Happy Holidays

Christmas came and went all too fast! This year we spent Christmas in St. Louis with my family. It was great to spend time with family and friends. It amazes me to see how much my nieces and nephews grow with each visit! Tim (12) is definitely taller than me.

This year we decided to come home before the New Year. This will be our first New Year celebration not in Ecuador or St. Louis. We have been spending this time being very productive. Working on the adoption, reorganizing the house, and we even are attempting to remodel our walking closet (I’ll let you know how that all turns out ;)). I think this was a great way to ensure that we start the New Year out right; unstressed, organized, and reenergized.

This holiday season was bitter sweet for us. I thought a lot about how our child is somewhere out there without their forever family. I took comfort in thinking about how by this time next year we should be celebrating with our little one. I can’t help but to think about what 2010 has in store for us!

At The Mercy of Others

I was hoping that I would be able to post more updates but the whirlwind of life have gotten to me. We finally found out the day before Thanksgiving that our homestudy was approved; that gave us something to be very thankful for. We then got the okay and information to begin our dossier. A dossier is a plethora of documents requested by Ecuador which is a representation of us. Almost every document needs to be notarized and appostilled. A lot of organization is involved and you seem to be at the mercy of others to complete the documents correctly and in a timely manner. Just today I went to pick up police clearance records for Giovanni and me. I luckily looked over the documents before I left the police station and noticed they misspelled Ecuador (probably not a mistake you can just let fly). This is after I wrote a detailed letter of everything that needed to be included in the document, including the correct spelling of Ecuador. So now we will wait until Monday until they can make the corrections and notarize it again. I am hoping that it will not take us too long to complete our dossier; my goal is to have it completed by February. But like I said earlier we are at the mercy of a lot of other people.
What else is going on in our lives: Giovanni got a promotion at work. So proud of him! I am finishing my last semester of my masters program. I will graduate in the spring after I complete the comprehensive exam for my department. Not sure what my plans are after I graduate…continue taking classes to obtain an additional endorsement in Autism, work on a PhD. or just give it a break. It is so hard to plan things like this because our future is in such limbo. Who knows where we will be around that time. I would like to think that we would be close to the end of our journey, but only HE knows what is in store for us.

Welcome

We have decided to start this blog as a means to stay connected with our family and friends around the world. As many of you know, we are in the process of adopting a child from Ecuador. We are about four months into the process and still have a seemingly long way to go. But we are in it for the long haul; knowing that God has great plans for us and will never gives us more than we can handle.
So where in the process are we now? We got word Monday that our social worker has finally finished out home study (she was a couple weeks behind). She has sent the paperwork off the Children’s Home Society & Family Services (CHSFS: The only adoption agency we found that works with Ecuador, located in MN). Now we need to wait until CHSFS looks at our home study and approves it. The next step will be Immigration and the Dossier. I have to say that I am a little nervous about the Dossier. The books I have read give off the image that it is no walk in the park. This week I joined an on-line community of people who have or are adopting from Ecuador and I have to say that the discussions scared me a little. I have to keep telling myself that everyone’s adoption is different and pray that the majority of ours will go smoothly.