Holding out

The struggle with a public blog is that when you want "everyone" to know something, you post it on the blog and then the people who thought they should know first get offended. I know, I'd be offended too. However, the intent of the blog is to keep everyone up-to-date, while making my life a little easier. I love you all, and would love to share my excitement first hand with each of you. Thanks for understanding that this blog helps me to get my own thoughts and feelings about the adoption down for my family and me to reflect on later. In addition, the blog is for my children's record and a method of communication to all of you who want to join us on our journey. If you read something here first, it's not because we didn't think you were important enough to tell first. This is our best method of communication.

Our Ethiopian adoption was fast, very fast, in comparison to other international adoptions we have heard of. Currently the Ethiopia program expects a wait of 12-18 months from completion of paperwork to referral. In non-adoption speak... from the time you turn in all the required paperwork until you are "matched" with a child, about 12-18 months will pass. Add onto that the weeks or months required to prepare the paperwork and then the weeks or months required to wait for more "legal stuff" before you ever get to travel and actually meet your child. With our Ethiopian adoption we waited 6 weeks. For Ethiopia, for the agency we used, 6 months would have been fast, but we waited not months, but weeks. We began our wait for our Ethiopian adoption on 4/22/08. I looked this morning and there is a family waiting for a 3 year old who started waiting on 5/22/08, and they still are without a referral. So why did we get our match so quickly? The only answer I have, God. If you have another idea, I'd be open to hearing it... I just don't think anyone has a more accurate answer than that.

So, I tell you all of that, to tell you this. Our Ghana adoption is going even faster! If you want to stay up-to-date on the adoption, you'll have to visit this blog frequently :-)

In my effort to respect the process, I am holding out on some information we have. I am not ready to post as many of the details as I have in hand, because we are hoping to see more of this in stone in a few days. Come back soon.