Update

I don't know if anyone is reading this blog right now, but I am going to post anyway so that someday our children will know how they came to be a part of our family! By the way, the rambling you will read is truly me, and my random thoughts!

I also hope that our experiences will help others in the future. With that being said, let's get going!

In my last post I wondered how the changes in the Ethiopian adoption process will change our timeline. WACAP, our adoption agency, continues to be hopeful that this changes (although they may increase our wait a little bit) will be best for the children of Ethiopia, and will help to decrease (or better yet stop) fraudulent adoptions.

Now that the school year is over my focus has been to get our paperwork done, once and for all. I will admit that we have been taking our time with it, and not giving it the attention that we should be. In my defense, I truly believe that this adoption process is all a part of God's plan for our family. I haven't felt the need to rush. Why rush, and then wait longer?!

Yesterday I made a bunch of photocopies and sent our final paperwork to our local agency, HOPE. The next step there is to have a home visit with our social worker. She'll take a look at our house, make sure it's a safe place and that there is a space for kiddos, and she will ask for our final parameters for our homestudy. After that visit she will begin to write our homestudy document.

Now that we are done with that part of our paperwork the next step SHOULD be to finish up our paperwork for WACAP. Everything is done for them except their required Parenting Resource Plan. It's a biggie, and we are stuck on the questions about parenting older children and all of the developmental and emotional possibilities that come with that (I'll write more about this later).

Did you notice I said SHOULD up there in the last paragraph? Well, let me explain! There has been a lot of talk in Minnesota about a state shutdown starting July 1st because of a budget disagreement in the legislature. At first I thought the only way that this would effect us would be the closing of the state parks because they are considered non-essential.

Today it dawned on me that we need to have a bunch of dossier paperwork verified by the Secretary of State's office. Scott called the SOS office, and sure enough, they are considered non-essential, too. Our options? Not worry about it, and hope the state shutdown doesn't last very long, OR spend the next few days gathering all of those documents and take them down to the SOS office early next week.

We decided not to risk a long shutdown since we cannot be put on the waiting list until all of our paperwork is in Ethiopia. Here's a list of the documents we need to gather, and where we are in the process after today:

• Birth Certificates -- DONE (new copies obtained, $26/each)
• Marriage Certificate -- need to go to the Ramsey County Courthouse on Monday to get one
• Medical Certificates -- Scott will drop his form off at the clinic tomorrow so the Dr. can write it up early next week, Mine was sent to WACAP by mistake and was mailed back to me today
• Police Clearance Reports -- DONE, although she had to include my driving without a license citation from 2006
• Financial Statements -- we are waiting on letters from our employers to finish one line, then we will need to get this notarized.
• 3 different Power of Attorney statements that must be notarized -- DONE

The woman at the Secretary of State's office recommended we get there before 8:30 so we can be one of the first in line, and told us that it will take about 3 hours to have everything verified. Athough I was a little stressed out earlier, this is doable!

My goal was to have all of our part done before we go back to school in the fall, but with this little push from the government, it might be a little sooner than that!

Please keep us in your thoughts as we work to get this done before July 1st! Thanks!
Beth