So, how does it work from here?

Okay.....Okay.... enough of the mushy referral story stuff and time to answer the most common question we are now getting, which is, "When do you actually get to bring her home?"

Well, the good news is that we could have her home in 4 months. The bad news is that we could have her home in 6 months. I'll try and break these scenarios down to see if it makes any sense.

1. Our dossier (a packet of paper that looks innocent enough, yet actually costs hundreds of dollars sprinkled atop with some physical blood, sweat, and tears) is now sitting in some office in ET waiting to be assigned a court date. It seems like they process all of the collected dossiers for court dates once - maybe twice a month.

2. The first court date is for either the family member or the "finder" (person who found the child) to come in just themselves. In our case, they will transport Y's family member from Mekelle down to the capital city of Addis Ababa. This is where in a court of law, they understand that their rights are terminated, that the child will live out of country forever, and that the family/finder's part in the adoption was in ways of ethical practices. This part made Husband and initially nervous thinking that maybe some new info will crop up or the family member will change their mind in court, but our agency basically said it is almost unheard of. Thankfully, they have tried everything to keep the child with the family (...and this is a very good thing), so when we get to this stage, the family member is pretty determined to follow through with the adoption. Also, they have thoroughly investigated the case and local officials have already determined it to be ethical and legit. Statistically speaking, having a family member change their mind in court has only happened in 1/300 of WACAP cases - and was more or less the bio father making the choice to rather have his ill daughter live in an orphanage for the rest of their life :(

Here's the bad news: The first court date has been getting scheduled out for 2-3 months. So for example, on April 10th, folks that had their dossiers sitting in that ET office got news that their first court date was scheduled for June 15th. WACAP told us that if this happens, plan on having our first court date in the first few weeks of July.

Here's the good news: Our WACAP ET representative (Atu Teklo) has been working tirelessly to petition the last wave of folks to get pushed up, so about 1/2 of the last bunch that had their June court dates got moved up to today. That is 1.5 months faster! There is no rhyme or reason as to why some got bumped up and the others did not, but he will try for ours. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that we might get to be there much sooner!

3. After this first court date, ours will be made the same day. This is typically 1-2 weeks afterward (yes - the thought of buying international plane tickets one week in advance does make me have a mini stroke). For our trip, we will first fly north to Mekelle to meet and spend time with "Y", then fly back down to Addis for our court appointment.

4.  After court, we will have officially adopted her, but there is a whole other wave of paperwork that has to be processed through the Embassy. This is typically 2 months. I imagine that the most difficult part of all of this whole experience will be spending time with her, adopting her, then leaving her for 2 months! We have decided that if school is back on, I will fly out a few weeks before the boys to start bonding with her. The boys will then come out a few days before to do a little bonding (and sightseeing with Jaden) before we all come home together. Together as a family of four!

Hopefully this process is now just as clear as mud ice!

Part II: How our referral came to be.

Let's just back up a little before our "almost call" on April 1st. For several months, we had been hearing rumors that there was a 4-5 little girl that they were just finishing up paperwork on. Since we had decided to turn down a referral back in September for a girl this age, we felt pretty certain that we would be turning down this referral for the same reasons.

As we had been feeling discouraged by this soon-to-be referral, we'd found ourselves saying on many occasion, "If only we knew they were getting the paperwork ready for a 2-3 yr old, then we might feel very differently right now." Since I hit the big 4-0, I realized that my baby urges dwindled away with my 30's; however, we still wanted to to adopt as young as possible (yet potty trained, thank you very much!) and felt that this age span would be the makings of some pretty sweet mojo between big brother and little sister.

So now let's jump forward again to April 1st. When our WACAP caseworker made that "almost call",  she told us it would just be a day or two until they had all of her (the 5 yr old) information to share with us.  A week went by, and on March 8th, the phone had still yet to ring. Not surprising at all. We'd lost count of how many times we had walked down this road of empty promises. Along the way, we've become fluent in the dialect of adoption - a few days really means a few months....a few years.

