Our Timeline

August 2007-January 2008 – This time started with sharing with our family and friends about our plans for adoption. We are so thankful for their excitement and support. We also spent this time researching organizations and countries from which we could adopt. We were looking at Central/South America due to the location, Spanish being a valuable language to know and the culture being fairly prevalent in our area. There were definitely some frustrating points in the process since we were having difficulty locating a country in this region that we could adopt with. During this time, Ethiopia began to surface, but we didn’t feel a complete direction to pursue Ethiopia at this moment. We discussed Ethiopia as a possibility for our second adoption, where we to adopt again.

January 2008- We discovered that Peru would be a viable option. The process would take about two years, and our child would be about 18 months to two years old, and we would be in Peru for about a month, possibly longer. We could only find one adoption agency in the US that was licensed for a family from our state to adopt from Peru so we chose Children’s Home Society & Family Services out of Minnesota. We would soon find out that this would be a great agency for adopting from another country besides Peru. We completed and mailed in our initial application to be placed in the program to adopt from Peru.

February 2008- We began gathering all of the required documents for our home study and we completed our initial home study meeting at the end of the month.

March 2008- Kevin and I went to Sierra Leone, West Africa to the same orphanage that I had the opportunity to work at in 2006. It was an amazing week! When we returned, we really began sensing that God was leading us to adopt from Africa. We completed our second and final interview for our home study right after returning from Africa. We took the rest of March and beginning of April to seek the Lord on what we needed to do.

April 2008- We felt a peace and direction to adopt from Africa. Only a few countries in Africa have strong, reliable adoption programs, and Sierra Leone is not one of them. As I mentioned earlier, Ethiopia had been surfacing for several months. So, we did a lot of research and praying, and we decided upon Ethiopia. We notified our agency and our social worker so our home study and paperwork could be changed. We were transferred from the Peruvian to the Ethiopian program within the same agency. The process for Ethiopia takes about 9 months to one year to complete the paperwork and receive our referral. Our child will be about 6 months old give or take a month or two, and we will stay in Ethiopia for one week. We do not know what gender our child will be. Our agency stipulates that if you do not have children, then you must be open to gender, which is fine with us.

May 2008- Filed our I600A with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Our home study was approved and we were approved to begin the process with adopting from Ethiopia. We received our information packet for our dossier (legal documents that are required by the international government) for Ethiopia.

June 2008- Completed and mailed in our dossier on June 17. On June 20, we received confirmation via e-mail that our dossier had been approved, and would be sent to the Ethiopian Embassy and US State Department to authenticate specific documents, and then it would be on its way to Ethiopia! So, WE ARE OFFICIALLY ON THE WAIT LIST FOR OUR REFERRAL AS OF JUNE 20, 2008!!!!!!! Currently, if nothing changes with the time frame, then we can expect to know who our child is between December and March. Once we find out, then we will travel 2-4 months after that.

August 2008- We received our CIS approval on 8/1!!!! We were very excited to receive this approval from US Citizenship and Immigration services. This means that once we receive our referral that we are approved by the US federal government to go and bring our child home. We also got to meet the local group of parents who have adopted from Ethiopia and meet at a local Ethiopian restaurant. We had a great time, and we look forward to spend more time with them on a monthly basis in the upcoming months.

September 2008- On 9/8 we received word from our adoption agency that our referral time has extended due to anticipated referrals slowing down while the Ethiopian courts are closed for August and September. This was obviously very disappointing news and not at all what we wanted to hear. However, we knew it was a strong possibility and the more friends that I have talked to that have adopted experienced increased wait times with their adoptions as well. That did provide some encouragement that this adoption will happen. As I said, we knew it was a possibility, but when you get a certain timeframe in mind, then it is definitely discouraging to hear otherwise. So, at this time we are expecting to receive our referral somewhere around June of 2009. This was the initial timeframe that I had in mind before we completed all of our paperwork, but it still seems far away right now. So, we will just continue to wait as patiently as possible....