Bummer

BUMMER

We found out yesterday that we won't be traveling in June.

All of the travel groups are full for the June Embassy dates.

We don't understand all of the hows and whys;

However, we do understand that...

God's timing is always perfect and

Andinet is protected in His hands.

We will continue to...

engage in the spiritual battle for this little boy,

prepare our hearts and home for a new family member,

put our hope and trust in the One who has ordained

and written our days before one of them has

come to be,

shrink the miles between us by letting our love grow.

What's another month, right? We will keep ourselves occupied while we wait and continue to expect him home by his July birthday.

Moving on Up

Goodbye main floor, comfortable, queen sized companion...

One of the transitions being made in adding a member to our family is that we are all moving our bedrooms onto the upper level of our home--and that's what we did this week. Moving upstairs just as the hot summer days begin!--Everyone may need a mister fan next to their bed by July.

Our new digs are in the loft room just at the top of the stairs. From our bed, we can see both of our kids' doors. We want to be close by for any night-time needs--especially in the crucial first months of adjustment. Hopefully the air compressor is not a permanent fixture at the foot of our bed.

We began re-doing the kids' rooms upstairs in March. You can read about Josiah Andinet's room remodel here. Unfortunately, we had redone Julianna's downstairs bedroom just prior to being matched with Andinet. Oh well, all of the redoing just made it's way up stairs.

Julianna's make over was a lot of fun for me--if there has ever been a girl more in love with powder pink and floofy flowers I would be laying down with my legs elevated in shock.
She loves pink and floofy and so I did my best at pink and floofy (spell check will not like this word, I'm sure).

It is amazing what $15 of bubblegum colored paint can do. Actually, I had enough paint left over from the re-do downstairs- so this part was effectively free. Much thanks to The Light Giving Thrift Shop, Salvation Army, Goodwill, Hobby Lobby, and my late grandmother who painted the picture above the bed. If the bedspread or curtains look familiar to something you dropped off at a local thrift shop-- thank you too. Micah, once again, was the plaster and trim man on the job, thanks Babe!

"My people will live in peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes,

in undisturbed places of rest." Is 32:18

Our Immigration Story

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services....

Oh we loathe you and love you.

All internationally adopting families in the United States have to apply for an immigration visa to bring their new child home. This has been the most wearisom process for us in the entire adoption.

Here is the protocol:

I-600 (application petition to bring home an orphan)

Fingerprinting invitation/background check

I-171H (approval of immigration visa)

This approval has to be in Ethiopia in order to be assigned an Embassy date, a.k.a TRAVEL DATES!!!!

The procedure began for us in the first days of February this year. We sent in our I-600 application to the immigration center in Texas. The instructions stated that we could send in our application prior to the completion of our homestudy. Post homestudy completion, a copy of the final study should also be sent to the center in Texas. So...that's what we did. Our application and our homestudy were confirmed to be in Texas as of February 4th.

We were pleasantly ignorant for a month just waiting for an invitation to be fingerprinted. Our bliss was interupted when on March 12th we received a letter stating that the office in Des Moines had our application but was missing our home study....WHAT??? We should have our fingerprinting invitation by now and your just telling us that you are missing a document?

The letter gives an email address to contact if you have any questions. I email my concern and then I waited some more. A few days and 2 unreturned emails later, I call the national hotline. The helpful people there kindly direct us to the email address I have been unsuccessfully tapping for the past 3 days. SIX days later we receive an email stating that they don't know where our home study is but it is not in the Des Moines office where it needs to be in order to receive an invitation to be fingerprinted. We secede to the black hole between Texas and Iowa and send another notarized, original copy of our homestudy to Des Moines--- which they received on March 29th. So this has put us about a month behind. The staff in Des Moines did say at that point that they would request us to have the first available fingerprinting appointment....ok some good news. However,this happened not to be until May 7th. By this point, we have passed court in Ethiopia but we have not been so successful with our own governments' paperwork trail.

