Treasured

Here's a song we (we being mostly Ray) wrote for our baby:

Treasured

Treasured one, we’re your mom and dad/And you have made us so very glad

You don’t know us yet, but you soon will/A place in our hearts you will fill

When you make family our name

Half a world apart but have no fear/For one day soon we will appear

Then we’ll take you home, you’ll be our very own/Never again will you be alone

And family will be our name

But until then, Jesus will hold you near/Because to him you are so dear

He’s known you from the start/You own a special place in his heart

And that’s why we pray that you’ll know him some day

Treasured one, we hope that you will see/Jesus livin’ in your mom and me

‘Cause our Father above sent him down in love/So we all could be set free

And be a part of his heavenly family

Not flesh of our flesh or even bone of our bone/But God has made you our very own

And until we meet we want you to know/That we love you so

And family is our name; family is our name; family is our name

Our dossier is on it's way!

We got an e-mail from our family coordinator that our dossier left for Ethiopia on Friday!! We were given a FedEx tracking number and were told not to worry if it makes some stops in Europe for long periods of time. HA! While I don't blame it for wanting to vacation in Europe, I hope it doesn't stop for too long! It's got a job to do!

We are officially waiting for our referral now. Woo Hoo!

Not quite finished!

We heard back from our agency on Friday that they reviewed our dossier and found a mistake. My passport wasn't signed, so I had to sign it and make 3 new color copies of it to send back. So, yesterday I headed back to FedEx (we're becomming regulars there) to send out the corrected copies. I guess our dossier will go through the authentication process this week. I was bummed about the hold-up, but Ray reminded me that if there had to be a mistake, we should be thankful it was something so easy to correct!

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.