The peace and stillness of nightime hours allows me opportunities to reflect upon how wonderfully blessed we truly are. I am filled with a sense of amazement and wonder of the miracle of parenthood, of how truly special it is to receive this responsibility of nurturing our children and assisting them to develop into the adults they will become.
We've begun talking with C and telling him that he will be a big brother. I've enjoyed seeing him look at me, make a rocking motion with his hands, and say "baby." We're very fortunate that C was the oldest child at his care center in VN. While at the care center, he lived with six infants & was indeed their "big brother." He was a great help to the nannies (within the scope a 2 year old can provide) and will be a great help to Ba and Mum-Mum.
Since the last post, we've continued to move along the paper trail. Our home study (hs) was completed on the 8th. We enjoyed meeting S., the SW from our agency and were quite happy to learn that our hs would be completed in one visit. She's now working on writing the report and hopefully we'll have an initial draft by the end of next week. After the hs is finalized, our file will be reviewed to receive "agency approval." Another big step!!!
Kudos to our agency (especially JW & JB) for their willingness to answer the many questions I have and always doing so in a warm, caring, and timely manner!
We're also moving right along with collecting our documents for the dossier. It's been a tremendous stress reliever to have decided to use KBS Dossiers to help prepare our ET dossier. K has been great to work with and is very timely in sending updates. Currently, we only have a few outstanding items (once K receives the forms I mailed to her today):
- FBI results (which can take up to 6 wks to receive)
- Homestudy documents (see above)
- CIS approval (see below)
Speaking of CIS, we receive our appointments today in the mail. We're scheduled for June 24th! Yay, that's 10 days from now. It will probably take around 3 months to receive our approval but once K receives our last few items, the dossier will be reviewed by JB at the agency. Afterwards, our dossier documents will be certified and authenticated. After authentication, the dossier will be translated and sent to ET (we'll officially be DTE - "dossier to Ethiopia"). That will place us on the wait list for a referral!
As I've said before, each day (and small step of achievement) brings us one step closer to being united with our daughter!