Well, we realized that there is nothing we can do but trust in the God who has leveled every other mountain standing in our way during this journey.

We went for fingerprinting last Friday. The lady there said it would take at least 20 days to be processed. This actually made us feel pretty good considering the length of waiting we had already done. I then started looking at other family's blogs and saw that most of them had waited at least a couple of months before they got their approval after fingerprinting. We also received an email from our agency saying...We haven't received your I-171H approval form yet. You can't be assigned travel dates without this. Let us know as soon as you receive the form. Ok, panic started to creep in a little.

Micah and I started to pray for a miracle. After all, why would the God who has completely laid the path for us in every other aspect of us becoming a father to the fatherless forget us now?

"Does he who implanted the ear not hear? Does he who formed the eye not see?" Psalm 94:9

Micah shot another email to Des Moines at about 10 o'clock last night telling our case worker about our situation and politely inquired if there was any possible way to expedite this process. This was the response that we received this very morning:

"Your I-600A was approved today,

and the I-171H approval notice was mailed to your home address."

FIVE BUSINESS DAYS LATER WE HAVE BEEN APPROVED.

Why do we waste even an iota of time or energy into worrying when all we have to do is call on our loving and abundantly gracious God?

We now ask that God's hand would move this approval to Ethiopia quickly so that we can be assigned travel dates.

I am thinking God wants this little boy in our family fast--maybe even more than we do.

Fingerprint Models

Well we finally made it to our fingerprinting appointment at the Department of Homeland Security... "Securing America's Promise" ---I really like their motto.

On the way into the center there is a sign on the door telling us to leave our cell phones and cameras in our car. We take a couple quick snapshots....

Micah grabs our camera, both cell phones and runs back to the car...running because if you are not on time for your appointment (the one we have been waiting for since February) your application will be considered "abandoned." As I walk back into the breezeway of the building, I see that the sign also says to leave your multi-tools, knives, and box cutters in your car. I remembered that I had a multi-tool in my purse and so I hand it to an out-of-breath Micah as he opens the door, rolls his eyes and starts running back to the car to ditch it. As he is running away, I remember a small pocket knife I also have in the bottom of my purse. I open the door, yell at Micah, he turns around, I hold the knife in the air to show him the extra part of my ridiculous weapon store and I toss it to him from across the parking lot.

Well, after all of this, I did surprisingly make it through security and we were still on time for our appointment. The lady who took our fingerprints told us that both Micah and I could be poster models for fingerprints. I guess that's good, or maybe it means we don't wash our hands enough. Either way, our prints should fly through. She also told us that if things go right, we should have our approval in about 20 days. This was thrilling to hear. We have been waiting so long for every part of this immigration process and a delay on these papers would be the only real possible hold up to us traveling.

We are still waiting to hear our dates for travel but have been told that we may not be issued dates until just two weeks before we need to hit the road! We are preparing for early June.

God continues to shower blessings and level the mountains that have stood before us.

Beauty for Ashes

"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me...He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted... to give them beauty for ashes...that He might be glorified." --Isaiah 61:1-3

I have heard that:

"Adoption is born of loss and sacrifice."

This Mother's Day I have thought a lot about that statement. In every miracle of adoption someone has suffered loss. It can look different in each circumstance---sometimes it looks like the birth parents surrendering their heart so that their child will have a better opportunity. Sometimes it looks like the child experiencing cold abandonment. Sometimes it looks like the adoptive family experiencing loss by walking through infertility.

Ashes
I have thought a lot about the birth mother of our son and what her Mother's Day may look like when her country celebrates it this fall. I have thought a lot about all that our son has had to grieve in his short life.

Ashes

I have thought a lot about how Jesus came to bind up brokenhearts and how one day there will be no more sorrow or pain or separation.

Beauty

"In adoption the fearful become beloved, the scorned become adored, the nameless become cherished, the lonely become the laughing, and death becomes life abundant."--Hasenbalg

Beauty