From Kate to Sec. of State!

Our I-171H will arrive at the KY Secretary of State in the AM where it will be authenticated and hopefully sent back to Kate quickly along with our other documents! Tomorrow I have the whole day off and I will be making up party favors with Jamie and Angie (my two favorite party planners). As soon as that referral is in, a big party will take place to celebrate our little one!!!! Sometimes the excitement is too much for me!!!!

Here it comes Kate!

My sister got the notarized CIS approval approved on the county level today (many more thanks to Jamie!!!) and sent it to Kate, our dossier preparer, where it will arrive tomorrow. She will give it a look over and send it on to Frankfort. Ahh, the paper chase has been crazy but hopefully for us it is over. Kate will take care of everything from here on out and we can just enjoy the update emails....HOPEFULLY!

GO TEAM AUTHENTICATE!!!

(This is my sister who does the running and the three children that have been to the courthouse more times in the past 3 months than they ever should be again! My brother-in-law is in the pic too but he stays away from the documents!)

I have spent weeks trying to find the perfect video camera. I want to be sure to capture the moment when we first see Ian's little face. For a long time I dreamed about what it would be like when I finally got to tell Cortney and our families that a baby was on the way. I would think about how I could spring it on them when they weren't expecting it and really take them by surprise. That time is nearly here and I can't believe it.

YAY! YAY! YAY!

It is here!!! Today the mailbox finally yielded a treasure!!! Our I-171H (the much awaited immigration approval) arrived today!! We are officially approved by the US government to adopt a baby or two from Ethiopia!! This completes our dossier! We were on our way home to meet some friends and we stopped by the mailbox for the second time of the day. I saw the usual stack of Kmart sales papers come out of the box and wondered how many more days we would have to wait. Then Cortney got in the car and with his best poker face handed me the envelope! He brought out his cigars that he has been saving for the longest time and then decided to wait until the referral to light them up. Now we have to get some authenticating done and we will soon be waiting on the call from Gladney!! I have danced, squealed, and praised that the waiting for immigration approval is over. This means that our son is more than likely in Ethiopia today at this very moment, sleeping peacefully I hope. I thank God for the many blessings we have had over the last month and for the many we will receive in the months to come.
Tonight I called my sister of course while she was eating out with my brother-in-law. When they left the restaurant they came straight here to see the piece of paper that we have been so patiently waiting for. I know that I have thanked my sister many times on this blog but seriously, she cried when I told her that we had gotten the approval. I can't even say how much it means to me that she is as emotionally invested in this process and this child as we are. Ian is going to have the best sissy in the world!!!

WHERE ARE YOU I-171H??

Ok, so this is getting ridiculous! I WANT MY I-171H!!! LOL Really 35 business days will be next Friday (Aug 3rd). But why couldn't just this one time (and the time of the referral and the court date) couldn't something just happen a little early!!! I don't ask for much do I??? When the thing finally does come in the mailbox I hope all of our family members will be understanding when they receive a hysterical phone call much like the one you all got about a month ago first when I passed the NAPLEX then when I got licensed!!! Sorry in advance!!
All of our papers are in Frankfort for authentication. This is after our county authenticator lost one of the documents and it had to be redone. (Not a good day for me at all!) When I got the call from Kate saying that she received 15 of the 16 documents back from Pike county I really wasn't very surprised. I knew that something was bound to happen, but really, they lost a document??? Special thanks to Melissa Coleman for staying late to redo a document in order to get it out the next morning! A VERY special thanks to my sister for getting it all taken care of and back on the right track! My sister is so excited that I'm not sure I can contain her for the next few months. I didn't think that any person on the planet could be as excited about the whole process as Cortney and me but she is sure giving us a run for our money!!! I will never be able to thank her enough for what she has done!! LOVE YA JAMIE!!

Awaiting CIS approval

Ahh, stalking the mailbox has become something I am not proud of but a way of life for both me and Cortney! He frantically checks it if he beats me home from work and I check it 10 times a day if I am off work! I know that the mail doesn't come until around 4pm but that doesn't keep me from checking it all day long. LOL We aren't expecting the immigration approval until around Aug 10th but we are always hopeful that it will come early. Getting that approval means having a completely finished dossier (after it is authenticated) and then we are ready to wait for a referral.
In the meantime friends and family have gotten really excited about the process. My sister and her friend Angie have spent a great deal of time planning the baby shower that will happen soon after the referral. They have thought of some very wonderful things that we are going to do at the shower. I am so excited that they are so excited!
Cortney and I started the process of getting our vaccinations for the trip. He started out with Hep A, B, and DTaP. I got the yellow fever and typhoid shots. We both still have a few more to get but we are getting them out of the way early. The Hep vaccines are series shots but hopefully we won't make it to the end of the series (6 months away) before we travel! They told us that it was no big deal if we didn't.
I try to think of how it will be on the other side of this process. I try to imagine a little person filling up my home with laughter, screams, toys and LOVE. I try to remember how hard it was on my sister when she had little ones and how she cried because she was so tired or when they were basically inconsolable. I am a first time mom and I am guilty of romanticizing motherhood. I am sure there will be nothing like 18 hours on a plane with my little angel to bring me back to reality!!! I can't wait!!
Here's hoping for a treasure in my mailbox very soon!

