In the past nine days since announcing our adoption so much has happened. I will start with Isabelle. I have to say that the child's heart is bigger than Texas and I just love her for it. When I told her about the adoption she was so excited, the first words out of her mouth were, "I get to share my room with her, I really want to Mommy". Her follow up statement, "what can I do to help?". I told Isabelle that we would need to fill out all kinds of paper work and start saving up a lot of money to get our new baby, but that it was going to take time and not to worry about the room situation just yet. Of course she immediately opened her fundraising file in her sweet head and decided that she is going to start making rainbow loom bracelets and sell them to help. Then she asked if she needed to talk to anyone about us. Would someone need to know if we were good parents or not because she would be happy to talk to someone about that, but she was concerned about what Davie would say ;) I reassured her that Davie would probably say good things but the weight of what a 3 year old says is not normally taken that much into consideration (she should be worried about that boy though, he is a loose cannon).
Isabelle told all of her friends at school, and pretty much anyone else that she ran into that would listen to her. Her teacher has since pulled up pictures online of Ethiopia and talked to the class about the people, houses and culture there. (So sweet to have such an amazing teacher, we love Mrs. Meazell) Isabelle is working on a Flat Stanley project and we were so blessed to have met a sweet lady, Mrs. Hilary, who is taking Stanley to Ethiopia with her when she picks up her new son in a few weeks. So exciting! My last Isabelle brag is what gift she has asked for this Christmas. We were talking about Christmas and she told me that she really wanted a brown American Girl doll because she doesn't have any brown babies like Baby E (that is what we are calling our mystery Ethiopian baby). We looked through the catalog and when she saw the brown twins she asked if she could get those for Christmas, she would keep one of them and save the other one for Baby E when she got home. How precious is my girls heart?
As for Davie he is is still pretty clueless about what is going on, we have told him but he is a boy and he is 3 so really he doesn't care all of that much. Davie also has no real sense of timing, with it being such a long time from now I don't think it's best to start talking it up to early. Once we are on the wait list we will probably talk it up a little more. I did however show him a picture of an Ethiopian baby girl and asked if he wanted a baby sister like the one I was showing him and he told me "no, I need a brother".. Tough cookies Davie, we are getting a girl and you will love her just as much as you love sissy :) I keep saying girl, but don't know if I ever officially announced it- we have requested a girl from birth to 5 years old. I probably should have mentioned that, it is pretty important :)
ADOPTION NEWS:
We have finally selected an agency and are going with Children's House International. Finding and picking an agency has been way harder than I thought. I called a bunch of them, asked a ton of questions, and asked the very few people that I know who have adopted what they thought and we finally ended up at CHI. One of the main reasons we have chosen CHI over a lot of the others is because of their wait list. When calling around so many agencies has a closed list or they were on a three year wait list, CHI had a wait list of one year. This was in the beginning a big red flag that made me concerned whether or not they were being honest about their wait time but after asking around their wait times are smaller because they are an agency that shuts down their wait list before it gets to long. Once all of their families are off their list they move onto a new group of families. This makes perfect sense and seems like the way that all of adoptions should be done, three years is so long to wait :( After speaking to the lady at the agency, she was very nice and ready and willing to answer all of my crazy question I knew this was the agency for me. We are so excited about CHI and cannot wait to get this ball into motion. At this point we have filled out the application and submitted our application fee, we are just waiting on approval.
Another selection we have made this week is our social worker. With CHI being based in Washington we had to find a social worker that was local to the area to do our required home study. I again asked around and spoke to the very few people that have adopted and by chance the two people I spoke to referred me to the exact same lady and told me how amazing she was. Kind of feels like a God thing people! I called her up and spoke to her and indeed she is a wealth of information and a sweet, sweet lady. Yay, we have a social worker! We are currently working on filling out all of the required paper work to start moving forward on our home study.
We are beginning what is now called the paper chase, sounds super exciting right? My days in between designing Christmas cards, cheerleading, school, preschool, keeping my house in functioning order and preparing for Christmas are going to be spent filling out a bunch of paper work, answering lots of questions that frankly I have never even thought about, and chasing down a bunch of paper work. Am I excited, OVER THE MOON, I can hardly wait to do all of these things because they bring me one step closer to getting our sweet baby girl.
I had better run lots to do, places to go, people to see and a social worker to call (I have a social worker, so giddy). Before you leave my blog check out the new page I added to the blog called, "Why Ethiopia) or you can click on the link here: http://winksethiopianwish.blogspot.com/p/why-ethiopia.html Just incase you were wondering why we decided on Ethiopia.
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