Big News!!

Well, as you may have gathered by the title of this blog, we have some exciting news! We have decided to adopt a baby girl from Ethiopia. We have spent much of the last year thinking about this and researching all of our options, and in the end, we know our family is not yet complete. We are very excited and very nervous (in a good way!).

I'm sure you might have questions, so please feel free to ask away. In the meantime, I will try to answer some things that I'm sure people might be wondering about.

Why adopt? There are a few reasons that we have decided to adopt-some of them more selfish than others. We wanted to make a change in the world. We realize that adopting a child from Africa will not change the world, but as the saying goes, it will change the world for that child. Chad and I have always felt called to do something with foster care or adoption, we just weren't sure what. We'd always planned that we would become foster parents when our kids are a little older. But then some wonderful friends of ours, the Taylors, stepped out in faith and adopted the most beautiful little girl from Ethiopia last year. Seeing their family has been such an inspiration, and a real sign to us that we should do this now. We also really feel that our family is missing a daughter (Jana especially), and with this addition, our family will be complete!

Why Africa? We didn't necessarily start out with the intent to adopt from Africa. We were open. We looked into domestic private adoption, but didn't feel like that was a good fit since we wanted a girl and already have kids and are able to have more. We also feel like there is not a huge need for domestic adoptive parents, like there is internationally. We looked into foster-adopting, which is foster parenting a child with the intent/hope of adopting them. We didn't feel like that was a good fit because there is a strong possibility of the child being reunited with their birth family or relatives. I didn't want to have that kind of uncertainty for the boys, wondering if the baby would really be their sibling. And finally, we looked into adopting from literally every country that is open to international adoption (no exaggeration!). However, once we started to hear of the orphan crisis in Africa, we knew that is where we were being called to go. There are roughly 147 million orphans worldwide, and close to 50 million of them are in Africa alone. When we watched videos and saw pictures of the orphans there, we felt convicted. The need there is staggering.

Why Ethiopia? We didn't start out with the intent to adopt from Ethiopia. In fact, it is one of the countries we eliminated from contention right away due to some new travel requirements. Once we narrowed things down to Africa, we looked at the Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. We also had a brief dalliance with Thailand. Initially, we were very excited about doing an independent (cheaper) adoption in Rwanda. There were a great many things we liked about that idea. Then we learned that the country's adoptions are at a standstill, so we ruled them out (and just this week they actually stopped accepting new dossiers, so we definitely had God looking out for us and leading us the way we are supposed to be going). We looked at the Congo, and very seriously considered it. It is a very new country to international adoption, though, and still pretty unstable due to a long and violent civil war. I think the need there may be greater than almost anywhere else, but we didn't feel up to the risks there. Uganda posed similar problems. Thailand was appealing because we've been there and absolutely fell in love with the country, people, and culture. But the need there is not great. It is a more prosperous country, so there are some domestic adoptions there, and the timeline there was 2-3 years to complete an adoption. We are hoping not to have our adoption take that long, of course, and the kids there are typically 2 or older by the time they come home, while we are hoping for an infant.

So, as we ruled country after country out for one reason or another, I was getting a little (read: lot) worried that none of them would ever feel right. And just as that happened, I found an agency completely by accident, that only works in Ethiopia. I fell in love with them, and the things they are trying to do there, so we began to rethink things. We had briefly considered Ethiopia, but they just changed their requirements and you must take two trips there now, which adds expense. I had ruled them out due to that, but over the months we researched, I kept noticing how stable adoptions there seemed compared to other African countries. The children also seem extremely well-cared for and loved while they wait, relatively healthy, and there is a huge need there (more to come on that in a future post). After much analysis, several pros and cons lists, and some serious prayer, we decided our daughter is in Ethiopia!

What's the process like? We are by no means experts, seeing as we just started, but here it is roughly...

We applied with our agency, Arise for Children, on Monday, August 23rd. Thanks to some wonderful friends and family willing to write reference letters quickly, we were officially approved on Friday, August 27th!! Our next step is to have a homestudy done (a social worker will meet with us a few times, visit our house, learn all about us, and make sure we are fit to adopt), and put together our dossier (a bunch of papers like birth certificates, medical checks, background checks, proof of life insurance and health insurance, even pictures of us and our house). We also have to send in a very expensive form to the US government, asking for permission to bring an orphan into the country. Then it gets sent to Ethiopia. That part will take 3-4 months, hopefully. We are hoping to have our dossier there by the end of the year, but much of that will be out of our control as we wait for forms and documents. Once our dossier is done, we will be on the waiting list for a baby! Then the hard part...waiting. Our agency is very small and has a short waitlist, so they have given us an estimate of 2-6 months for a referral (that's when we are given the details of a baby available and asked if we accept her). So far they haven't had a family take longer than 4 months to get a referral, but I am telling myself 6 so I don't go crazy earlier than that ;) A few months after we get our referral, we will take our first trip to Ethiopia for our court date. When we pass court, the baby will officially be ours! We will then have to go home for 6-8 weeks without her, while we wait for the US Embassy there to get her paperwork in order. When it's ready, we (probably just Jana) will go back and bring her home forever! We are thinking that realistically, we could be a family of five by Christmas 2011, maybe sooner if we are extremely lucky. Whenever it is and however long it takes, we know it will all be worth it. Whew...I'm exhausted after writing that down! Of course, neither international adoption nor Africa work exactly as we are used to here. There is a 2 month court closure there for the rainy season, so that could delay our court date. Tons of different things can, and probably will, derail us at some point in this journey.

We are not typically "step out in faith" kind of people. We are planners, and some people might claim that I (Jana) am a control freak (shocking, I know!). Probably the biggest concern for us is how we are going to pay for this. If you know anything about international adoption, you know it's not inexpensive. We have some fundraisers planned, which I will go into more detail about soon. But in the meantime, please keep us in your thoughts and prayers. Also, if you don't mind, would you follow this blog by clicking on the "Follow" button to the right? I will be much more likely to update regularly if I feel like people are actually reading! We are so excited to share this journey with you!