eventful

Well, as usual, post ideas have been floating around in my head... details from our trip... thoughts about this whole adoption process... how it feels to have met our daughter and returned home without her... the chaos of deciding to sell our apartment in the midst of all of this... you get the idea.

And again, before I could find the time to sit down and write a post (or posts) about all of these things, we get the news yesterday that our paperwork has been submitted to the US Embassy in Addis. I may have used the words "roller coaster" to describe this process before (just once or twice... or maybe a thousand times...) and this just goes to show that it is.

So what does that mean?

Well, it means that in a few weeks we should hear from the Embassy - hopefully with news that our case was approved, in which case we could be back on a plane to Addis in another week's time! But it's also quite possible that they will want do some additional diligence (request for documents or to interview people relevant to our case) and that we will have to wait to travel for a few more weeks. And of course, there is one other scenario and that is the possibility that the Embassy will feel that our case requires a deeper review, and then it could be months before we can travel. Less likely, but still possible.

We are cautiously optimistic. After two years, the end is definitely closer than the start of this process, and that fact is not lost on us, even if the end is not quite close enough.

So we are celebrating this milestone. And today we are also celebrating the life - and first birthday - of a very special little girl, a member of our family, who we love and miss and look forward to bringing home very soon.

Happy Birthday beautiful girl!!

guzo:party of four (oops - ej says five!)

According to the courts in Ethiopia, we are now a family of four!

I promise (really... truly....) to post more details soon. We had a wonderful week in Ethiopia and are just now recovering (I learned that jet lag + a four year old = 4am "lunches"). There are so many things to share...

For now, just a quick peek at our kids :)

ethiopia bound!

happy holidays!!

surprises

I know I have not been a particularly good blogger this past year (or is it even longer?), but even I can't believe that it's been about 6 weeks since my last post.

It suddenly seems as though we have so much to catch up on, which feels a bit crazy because for much of the past year, I struggled to blog because there was really nothing to blog about. Between June 2010 and late this summer when we started having to re-do expiring paperwork, there was basically nothing adopted-related happening (well, other than a few rule changes and the fact that as things unfolded, our estimated wait time grew and grew... but more than enough has been written about all that).

So imagine our surprise when we got a call in early October, not even 15.5 months into what we then expected to be a 16-17 month wait for a referral. In our experience, surprises are pretty rare in the international adoption process. Or, I should say, good surprises. We have had our share of unexpected delays and paperwork glitches, changes to the rules and process... So that call certainly threw us!!

And so now, just as we are finally taking it all in. Getting to know the face of this amazing little girl in Ethiopia and starting to think about an exciting new year ahead, we got another call that sent us spinning. In what I assume was one of the last tasks our caseworker, Sara, did on Wednesday morning, before Gladney's offices closed at noon for the Thanksgiving holiday, Sara told us to book our tickets to Ethiopia. We are expected to be in court in Addis on December 27!

For the first time in almost two years of planning for our daughter's adoption, I'm thrown. We've become so used to the long stretches between the various milestones of this process, that I never imagined we would have less than 30 days between learning of our court date and getting on a plane bound for Ethiopia. But that's exactly what's happening. Our journey is finally nearing its end, and yet in some ways also just beginning. We couldn't be more excited.

the "we didn't think we would have a referral yet" story

After 15 plus months on the waitlist and about 20 months since filing the first piece of paper in connection with this adoption, I didn't think I could possibly be writing a post saying that we received our referral when we weren't really waiting for it. After all, when we started this adoption, we had every reason to believe we would already be home with our little girl by now.

But that's the truth.

I mean we were waiting. And waiting is pretty much all we were doing. But we were not waiting in that anxious, never let the your phone leave your side, jump every time the phone rings... way.

We were mostly waiting for time to pass, for families who had been waiting for a referral even longer than we had to receive their calls, for October to end and November to begin so that we could really be waiting for "the call." (okay, in fairness, Ryan was slightly more optimistic and chose to believe that we might get our call around Halloween, but he certainly wasn't making any bets on it).

So on Friday, after a really hard week at work and a particularly long morning (I had moved to a new office the night before and came into the building to find I had no access to my new floor and no key to unlock the door to my new office... and then I had to run to make a 2 hour presentation before I was able to sort that out...), when a call from a number I did not recognize came in on my work phone as I was getting my things together to go out and grab lunch, I almost let it go to voicemail. The infamous "817" area code meant nothing to me and I was really needing a break before jumping into another matter. But something made me answer the phone anyway.

And then I heard a lovely voice say "Hi Meredith, it's Sara from Gladney."

I said "Hi Sara, how are you?" No excitement. No thought that this was "the call." No heart beating out of my chest at the sound of her voice, not even a tiny burst of hope entering my mind. No thought that anything special might be happening even though she's never really needed to call me before.

And then she said, "I'm great. I have your referral." (or something like that - I admit my memory starts to get a little fuzzy at this point)

Although I know that I very calmly (and somewhat strangely) replied "No, you don't," and in some weird alternate realty thought she must be joking - in the moment, that made more sense to me than this being our referral call.

And then it started getting a little crazy.

You see, when we were waiting for Simon's referral, we had a plan. We had agreed on the fact that if one of us got the call, we would immediately track down the other (which wouldn't be difficult because we pretty much compared schedules at the beginning of every day to make sure we would be able to find the other if need be) and we'd both go home to hear the details and open pictures. We were going to be together no matter what. Because we were WAITING!

(And I know this sounds a little weird, given that we only waited about 5 months for Simon's referral. (How crazy is that???) When we started his process, families were getting referrals after 3-4 months, so the extra time was so, so emotional. Lately, many families have been waiting more than 16 months for a referral, so at 15 months, we thought we still had a little while to go....)

We never talked about a referral protocol this time. But as the reality of the call was quickly settling in for me, all I knew was that I needed to get Ryan on the phone and that we probably weren't going to wait to be together for the details. Ryan was running to a class he teaches on Friday afternoons and had a going away party for a colleague after work. It would be hours before we could be together. So this was going to happen... now.

I managed to catch Ryan in transit from his office to the classroom and Sara gave us details while Ryan walked and tried to simultaneously listen and open pictures on his iPhone and I sat at my desk staring at pictures of a little girl with enormous brown eyes.

Amazing.

The call probably only lasted about 15 minutes. Maybe less. Ryan was in a complete rush (I have no idea how he managed to walk into his classroom and hold it together enough to teach) and there was so much to absorb.... we took 30 seconds to agree that we would tell our parents, but no one else until we had time to speak again and actually take everything in. And then he hung up. The silence and loneliness of that moment was eerie....

I couldn't believe that I had to be in my office for about 4 more hours... bursting at the seams to scream and tell everyone the news, but knowing I had to keep things to myself for a little while longer. Oh and maybe trying to get some work done too.

But we survived. The fact that I was in a state of shock for most of the afternoon probably helped. And the champagne we opened when we got home definitely did!

We are still taking it all in. Gearing up for the next wait: the wait for a court date. It could still be 2 months before we are assigned a court date - which could be another month or more after that.

We will travel to Ethiopia for the court date and will have the opportunity to meet our little girl. We may or may not pass court (i.e. be legally named her parents) on that visit. And either way, we will have to return home without her. After we return home, any further hearings or documents required for the courts to approve our adoption and close our case (if any) will happen while we are back home.

Once the court finally does approve our case, we will then wait again, this time for the US Embassy to review our case and provide the paperwork we need to bring her home (maybe another 1-2 months). Then, when we finally have the okay from the Embassy, we can return to Ethiopia to take placement of our little girl.

Bottom line... now we are waiting again.