About Our Adoption

Amy and I started this blog with the intention of keeping interested parties up to date on our adoption and our life in general.  We, as in many areas of our life, have fallen dreadfully short of our intention.  For this we apologize, but we are going to make an effort to change this pattern and give more regular updates.  I thought I would start with some basics about our family and why we are adopting.  

Amy and I have been married for about ten years.  We have three children (Samuel (7), Georgia (would be 5), and Lucy (3)).  Georgia passed away when she was six months old of a rare heart condition that we did not find out about until she had died.  Obviously this has been very difficult for our family, but ultimately God has carried us through and we continue to trust in Him for our future.

Amy and I have always talked about adoption and after Lucy was born we knew it was our time to pursue it.  We decided on America World Adoption (awaa.org) and we then decided to adopt from Ethiopia.

We submitted our application on October 30, 2007.  Our completed paperwork was shipped to Ethiopia on May 2, 2008.  This date is referred to as our DTE (documents to Ethiopia).  We are now in the process of waiting for a referral.  A referral is when we (the adoptive family) are matched up with an orphan.  We expect a referral in the first couple of months of 2009.  After we receive the referral, we will travel to be united with our new child in about 6-8 weeks.  During this wait, our case will be taken to court where a judge will officially okay our adoption.

Amy and I have requested a child 18 months or younger.  We did not specify whether we preferred a boy or a girl.  It is likely that we will be matched with a boy since there are so many requests for girls in the adoption world.

This is a basic snapshot of where we are as of today.  We will be providing another update before too long, so stay tuned and have a great week!