I'm terribly behind in my life right now.... My list of "to-do's" completely outweighs the amount of time I currently have (I do admit that I have been a little bad at time management lately)... but for good reasons.
But more on that another day...
We have INCREDIBLE News! We were officially DTE (Dossier in Ethiopia) on February 24th!!!! Meaning all of our paperwork was sent to Ethiopia on that day and we are officially on the waitlist.
Yay!!! Lets celebrate for a moment!
Because, really, it has been a long road to get to this point.. We submitted our application to the adoption agency on May 9th last year so our "paper-pregnancy" part of this journey has been exactly 9 months (how appropriate! haha). And not we are officially in the "waiting" stage of this journey....
Speaking of waiting....
When we first submitted the application for adoption the wait times were just raised to 14-18 months.... then, Ethiopia started making changes in how many cases they were reviewing and that started making the wait even longer. Because of these changes our adoption agency just informed us that the current wait times are increasing from 14-18 months to 18-24 months for a male
or female infant or toddler.
So we are estimating about a 2 year wait at this point.
The good news is that the past few months the number of children that have been referred and matched with their forever families has increased. It has gone from 5 referrals in November, 4 in December, to 8 children in January and a wonderful 12 in February! My hope is that it continues to increase and if it does the wait times will start to go back down again.
But we know that the Lord is in complete control of this and that our child is in His hands. We trust that HE is the one guiding this whole process and that His Will will be done. We know that our future and the future of our children are in His hands.
So right now we Celebrate! One month down and 17-23 to go!!!
Stephenie
