What Happened to February?!

I had no intention of going the entire month of February without a single blog entry but here we are in March already! February was a busy month for us. I had a birthday (don't ask, I'm not telling ;-), we celebrated Valentine's Day at our new favorite tapas restaurant and my mother got married. Congrats Mom and Tom! We are thrilled that you finally made it official!

We made it to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant with a few of our new Ethiopia Adoption friends (someone took pictures but I don't have them yet...). We also tore down the wallpaper in the guest room and started putting up bead board and molding (well...Mark did anyway). The wallpaper doesn't look that bad in these pictures but trust me, it was bad. It was made of VINYL!!! Of course, no offence meant to those who love vinyl but it's just not for us!

BEFORE... IN TRANSITION...

Stay tuned for the AFTER pictures...until then imagine clean white bead board to chair rail height, a fresh coat of blue gray paint and some sort of new window treatment and light fixture. This room is going to become the office and the office, which is the larger of the two rooms, is going to become the kid's room (that transformation is next). Don't worry, we still have the guest bed and plan to set it up again so people can come visit until the babies get here to claim their turf!

I also finished a few knitting projects including a pair of socks for Mark, some little jackets and sweaters for the babies, and three teddy bears. I have come a long way since those hats back in November if I do say so myself!

GREY JACKET... Still need to sew on the mother of pearl buttons and "block" it so that the edges lie flat...but you get the idea.

THE THREE BEARS...No, this does not mean that we are planning for three children! I simply had extra yarn to make a third bear!

GREEN JACKET...

Another little jacket. I'm really into the jackets right now and have done four of them. I know, I am incapable of doing just one of anything!

Last Saturday night we had the honor of being among the first to celebrate the referral of a beautiful, 6 month old baby girl with this family: http://lovegrowsourfamily.blogspot.com/. I wish we could post her pictures so you all could see how beautiful she is (for those who don't know, the Ethiopian government does not allow posting pictures or names of the children on the Internet until the adoption is finalized). I can't tell you how great it is for us to know people who are also going through this process. It really helps us prepare for the road ahead, and sharing in the joys and milestones of others makes our wait less noticeable.

So what about the babies, you ask? Our agency, Gladney, has started hosting monthly conference calls to keep families informed. The great thing about that is the fact that Gladney is being so proactive about communicating. The perhaps not-so-great thing about it is the fact that there are enough changes that they need to be great at communicating. That said, we did know that change and bumps were inevitable in this process so we are just happy that we aren't being kept in the dark. In a nut shell, here's what's happening...

Adoptions from Ethiopia are becoming wildly popular, not only in this country but also in Europe. I think they said the number of adoptions has tripled over the past year but the government agencies that support the adoption process in Ethiopia have not been able to triple their staff to match this growth. There have also been new laws put in place to help protect the children and prevent child trafficking. This is a good thing in spite of the increased red tape that families and agencies have to wade through. As you can imagine, all these things combine to slow the pace at which adoptions are being completed. We already knew wait times were increasing from watching our friends, but Gladney has now officially announced that increase. There are essentially two stages of the wait and both are long enough to warrant talking about them separately:

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  The first wait is the time from when you get on the wait list (for us that was Dec 11, 2008) to getting your referral (that's what it is called when they tell you who you have been matched with). Until recently that wait was estimated at 4 - 6 months. Gladney is now giving an average instead of a range, and that average is 6.5 months with some families waiting less time and some families waiting as long as 8 months. Our friends mentioned above, as well as our friends who received their referral back in November, all waited 8 months.
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  The second part of the wait is the time from when you receive your referral to when you go to court to legally adopt your child or children. That time used to be 1 - 3 months, now they are saying it is an average of 4 to 6 months, and then another month on top of that to travel if you pass court.

So, this means that if all goes well we should learn who our children are some time between June and September, and we should have them home sometime in the fall or winter. Of course this is a guesstimate based on current trends and things could change again for the better or for the worse.

I know this all must sound like torture to some of you - and, ok, occasionally it is - but mostly we are at peace with it. What better way to practice patience and prepare for parenthood than this?! And we really, truly know in our hearts that this is the way we are meant to build our family and we think it is worth waiting for. Some day we are going to look back at all of this and try to remember why one measly year felt like such an eternity!