A Promise is a Promise

I promised you all (my millions of adoring blogger fans) and myself and George that I'd write in this thing daily this week, and a promise is a promise.

I'll have to keep this one short because I am exhausted from this Tuesday that felt like a Monday, getting back to work, being really busy and trying to squeeze in a moment or two to push this adoption journey one tiny step closer to its grand finale.

I did manage today to ask some pretty important and hopefully time saving questions. I asked questions of all 3 entities we are dealing with - Gladney (placement agency), Partners for Adoption (homestudy agency), and Kate @ KBS (the woman we hired to help us complete our foreign dossier, which is the all-important document that will be sent to ET).

I asked them about our employment verification letter. We received from each of them a sample letter of what they wanted to see, and they were all slightly different. So I had to find out if we truly needed to ask our bosses to write 3 letters, or if 1 covering all the bases would suffice. I got an 'almost definite' answer that 1 should be good, as long as all questions are answered. One of the forms even asks them to break it down to yearly, monthly and weekly salary - I'd have thought they could do the math on that one, but I guess not.

I also asked about our medical forms. Same question. I think I got the answer that our physicians need to fill out 2 of the 3 forms. Not quite as simple as the j-o-b but better than all 3, I suppose.

So I've fulilled my promise and reported in, and now I must go to sleep! G'nite!

Catching Up

Our anniversary was this past Tuesday, our 3rd, which is apparently crystal, so my parents & siblings sent us this beautiful vase. Thanks, guys!

I haven't been incredibly diligent about posting here. I'm going to make it a point to post a little something daily this week, because I want to keep up with this and plus it will help keep me on my toes. I'll need to accomplish one thing each day in order to have something to report.

Since I wrote last, we have moved into full speed ahead mode. We have sent off our official application to Gladney with our first part of the fees and a bunch of other paperwork. Now we're working on Round 2 for them.

And we sent off our first set of papers to the woman who will help us prepare our dossier, which is the document that will ultimately go over to Ethiopia, get translated into Amharic (the native language in Addis Adaba, the capital of ET) and then go to court there and hopefully convince a judge that we are fit parents for our baby.

Last but not least, we had our first homestudy appointment/meeting yesterday! We were very nervous and excited but mostly nervous, but it went really really well. Our social worker is great, very sweet and insightful. She made us feel comfortable, even when asking the 'tough' questions. It was about a 2-hour visit and mostly an interview. Often times, it just felt like a conversation that just happened to be focused on us, as a couple, as potential parents, as adoptive parents and just as people in general. I think (hope) we passed that portion. We were both very happy when it was done, and our sweet families called us to check on how it went. So good to have support, as this process can feel very long and lonely sometimes, without those people caring enough to ask. We're very lucky.

Anyway, this week our goals are to get our employers started on the employment letters we need, which will hopefully also serve as proof of insurance for the baby. And we just took our first class on "Conspicuous Families" this afternoon and plan to take at least one more before the weekend (there are 4 total, plus a book and test we have to take). Also, we're going to try to round up and get our reference letters finalized. And we have our LiveScan fingerprinting scheduled with the FBI as well. I'm sure there's more I'm not thinking of, and all of this amidst one of the busiest times for both of us at our jobs.

We love the challenge - and we live for the day we leave for Africa!