Thursday, July 1, 2010

Hi Debbie

Oops, I forgot to say hi to Debbie who faithfully checks the blog every week even when there are no new postings. HAPPY CANADA DAY EH!

Fingerprint date- finally

Well, it has been a while. Where does the time go? I have been spending most of my time outside with Ainsley and my gardens and fixing the damage that the hail did this time!
After some confusion and much investigation we have finally received our date to be fingerprinted for our Application for Advanced Processing for Orphan Petition with USCIS (US Immigration). Our date is in late July. We are very excited to again be able to do something other than just waiting! We will then soon start our dossier paperwork which is all the requirements for Ethiopia. They recently layed off 10 international adoption workers at our agency. I guess a sign of the times.
Both Jim and I watched a webinar presentation on our travel to Ethiopia. It was full of many interesting insights and topics of the Ethiopian culture. One of the things I found fascinating was that the Ethiopian clock starts at dawn which is called 12:00 and midday is referred to as 6:00. There are also three calendars still used, the Coptic which has 13 months and it is the year 2003, the Gregorian which is the same as North America, and the Julian calendar which is used by Orthodox Christians and has only 13 days difference than the Gregorian. I guess it could get kinda confusing if you are not used to it.
Ainsley is still doing well with the whole process. Every so often she asked how much longer it will be until her sister comes to live with us but she usually just tells everyone that it is going to be a while until she is here, or, as Ainsley puts it, "this is taking forever." It also takes "forever" to get to Target so it is all relative to a five year old. She really wants her sister to have a name though. I think that is the one thing that really bothers her. She wants to be able to call her sister by her name!
We are heading up to T Bay on Sunday for a week.
HAPPY CANADA DAY and Happy 4th of July to all!