Paperwork, blogs, and prayer

We received our dossier packet the day after I blogged last. Since then (Thursday the 6th) I have been working like crazy on all the paperwork. I ordered birth and marriage certificates, found a physician and scheduled physicals, put together a 5 page picture "album", filled out and printed around 15 personal info forms, made copies and sent of many of those to our Social Services agency, and sent off 6 requests for letters of recommendation. So, we are cursing right along. The biggest thing we will be waiting on now is getting some adoption books read and on-line classes done. So far things have been going very smoothly except that Jared’s name was spelled wrong on our marriage certificate. My hope is to have almost all of our paperwork complete by the end of next week. Jared will be home for a few days around Christmas so we are hoping to get at least one book read during this time.

Since we are now “official” AGCI adoptive parents, we have access to an on-line group of other AGCI families. It has been really fun to check out other families’ blogs and see their stories. It is also nice to have such a large support group of people going through the exact same thing at the same time we are. If you get a chance you should check out the new link I posted under our “links” heading called “Another AGCI family’s blog”. This family is selling cute T-shirts to benefit the orphanage that we will be adopting from. Even if you don’t want a shirt their blog is fun to read, and might give a new or better understanding of what we are doing.

We are asking for prayers for a family from our church who is traveling to Ethiopia to pick up their child right now. They will be there for a little over a week to finalize legal stuff and then will return home. Please pray for a safe trip there and back and for the little girl as she connects with her new family. Other prayers that would be appreciated include, prayer for the pregnancy and birth of our little boy if he has not been born yet, and for a safe and healthy first few months of life for him. It is hard to think that we have no control over how he is cared for in the early months, but God does, so please pray for that. Thanks, and we’ll keep you posted on the paperwork process.