Back In

Today we got the call we are officially back in AWAA's Ethiopia program!! Tonight we filled out all the agreement papers and we will fax them in the morning! We are so excited to see who God will add to our family!!! We have been working on our homestudy for the last month, so that is all finished. It will be going off to the State of IL to be approved next week. Last time it took 9 weeks to get it back, we are hoping for less :) Another family just got theirs back after 4 weeks, so hopefully they are faster now. Then we will send our homestudy to USCIS, and they will schedule a fingerprinting appointment for us. As we wait for this we will be collecting the parts of the Dossier that we need to send to Ethiopia.
Everyone asks if this time it will be quicker since we have already adopted once- basically the answer is no. It does seem to be going a little faster since we know what we are doing and where to go to get what paper, but most of the pieces of this journey are out of our hands. There is just a lot of waiting for papers to be approved and then the real wait will come when we wait for a referral. Our goal is to have our Dossier to Ethiopia by Christmas. What a present that would be!
There isn't a day that goes by that Brad and I don't talk about Ethiopia, what we miss, what it was like, who we miss, etc. Since we are adopting older children this time we also talk about what our kids are doing, etc. We pray for them daily, praying they are being taken care and loved on until we can be with them to love on them.
Thanks to everyone that is sharing in our excitement of starting the process again! God is so present in adoption and we are so thankful He is building our family through adoption!!!!