Referral!!!!

The day is finally here, our adoption agency found a BEAUTIFUL and tiny 2 year old girl for our family! We just faxed over our acceptance letter today. I'm going totally over the top with printing her picture and putting it all kinds of places....my iphone wall paper, my computer desktop, by my bed.....I just can't get enough of staring at her photo!

We received her referral on Wednesday morning much to the complete and utter shock of myself and Mike. I literally went into shock, shaking, crying, calling Mike, Kevala and my sister and speaking incoherently. I don't think my mind stopped spinning for 24 hours.

We are incredibly overjoyed to be entering a new phase of the adoption process and right now we are trying really hard to be disciplined about taking time to praise God and thank God that we have been given the opportunity to parent an orphan from Africa.

It is both surreal and amazing to be sitting here typing this blog post with a picture right next to me of a little girl who needs a mommy! I always imagined what it would be like to receive a referral and it was nothing like I thought it would be. As Mike said yesterday with a shocked look on his face "you think you can prepare yourself for this day, but you really can't prepare yourself!"

As most of you know we have been spending the last three months preparing ourselves that this day would not come until next year so we were totally unprepared to receive this news on Wednesday - isn't it funny how God continues to turn my "planning time lines" upside down! We were so overwhelmed when we received this referral just under 6 months on the wait list!

I know that many of you will want to know what the next steps look like, and to be honest we don't totally know what the timing will be because there have been some changes in the Ethiopian adoption process but this is the general process we know so far:

1) We now wait for the Ethiopian courts to assign us a court date (probably within 6-8 weeks from now) The Ethiopian courts are closed for a month starting today.

2) Fly to Ethiopia for court, meet our baby, pass court (she is then legally ours but we can't take her home until a US Embassy date) and then fly home

3) wait 6 weeks until we get a US Embassy appointment, fly back to Ethiopia to pick up our baby and bring her home as a US Citizen

5) Hopefully we will have her home by the end of the year, possibly sooner.

I will write more when we know more, this week has been an amazing whirlwind!