges they have had because their child was quite sick when they picked him up in Ethiopia. They answered our questions in detail about their experience in-country and told us about their adoption perspective as parents who also have two birth children like we do. It gave me a lot to think about and to prepare for. But nothing could steal the spotlight from their little boy who was precious and happy and crawling around to get into everything he could find! And as we parents chatted their older children would occasionally waltz into the room to check on their little brother.

This weekend was really what I needed. I hope to be invited to additional get togethers as we work through the process, though I admit it is a little uncomfortable to be the one just starting out, when everyone else is already through the process. It's a bit like being invited to a baby play date when you are still pregnant. But everyone has been so welcoming and supportive. The Ethiopian adoption community is such an amazing sub-culture to be a part of!
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Now here I am - its Monday and it is time to shift gears into "dossier mode". I have a list of 17 official documents that need to be ordered/obtained/gathered/collected from various official agencies and they all need to be notarized (I'm starting to think it would have been worth it to pay a neighbor to become a notary!). This follows the 12 documents of similar type that we already gathered and notarized for our homestudy. And yes, in case you are wondering many are duplicate information, but no - they are not in the same format so away we go again to collect the same info in a different format. But that is okay.....we are making progress!