6 months flew by!!

I can hardly believe it but 6 months have flown by since we submitted our Dossier (pronounced Daw-see-ay) to Ethiopia.  Six months since we went on the waitlist for a referral.  For all of you who have no idea what that means, here's the scoop...  Our dossier was a set of paperwork that took us 4 months to put together containing everything from medical letters from doctors, reference letters from friends, financial statements, birth and marriage certificates - and then some - like, a TON of paperwork.

Anyway, we submitted all that paperwork to the United States Embassy for approval and then it is sent on to Ethiopia while we wait for a referral from the agency we work with.   When we submitted our Dossier we submitted a request with our agency for a little girl between the ages of 0-24 months.  Our agency can only handle processing a given amount of children at any given time, so they create a sort of "waitlist" for families, so that we move up the list as other families are matched with waiting children.  It has been so wonderful to follow other families blogs, who are going through this process alongside us and to see them receive referrals, and bring home their sweet blessings.

Every agency is different, in terms of their waiting period (and even some parts of the process).  Our agency, Christian World Adoption, gives us a general idea of how long we should expect to wait for our referral of 6-12 months.  I do think it will be closer to 12 months but I am waiting with great expectation!  When we receive our referral we will get a call from Christian World letting us know they have a referral for us (I really would love for this to happen when Dustin and I are together but I know this is not very practical.  My prayer is that it will happen at a moment that I am able to fully celebrate and experience the joy with Trent and Kate and Dustin)  They will then send us medical information on our daughter and a few pictures of her - I am hoping to ask Dustin to come home a bit early and wait to open that email together as a family so that we can see her for the first time together.  Then we have several months to wait for a court date in Ethiopia when we will travel to the capital, Addis Ababa and appear before a judge to accept Penelope as our daughter.  The hardest part of all will be leaving her there in Addis for 6-8 weeks while all the paperwork is processed by the courts and we are able to receive another date to travel to appear before the Embassy and to bring Penny home...