I Hear You

I have gotten MANY calls...texts...emails..FB messages...that I need to update the blog. I HEAR YOU!! Now, being mentally capable of comprehending what I'm hearing..well that's been a more difficult task this last week. We arrived back home this last Monday at 4:30 am from Ethiopia. It was a VERY LONG trip home from Africa that left us beyond exhausted. Bryan and I both had a day this week in which we slept 14 hours or more. A big contributing factor was us catching something nasty at the end of our time in Ethiopia. BUT, we had a WONDERFUL time in Ethiopia and greatly miss eating shiro and injera (my new favorite food).

But, you all don't really care about that....you want to know what happened while we were there. WE PASSED COURT!! We are officially parents of a beautiful 5 month old daughter. We traveled with 5 other families who had court appointments with us and we ALL passed court. Now, you might not understand just how big a deal this is. Let me explain. If you read a few posts back you'll see that right before we received our referral for our daughter, MOWA , an Ethiopian governmental dept that has to approve the match in order to pass court, made an announcement that they were going to reduce the # of cases they review by up to 90%. This is supposed to be in effect for all adoptions submitted for court after March 9th. If you remember, we received our referral on March 10th. Our group of adopting families was the first group for our adoption agency to be governed by this new rule. NOBODY new what to expect, but we had all decided that we would be ok if our letter of approval from MOWA wasn't present at court, but everything else was approved. It was a HUGE shock to all six families to hear the judge say "the children are yours". We are incredibly blessed and so thankful that God allowed us to pass court right away.

So what does this mean now? We are now waiting on the U.S. Embassy to approve everything and set a visa appointment before we can bring our daughter home. Our timing on that is hopefully within 6-8 weeks of our court date. Please pray that everything goes smoothly in the Embassy review process and that they don't request any additional information.

Oh, by the way, we are IN LOVE! Our A is amazing. She's a sweet, happy baby with lots of crazy faces and sweet smiles to give. She giggles when you kiss her neck and is ticklish. We can't wait to have her home. In the meantime, we need to store up some much needed sleep, which I need to do right now.

I know you're probably feeling like there's so much more that you want to know. Don't worry...I won't let you down. The day by day of our journey is coming soon...I just have to get my thinker fully processing again before writing those posts (they might be long).

Until then I'll leave you with a picture of our sweet girl. We can't post her face until she's home with us...so this is just a teaser.

-amory