The beginning of a journey...

Hey everyone. As most of you know by now, we're in the process of adopting a child from Ethiopia! Sometimes it's hard to keep everyone in the loop, so we had this idea to keep our family and friends up to date on everything adoption-related by creating this blog.

We started this process back in August of 2007. For the past few months we've been gathering what's felt like millions of documents, signatures, and certifications for our dossier. The dossier is the collection of paperwork that will be reviewed in Ethiopia before a child is referred to us. In the end it felt like we had gathered our entire life on paper! Last Wednesday we got the last document back from our state, and I spent an hour and a half making copies of everything. Thursday morning Ray took the originals and 2 copies and sent them by FedEx to our agency. Friday we got confirmation that they received our precious paperwork!

This week our dossier is being taken to the US Dept of State and the Ethiopian Embassy to be certified some more and translated into Amharic, the native language of Ethiopia. Our family coordinator said that process should be done this week, and then our dossier will be sent to Ethiopia!!!! One step closer to our baby!

There is much more to our story -- things that have happened and things yet to happen -- and we'll save that for future blogs. But thewait4you isn't only about our journey to adopt our first child; it's a testimony to God's faithfulness in our lives as we wait for the child that he has made to be our very own.