Still no news!

Well I was hoping and praying that the next time I post I would have some exciting news. We are still waiting for a referral and are trying to be patient. I would've never guessed that we would get into June and still not have a picture of our baby but as we learned thru our first adoption it is entirely out of our hands. We will just keep praying that it all works out in God's timing!

On to other news, we are officially on summer break and the kids are loving it! Joshua graduated from Kindergarten and felt very important in his graduation cap. :) Allison will be entering Junior High in the fall which is hard for me to believe and Caleb will be in 4th grade. We have been able to go swimming and boating this week and really enjoyed the time in the sunshine.

The next two weeks will be full with Bible Memory Camp, volleyball camp and then we have vacation bible school the last week in June.

Who knows maybe one of these days when I am least expecting it we will get the call!!! :)

Happy Mother's Day!

I feel truly blessed to have the opportunity to be a mother to the children God has given us. Was thinking a referral on Friday would be a great Mother's day gift but who knows maybe we will get it tomorrow. :) Wishing all mothers a very Happy Mother's Day!

Surgery and the Flu

Well the past 12 days have been interesting in this household. It started out with me having surgery that requires me to lay low and take it easy for 6 weeks. Any mom with children knows that is pretty hard to do. While I was still in the hospital Caleb started with the stomach flu. Over the next week it passed from one Wengerd to the next until it ended with me. After two days flat on my back I am very thankful to be up and feeling better today.

As for adoption news, there is none. :( I keep hoping and praying we get the call and try to keep myself occupied until we do. I did call our agency last week and after talking to them am pretty certain that we should get our referral sometime in May. I am praying that my next post will be that we received good news!

Another week

Well it is the start of another week and still no phone call. The end of the month is coming quickly and I keep hoping and praying we get our referral . Ethiopia has now passed a law stating that adoptive parents must travel to Ethiopia and be present for the court date which was not required before. Any case with a court date after May 8th will have to abide by this new requirement. We are praying that by some miracle we will get our referral and court date before that. The expense of two trips to Ethiopia is staggering but the thought of holding our baby in our arms than having to leave without bringing him with us is heartbreaking.

We were able to get re-fingerprinted last week and are now just waiting for the updated I-171H. We are so close to the end but at the same time it seems so far away. We continue to pray that God would wrap His arms around our baby and keep him safe till we can bring him home.

Could this be the week?

Well ,we are now in the second full week of April and everyday I wake up wondering if we will get the call. I find myself running to check the caller ID every time the phone rings, praying it will say Adoption Advocates. Patience is definitely something I have to work on right now and it seems to get harder every day that passes. I have found the best thing for me to do is to stay busy and focus my attention on other things, which isn't hard when you have four kids. :) Since the wait has gotten longer than we anticipated we discovered our fingerprints are going to expire in May. We applied to the USCIS to be re-fingerprinted and got an appointment to go on Monday. It will be nice to have that done and know that our paperwork is all in order.

The Wait

Welcome to our journey to Ethiopia! Doran and I felt the call to adopt again in the fall of 2008. Since the adoption agency we used to adopt our daughter Mya didn't have an Ethiopian program we started researching other agencies. After some time we felt as if Adoption Advocates International was the agency for us. We mailed our application to AAI in November and started the paperwork. After six months of filling out forms, background checks, fingerprinting and a homestudy we were ready to send in our dossier. Our dossier was sent to Ethiopia May 12, 2009 which officially put us on the waitlist for an infant. The adoption process takes lots of time and patience but as we experienced in our first adoption it is so worth it! We feel so blessed to be on this journey and cannot wait to hold our baby in our arms.