Song from another adopting family

My sister told me to go check out this song on another family's blog. Then she said, "No, don't." Now I see why. I am sitting here crying for so many different reasons. As the lady on the other blog said, it sums up all of the months of trying and the emotional roller-coaster of fertility treatments. I have heard since we declared that we are trying to get pregnant that if we would just forget about it...that we would get pregnant. You can rest assured that no woman who had fertility problems would ever say this to another woman. For the longest time I felt like everyone was placing blame on me because I wouldn't quit worrying about becoming pregnant. I just knew that it was my fault that the fertility cycles didn't work. But those people were wrong and I was wrong. So many times I just prayed to God that I could be a mom. I cried out to Him to answer that prayer and he did. He opened my eyes and my heart to the child who will come from a far away land in need of a loving mother. So when people say to me, "Aren't you going to try to have a baby of your own?" I can assure them that no child I could ever conceive would be any more my own than the one that God led me to.

Odd Day

Today has been an odd day for some reason. I can't put my finger on what is bugging me today but I am just out of sorts. I am hopeful that we will get our I-171H (immigration approval) soon. I read another blog tonight that looked like the family received theirs in about 6 weeks. That would be around the first of August for us. I really didn't expect that it may come that soon. I thought it would be around the middle to end of August but earlier is better. My stomach kind of gets in knots when I think about us waiting on the referral. I don't know if my nerves can handle it! Every phone call will potentially be the ONE from Mary (the lady who calls with the news from Gladney)! Hopefully I will grow tired of doing that to myself quickly and settle down. We watched an Ethiopian training video provided by Gladney this weekend. It was very informative and I was surprised by some of the info about the culture. Cortney said he enjoyed watching it. He said that he had hoped that it would pertain more to adopting infant children but it helped us learn some of the things that we will enjoy telling Ian about his country.

Reading the required material

Cortney and I have been reading some really good books that have been suggested by Gladney. I hope that I can remember some of the tricks that are talked about. It has however made me worry about the childcare situation. I will get two months off with the baby after we bring him home but after that it is back to the grind. I don't have to work a whole bunch of days but my days are long and largely inconsistent. Consistency seems to be the key to developing attachment. One mother in the book went back to work and her daughter could only stand to be in day care 5 hours a day! LOL, I wonder what Rite Aid would say if at 1pm I closed the pharmacy and hit the road??? Probably...see ya! Then I talk to other working moms that say their child has a stronger bond with their caretaker than the parent. That stresses me out tremendously. For me, not working is not an option. So, I'm not sure how I will swing it but I guess I will do my very best...hopefully that is enough.
Cortney and I were talking yesterday about some crazy things that people have said to him about the adoption. These are things that he hasn't spoken with me about before so I don't know to what extent they bothered him but he was a little fired up yesterday. He had told everyone he knows that we are adopting a baby from Ethiopia. He said that this lady says to him, "Will it be black?" That is a question that I have had to field so he had an answer already prepared! He said, "No, huh uh, haven't you seen all of those white Ethiopian children in need of homes?" And walked away. LOL He also said that another fella kept referring to African Americans as "those people" and talking about how "those people acted". He made a few rude remarks about us raising a child of a different race and Cortney told him off. Cortney told him that he did not agree with how he felt about people of a different ethnicity and that they could agree to disagree but if he ever made another racist or prejudice remark in his presence that he could not predict the consequences. LOL I can imagine the fear that my 6'3" 250lb husband could incite in another individual.
So this is what it has come to, Cortney is threatening to beat people up for being racist and I have equipped him with "smarty mouth" comments for the inappropriate questions! We can't do this Ian's whole life. I know that at some point some ignorant member of the public will say something hurtful to my son and I will want to punch them out but I can't teach Ian those means of settling differences. I pray that God will give me the tools to teach Ian to love himself enough that what someone else says won't matter.
Paperwork updates: Adoption Assistance mailed the notarized copy of the agency license and we received it yesterday. It only took over a week and two phone calls to get this little piece of paper but we have it now and it along with two corrected documents will go to Kate on Monday morning. We are still awaiting our immigration approval and will probably be waiting on it until sometime in August. At which point we will begin awaiting a referral!

YAY FOR ME!!

Today I got some of the best ever news! Was it about my referral? NO Was it even adoption related??? NOPE Today I finally became a licensed pharmacist!! Seven years, well over 100,000, and endless sacrifices later, I finally am no longer a student! I have begun the next chapter of my life. The chapter that entails being an adult, working a steady job, and being a mother to the baby that will soon enter my life. This day means something grand for every member of my soon-to-be three member family. I am so happy that this part of my life has started and I look forward for the next wonderful thing...Ian.

Still Waiting

We are still waiting ever so impatiently! I ordered a few books today from Amazon and an African Lullaby CD. I am so excited about the CD. The music samples I listened to were great. I love African music...it is so soothing. I hope that Ian gets to hear lots of it while he is still in Ethiopia! We got the revised dossier documents notarized this weekend and we are waiting for Adoption Assistance, the home study agency, to send the notarized copy of their license to us so we can get it all back to Kate. I hope it comes today so I can get the stuff in the mail tomorrow. Last week I went to the post office to mail the documents and I just couldn't send them USPS. LOL, I have the hardest time mailing things. I am in constant fear that they will be lost or damaged before they arrive. I know it is silly but I have a really hard time with mailing things!
I have been checking out plane ticket prices to Addis Ababa. It appears that we will be able to fly from Tri Cities airport which is a blessing! It is a VERY small airport but it is really close to home and hopefully everyone can greet us when we arrive back with the baby! My niece has a poster hanging on my mom's refrigerator that says, "Welcome home baby Ian. I hope you "no" how much we LOVE you!" Oh how I love my little Miss Emaleigh! She said this is for her to hold up at the airport when we arrive.
This made me feel so good to watch today. I love to see their precious little faces and the pride that they have. Watch and enjoy!