Her

(A rare post from Paige, which she wrote before realizing I had just posted the update in the previous post.)

I dream about and long for the day when we will see “her” for the very first time. More than that I long for the day she will be in our arms and in our lives forever. Until then we wait, and wait, and wait some more.

Where are we in all of this? I am asked almost daily how the adoption is going and when will we have our child. I don’t have answers really for either. Our adoption is “going”, and we have no idea when we will have “Someday Sister” in our home. I tell the kids, and anyone else inquiring, that we hope to have her home for Christmas. We hope and pray it will be before Christmas. If it happens before them I will be thrilled. If its late fall hopefully, I won’t be too disappointed.

The journey so far has been paperwork piles, and now waiting. We have been officially waiting for4 ½ months. The wait with our agency is typically 5-6 months (stretching into 7). So, our time could be coming soon, or it could be three more months yet. Ugh! Anyway, we wait. We wait for our referral. A referral is a picture of our child and a brief write up about anything that may be known about her. At that time we accept or decline (that would NEVER happen) our referral and the process moves forward to a court date.

This is the part we are very disappointed about. Ethiopia has just changed its adoption laws. Just, as in a few weeks ago, and they go into effect on May 9. No one is “grandfathered in”. We all must now follow new policy. The new policy that has us disappointed is that now we are required to travel to Ethiopia TWICE. That means two times leaving our brood in the care of another, two times Jason taking off work (using up those precious vacation days), two times the cost of airline tickets and hotel stays, two times crossing the ocean to see her. Don’t get me wrong we would cross the ocean a dozen times if that’s what it took, but at $1500-$1800 a plan ticket, it is a rather costly change in laws. When we appear in Ethiopia the first time for court, she will become legally our daughter, and we will have to leave her behind and return home. Not sure how Jason is going to get me back on that plane, leaving OUR daughter in an orphanage, in a third world country. We won’t be able to bring her home for weeks or maybe months (please NO!) later when her Visa is ready and we return for our Embassy appointment.

So the road to “her” just got a bit more tangled, more costly and longer. We do not know who “she” is at this point, but she is daily in our prayers, and we are longing to have her home. We don’t have a name for her yet. The kids still call her “Someday Sister” and refer to her when they are playing, clapping syllables of family members names (they learned to do that at preschool), in drawings, and in their prayers. Hopefully by the time our referral comes we will have agreed upon a name and we can begin to call her by name, rather than “Someday Sister.” Until then, she is a dream that we long for.