It was on March 8th that I decided that I was going to call WACAP to tell them we were really dropping out. That morning Husband had confessed that he was done with the adoption and just wanted it to stop. He could not go through this one more day. Predicting this might had been how it was going to play out, back on the April 1st, we had granted ourselves a 1 week extension. We were already feeling in our hearts that the figment of this little girl was not meant to come to our family, so why keep the torture going beyond then? Before the end of that work that day on the 8th, I was going to call. I was really going to do it.

I was sitting at my work computer when my phone rang from WACAP. I did not answer it. I couldn't deal with what that call was about at that moment, so I let voice mail pick up. I can still hardly believe that I continued to work and forgot that there was even a message! On my lunch break, I remembered and thought I better listen, and indeed the message indicated that this was "The call!". I then nonchalantly texted husband, which apparently he saw,  but also did not want to acknowledge that it existed. Fast forward through all of this nutty hesitation and I ended up in Husband's office at 4:30 .... almost 6 hours after "The call!".

If I were a fly on the wall, I think it would have been too sad to see what we looked like there at his desk, chairs facing each other, the phone in hand ready to call WACAP - or to not call WACAP. Surely we looked beaten down, depressed, discouraged, anxious, and angry. We felt that it had come to this.... after 6 years, we were going to be presented with a potential daughter and we were going to turn her away and then shut down our adoption dream. We weren't even going to listen to our caseworker's narrative, rather start the conversation as, "Hi WACAP. We are done. Send this girl's referral on to the next."

But instead, it went something like this....

W: Hi T and J. I know that this has been such a long and painful process for you, but I have information on a little girl and I feel that this might be the one for you! Do you want me to share a little about her before I email her information and photo?

Husband and I looked at each other and surprisingly said, "Sure".

W: "Well, we somehow ended up getting the information today for a little girl that just barely turned three years old......"

Needless to say, Husband and I looked at each other stunned as we continued to listen to the details of her story. We then agreed to get her info emailed to us and a few minutes later, we saw her photo for the first time. The photo of our daughter.

Heart. Be. Still.

 She was the cutest little thing you could even imagine! Her eyes looked bright and spunky. In one of her photos she was wearing a little Elmo shirt and cargo pants with sandals that looked several sizes too big.  From the little info that has been presented, she appears to have been well fed and has no apparent illnesses. She has only been living at the orphanage for 5 months and seems to have healthy attachments to people. This is big, big, big!

We read through her report, medical labs, and photos silently. All of my impulses were taunting me to jump up in song and dance, "There's our daughter! Woo-hoo! There she is!" But instead, I looked over toward Husband whose affect was still unwavering, but with maybe a little more seriousness and matter-of-fact. He leaned back in his chair and proceeded to confess his innermost fears that I had yet to hear. He feared what this could do to our family and even our marriage in the future. How life really would be for us from that day forward. He feared that we would have a long and painful road ahead.

Naturally assuming he was talking about our future with bringing this little girl home (that could potentially have challenging behaviors), I swallowed a huge tear and told him that we are 100% in this together, so if he truly felt this way, then we needed to call back and decline the referral.

"Huh?" he said quizzically. "What do you mean turn her down? I was talking about our future without her!" 

So there it is. We continued to look into a few more things that week regarding her medicals and hearing first hand accounts of people who had spent time with her there in Mekelle  - all glowing and promising! On April 14, we sent off our official acceptance documents and broke the news to J and family/friends.  Such a glorious day! We finally started to feel this huge weight on our shoulders begin to lift.

Part I: How our referral came to be.

Since the holidays, we have been telling everyone that would listen that April 1st was the exact date we would be walking away from our adoption. We chose that date because our paperwork was going to expire and we knew that we simply did not have it in us to renew all of those documents for a 4th time. We also just needed a date which would signify the end of our adoption madness. I mean, what type of sane people hold on to a dead dream for SIX years anyhow? Ahem.... that would be us kind of people. And we are not sane.

