New Agency

Well we have decided to go through a different agency for our adoption. This will in no way stall our progress so far. We only changed our placement agency and since we haven't gotten our home study completely finished we are still on the same timeline as before. We have also decided to request for two children, siblings, a boy and a girl, 0-6 months old, in other words twins. We feel this is way that God wants us to go. This is the only new news we have right now, as soon as something else happens I will let you know.

Some reasons why we chose Ethiopia

-1 in 10 children die before their 1st birthday

- 1 in 6 children die before their 5th birthday

- 44% of children in Ethiopia is under fifteen

-60% of children in Ethiopia are stunted due to malnutrition

-The median age in Ethiopia is 18 years

-1.5 million people are infected with AIDS (6th highest in the world)

-720,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS alone

-Per capita, Ethiopia receives less aid than any country in Africa

-Half of the children in Ethiopia will never attend school, 88% will never attend secondary school

-Ethiopia has approximately 4.3 million orphans and the country is twice the size of Texas

-Ethiopia's doctor to child ratio is 1 to 24,000

I got these specific statistics from another blog, but Matt and I learned of them when we were researching countries. We are not adopting a child from Ethiopia to save them, but we did choose Ethiopia partly because of the above mentioned.

Home Study Update

Well we had what sounds like our last Home Study meeting last night. We also got to meet our new social worker Mike, who is great. We are not by any means done with our actual Home Study, we still have a lot of paperwork to do. We are going to be getting some questions from Mike that we need to answer in regards to our marriage and then he will start typing it up, atleast that's what it sounded like to me last night at our meeting. Connie, our original social worker, is retiring on April 24th so she wants to be able to show Mike how to type it up and all that good stuff that the social workers have to do. So we are one step closer to turning in our Dossier!!

we have another home study meeting

I just found out we have our 2nd home study meeting on Tuesday April 7th. YEAH!!! Prayers that everything goes well. We will be having at our house again, so my weekend will consist in cleaning and more cleaning. Atleast this time they will not be walking around our house. So I only have to clean what they will see, which won't be that bad. The only hard thing is keeping things cleaned with two black dirty dogs and white carpet and tile. It is worth all the scrubbing and vacuuming though.

1st Home Study Meeting

We had our first home study meeting a couple of weeks ago and it went great. Much better than we anticipated actually. We didn't think it was going to go badly, we were just nervous about the whole thing. It is a little unnerving to have someone come to your home and to know that the future of your family is in their hands. It ended up that Connie, our for now social worker-she is retiring in about 20 days, was great.

For those of you that don't know what a home study pertains here is a little explanation. A home study is to a series of meetings and paperwork to be approved to adopt a child. In Illinois we also must be a licensed foster home. The meeting we had the other night was to start this paperwork. The home study makes you think about things that you might not have even considered about life with an adopted child From the sounds of there are around 4 meetings all together. So 1 down 3 to go. Hopefully we will have finished everything for the Home Study by the end of July. Which we will then be able to send in our dossier to our placement agency. Once that is approved by everyone involved we will be officially a waiting family, which means we wait for our referral of our child. So exciting!!! But one step at a time. First the Home Study.