My Husband is NOT My Brother

I have been patiently waiting for our birth certificates to arrive.  Then a letter came in the mail last week from the records division of our state.  At first I was excited, thinking it hadn't taken long at all to have one more thing to check off of our list.  But, wait!  Why is the envelope so thin???  How can six birth certificates fit in there?

They can't!  Someone at the state misprocessed my request and put into their computer that Justin is my brother.  Of course, they couldn't find any proof of that and want me to supply proof before I can have the birth certificates.  Oy!

I have to talk to one specific clerk about this and she's been out of the office every time I call.  I'm anxious to have this sorted out, for several reasons - the first of which is, "Ick!!!"

On a much more exciting and less disturbing note, we had initial contact with our social worker last week.  She's very friendly and super fast responding to emails.  Yay!  She's also a big proponent of attachment parenting, which is an answer to prayer!  Now we just have to finish filling out a bunch of paperwork so we can get things going.  It's so exciting and becoming much more real!

Paralyzed

Ok, so I do this thing where I kind of shut down when I'm overwhelmed with a project.  We waited with great anticipation to get access to Holt's guidebook and now I'm paralyzed by everything that has to be accomplished.  Should I start gathering letters now from the bank, police, and such or should I wait until we've at least started our homestudy [hopefully sooooooo soon!]??  I know there's something about documents not being more than a year old but I can't remember if that's at the point of the actual adoption or when the dossier is submitted.  Grrrrrrrr.  I don't know.  Hopefully soon I'll stop feeling like a dog chasing it's tail and actually get something accomplished!

In the meantime, life goes on.  The kids and I decided to take five Friday's off instead of doing a whole week off for spring break.  Today's our first lazy Friday and it's been lovely to sit around, reading and cuddling.  I'm so very blessed!  I adore these special, little people!

We're Expecting from Africa

Well, we started this blog to record our experiment to go without TV for 40 days.  We are at nine months and still going strong.  We're planning to make it to the one year mark and then re-evaluate.  Sooooooooo, there's not much more to say about that and we've begun a new journey of faith.  This blog will now re-focus on our sojourn into the fields of the fatherless.

We have started the process to adopt a baby from Ethiopia!  We have always planned to adopt internationally and after our third miscarriage on Christmas Day 2009, we looked at the four, beautiful, healthy kids we already had and asked ourselves, "what are we doing?  There are children out there who need parents.  Why bring another one into the world?"  

We've researched adoption on and off for years, but this time God is leading us forward and growing the seed that was planted long ago.  We chose Ethiopia for many reasons, which I will detail in another post soon.  Right now, we've just so thankful to be on this journey and cannot wait to see what God has in store for our family!