Our First Posting

We have finally started a blog to keep our families and friends up to date on our adoption process. For those of you who don't know, we are hoping to adopt a 1-4 year old little girl from Ethiopia.
So here are the details so far. In the summer of 2009 we began interviewing potential adoption agencies and after a few discouraging meetings we found the agency that seems like a perfect match. The name of the agency is Children's Home Society and Family Services.
Our application was submitted in early November and we then participated in a two day adoption preparation seminar in December.
After Christmas we then started working on our "Self Study" which is a 10-12 page essay on your childhood and life to date as well as answering questions about your marriage and spouse and what you expect out of the adoption process. Having completed that we had a three hour meeting this morning with our social worker which begins the next phase, the Home Study. The meeting went well and we really like Mary (the social worker). She is a very down to earth no nonsense kind of person and has been doing this for a very long time.
I will give you a brief synapses of what the process is after the Home Study. Once the home study is complete we will begin to prepare our dossier to the Ethiopian Court. It is at this point that we are placed on the waiting list for a child referral. That is the next step, referral. After that we submit the referral to the University of Minnesota International Adoption Clinic for evaluation and then we wait to travel to Ethiopia. This whole process can take anywhere from 1-2 years.
I will try to blog as often as I can although for parts of this process there is not a whole lot to report on.
We are all getting excited as it finally feels like we are progressing. Ainsley is very excited and she has informed us that she would like a little sister so that she can be a big sister. She has also started to inventory her toys so she can figure out what she needs to share with her new sister. She asked us the other day if her sister is living where the earth shakes and is that why her family can't look after her. It is a very strange feeling knowing that your child that will come to live with you forever is already living and breathing in another part of the world and you don't know her yet or she you.
Feel free to pass this link on to whoever I may have missed and please apologize to anyone I may have missed. We lost a lot of email addresses the multiple time that my computer had crashed.
We will keep in touch,
Bonnie, Jim and Ainsley