Seeing the End

Last week on September 11 we remembered the fellow Americans we lost. But this year we found a tremendous reason to celebrate with the arrival of our friend's adopted daughter who came home from Ethiopia! Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave, sweet girl! It was an incredible event to witness and we were honored to be allowed to see her when she came off the plane in her daddy's arms. What a vision of God... "a Father to the fatherless."

Seeing the end of the process puts things into perspective and renews our passion for adoption in the midst of paperwork.

We checked more things off our list recently and I haven't written about them -- adoption training courses. We're required to take 2 online courses, totalling about 10 hours of training. Our agency also shipped us a huge file of about 55 articles that they required us to read. Some of the courses and articles would scare anyone with casual interest in adoption. Titles such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, Hepatitis and Other Communicable Diseases, and You're Not My Real Mother, are tough to swallow. The learning is helpful and I'm grateful for it. It gives us more to pray for and more to be prepared for on this adventure. But it does not scare us away! This is the path God has us on and we'll follow Him to the end.

This week we'll put paperwork on hold as we celebrate C's 6th birthday. We'll celebrate at home on his big day and he'll have a party with 8 boys from school and church on Saturday out at a local indoor playpark. We also have his school carnival/fundraiser on Friday night. So, we're a little swamped this week!

Next week we'll send our passports off for renewal and we'll order the final birth certificates and marriage certificates. Once we're done with those things, we won't be done with the dossier per se, but the things we'll be waiting for will be out of our control, so we'll just wait until everything slowly comes in.

One way you could pray for us this week is that our home study social worker would receive Jay's police clearances from the State of Florida. She is also still waiting for our FBI clearances to arrive and she mentioned that those have been backed up for quite some time. So, we'd like to see those come in this week so that the home study can be officially behind us and added to our dossier.

Thanks for checking in and have a great week!