As that date grew near, our emotions became more intensified. In order to protect our hearts, we manically started thinking of 101 reasons why adoption was no longer the right thing and why we would be okay with moving forward as a family of three. We started making lists of things we could start doing with the house by spending our adoption nest egg.  Hell, we did start to spend that adoption nest egg! I started researching vacation summer rentals on faraway islands.  I was seconds away from reserving our Mexican Christmas extravaganza. I even applied to another graduate program. Yes - we had plans and our new mantra was, "We will be OK. We will be OK".

But speaking for myself,  I was deeply conflicted on the inside. Husband says the same thing, but he is just one of those more stoic manly-man types, so it was harder to tell with him. Like for instance, when his friends would ask him over for a glass of wine cheap beer, I don't think he would end up a puddle of tears on their reclaimed wood kitchen table. But he was feeling it. As a matter of reality and then survival, we no longer wanted to listen to what was really in our hearts, and in truth, we had to shut that out and were almost to a point that we knew we would be OK.

In early March, J asked if we could talk about the adoption. I figured I would seize the moment to tell him that the adoption was over. Actually, my exact words were, "WACAP told us there are no more kids to adopt from Ethiopia, so they told us that we had to be done." (I know - total cop out, but I figured it was easier for him and us if I stated it that way). I immediately tried to sugarcoat the situation by telling him that this summer we could go to LegoLand! He could move into the bigger guest room and I will paint in any color that he wants - even black! In a few years I will take him to Europe to meet his cousins! Maybe even New Zealand to see Sage! Nothing worked. He sobbed for an hour with a cry that could only come from a broken heart. He could not be remedied by material things and all that mattered in his little life was that he got his sister (or brother, which he said he would settle for). In the weeks that followed, he never wanted to talk about it about it, though he did start carrying around his little dark skinned doll again and became obsessed with a Disney TV series about two boys that were adopted. His new neighborhood friend has a sister and he asked if it was Ok if he secretly pretended that she was his sister, too.

The week proceeding "the call" was monumental for a few reasons. March 28th marks the passing of an amazing lady - my Grandma Jensen. This was an extremely difficult time for my family. She was so dear to us all and 100 posts could not give credit to the lady that she was. She was a 96 yr old rockstar. She so badly wanted us to get our little girl. A few weeks before she passed, the three of us joined her for dinner and she told us how concerning it was to her that J ("her boy") would be growing up without a sibling.

On April 1st.... let me repeat. ON APRIL 1st (the very day we were going to stop) we got "the almost call". They told us that our ET representative had all of the information in hand for our referral and that he was just having someone translate one document before he sent it on our WACAP office in Washington.

I am all over the board when it comes to spirituality and the mysterious workings of the universe, but it is a nice thought that Grandma, in all of her take-charge-so-her-family-is-taken-care-of glory, stomped right in to that marvelous room filled with God, Jesus Christ, Ganesha, Buddha, Yu-Huang, and whomever else she could rally, put her fist to the table and said, "Now you listen here. My darlings have waited too long to bring their daughter home, so I want something done about this now!"

Thanks, Grandma. :)

BIG NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After an almost a 6 year wait for an    After an almost 6 year painfully stressful and practically debilitating wait for an adoption referral, we are thrilled to announce that we've accepted a referral for a little girl from Ethiopia!!!!! She just turned 3 yrs. old and is as cute as a button. She has an adorable little dimpled smile, big almond shaped eyes, beautiful golden skin, and soft curls. All of the information we have been receiving indicats that she has a very happy personality and is healthy! She is living in an orphanage in a town called Mekele in the Tigray Region - Northern Ethiopia. We hope to be traveling to Mekele in about 6 - 8 weeks to meet the birth mother and go through the court proceedings for the actual adoption. After that, we will be traveling again (with J)  4-6 weeks later to bring her home. Sorry to keep you all in suspense, but I can't post pictures or share her beautiful name (hint: starts with a "Y") until we officially go through the courts. International adoption is now very regulated (for good reason), so we have made it clear to everyone that we are "trying" to bring her home to our family. Nothing will be certain until we pass court.... and really, until be land on US soil. As I am now bringing this stagnent and depressing blog back to life, I am anxious to start documenting and sharing with you all this soon-to-be wild ride!