Dossier Date 4.28.2008

Our consultant, Chandra, contacted us on Friday to tell us that our dossier had safely made the trip from Detroit to DC, by way of the Ethiopian Embassy, back to GR and will be on its way to Addis on Monday! Thus, making our dossier date 4.28.2008. This date then marks the beginning of the next wait, which is a referral. We are last on the list....but at least we made it to the list!

In an ironic twist, we met Karen and Patrick soon after receiving our pictures of Mikias. They are in Ethiopia meeting their daughter right now....just as our packet arrives!

I have tried to talk with Mikias about bringing another child to the US from his home country. I explain that he will have a brother or a sister to play with. So far, his only response is "apple". (Sorry, Gwyneth, we will not be following your lead...)

Out of our hands

Well, our dossier documents are now out of our hands and on their way to Washington DC for authentication at the US State Dept and Ethiopian Embassy. I mailed everything out this morning. It's a little nerve-wrecking putting all those documents in an envelope. I can't help thinking how much it would absolutely suck if they were lost in the mail. Of course there is some consolation knowing that we've done this once before and everything worked out just fine. Actually, I have to admit that it was pretty easy getting all this in order because we had done it before. In all, we had 21 documents that we collected, had notarized, and then had authenticated. Check out the picture...pretty impressive. I wish we would have taken a picture like this the first time around. This was my second chance so I couldn't pass it up.

Hopefully, at this time next week the completed dossier will be back in our agency's possession and will soon be off to Ethiopia! Then the wait begins. It's strange how it seems like everything is moving so fast this time around but in reality the process is slower. It must be because Mikias is distracting us from obsessing over this adoption.

This afternoon the three of us headed to the Earth Day Expo at Oakland University. It was pretty cool. Joanna and I have been there the past few years and really enjoy it. Mikias' favorite part was definitely the African dancers that performed. He was totally entranced for about 20 minutes.

Serious Motorboat

A video from a couple weeks ago...I had to post it

In other news: Joanna and I are close to sending our completed dossier off to Washington DC. Tomorrow I'm going to the Office of the Great Seal (not to Lansing this time) to get all of our documents authenticated. Now they do document authentication at some Secretary of State offices and luckily there's one two miles from my work that offers the service. For Mikias' adoption I drove (twice) to Lansing to get this done. Anyway, if everything goes well our dossier will be in the mail on Saturday.

Other than that...just enjoying the nice warm weather and looking forward to the weekend.

Spring Break and The Golden Ticket

This past week I did not have school as it was spring break. Of all the "spring breaks" I have had, this was one of the best. I had solid days just Mikias and I.
We took advantage of the great weather and I was reminded of how much Mikias loves the outdoors. Good times!

On Wednesday, we received our I-171H for the second adoption. This is known as the golden ticket in the adoption world. It does not get us a trip to a Chocolate Factory. In fact, it is a stamp of approval that says the US gov't feels we are able to "furnish proper care to an orphan as defined by section 101(b)(1)(F) of the immigration and nationality act". I feel so much better knowing that we have this declaration. We needed this same paper for Mikias...so I am guessing this time was just a double check. :)

What this does allow us to do is move forward with the second adoption. I am excited. We are taking the next couple of days to finalize our dossier and off it goes. At that point, our hands are off and we will be back to waiting for a referral. WOW!

Hard to believe it's been a year

This past Friday was the one year anniversary of the day we opened our referral and saw the first pictures of our little boy. What a year it has been! It's amazing how much he's grown and it's hard to imagine what it was like before he was in our lives.