Happy Valentine's Day!
I just realized that it has been since May of last year since I wrote about our adoption. Lots of stuff has gone on since then. So, while Jeremy and Hunter are cooking me a romantic Valentine's Dinner ;), I wanted to catch everyone up. In May of 2015 we accepted the referral of an infant boy. We had lots of more paperwork to do to make it official. So, we (mainly I (Jeremy has terribly handwriting so I typically do not allow him to help haha)) went to work. Had everything completed. Only to find out that the paperwork wasn't correct. They called us and told us we had two very short weeks to get an addendum completed on our homestudy and get it submitted to USCIS in Texas or else we would have to pay an additional $2,000 to have it redone. My heart sank. So, back to work I went on our paperwork. Long story short, our paperwork arrived the day it was due. Phew! Talk about cutting it close. After that we went back to waiting for our next approval. We received it several weeks later. In October, we submitted our next set of paperwork which they told us would take 3-4 weeks to receive our approval. To our surprise, we received that approval the very next day. So, now all we lack is one more approval before our case gets presented to the judge. They told us our next approval could take several months. So, I tried to not worry about it and tried to realize that God is in control of this whole situation. After three months of hearing absolutely nothing from our agency, I decided to ask some of the other families how long it took them to received their approval. Several of them told me just a few weeks and that it was a relatively quick process. I became very concerned. I emailed our family coordinator and asked her why she thought it was taking ours so long. She told me she would contact our orphanage and see if she could find out what was causing the delay. She called us a few days later and told us that we had received our approval and that now our case would be sent to the judge. Now, we have no idea how long it will take for them to approve our case. They said we would still be traveling to pick Little Man up this summer but it could be sooner or it could be later. If you would like to help our family by praying that would be awesome! Pray that the judge would see our case and see us as the perfect family for our little guy. Pray that Little Man stays healthy and gets the love and care that he needs until we get there. As silly as it seems, I often pray that he will know that we exist and that we are trying as hard as we can to get to Him and give Him the life he deserves. Every child deserves a loving family.
So, for now we just wait.
When we first started the second adoption we were doing a fundraiser to surprise everyone and let them know what country we chose. As of right now, between all the donations we received, two grants that we received, and saving our little hearts out, we have enough to complete our adoption 100% debt free! Jeremy and I are beyond thankful for all the ways in which everyone helped to achieve this. So, in case you haven't figured it out yet (or we haven't spilled the beans) our Little Man was born in
We will be making one trip to India and stay about two week in country with Him. Then we will get to bring him home! Everyday is one day closer to traveling!
We legally can not show any pictures of him or any information about him. So, if you follow us on Facebook you will probably see little teasers like this one:
But please understand that as much as we would like to show you his perfect little face, the Indian government is very strict on this and we would not want to jeopardize our adoption in any way.
Lately, we have been trying to gather a few things that we know we will need in hopes that we will bring him home sooner than later. Today we were excited to purchase the perfect stroller for half the retail price! Hunter had a blast helping to put it together and playing on it. He can not wait to be a big brother! He even picked him out a light up ninga turtles cup that he already has set up in brothers stroller. Hunter will be such a blessing to his little brother. I can already tell.
One question we have received a lot of lately is I thought you were adopting from Ethiopia or what about the Ethiopia adoption? We are still currently on that waiting list. We were officially added to that list July 5th, 2013. They have continued to increase the wait times for families. As of today, they are telling families 48-60 months before referral. Our agency has been offering incentives for families to transfer out of the Ethiopia program. Also, in the last week the Ethiopian government had decided to restructure certain areas of their adoption. The one that affects us overall is they are considering making families stay in country for 6 months with the child they are adopting. With having two other children at home and one in school, working, and going to school ourselves, we would definitely not be able to stay in country for long of a time. This is not set in stone yet but they are having another meeting about it tomorrow and hopefully our agency will have some answers. We will continue to wait and see how things move along before making an decision on whether or not we want to withdraw from the program. Although, we have no desire to until all options are exhausted.
We will try and keep everyone updated as the time comes to travel. But, for now we are really at the point in the adoption where we won't have many updates until time to travel. Hopefully, this gives everyone an insight as to what has been going on in our life. Feel free to send us any questions that we may have missed!
With Love,
Abby
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