so now what?

yesterday we received word that all of our official paperwork for baby boy was at our adoption agency, and that they were informing the ethiopian staff of our formal acceptance!  so now comes the SUPER hard waiting...the wait for our first trip to ethiopia when we meet our son and have our court date.

for those of you who are wondering...we will travel to ethiopia twice.  the first trip we will be able to kiss baby boy and play with him, and then hopefully have our case approved by the federal courts.  

the current estimated wait time from acceptance of a referral to court date is 4 to 5 months.  let's please all pray for 4!

when we are done with court we will have to leave sweet baby and ethiopia, and wait to be given embassy clearance and a date for a visa appointment. we will have our visa appointment on our second trip to ethiopia. there is usually 2 or 3 months in between these first and second trips.  and I expect this wait between trips to be the hardest of all.

once we have our little guy's visa in hand we are allowed to take him home to his sisters.  and love him forever and ever and ever, amen.

so that is a brief summary of what the adoption process *should* look like from this point forward.  we are looking at another 6 to 9 months of waiting before he is home with our family.

we can't stop looking at his pictures.  and they are already up all over our house.  I SO wish that I could post them here for you all to see, but I have to wait until he is home with us.

last night I noticed something new about him that I hadn't before.  how precious his hands are.  he has these sweet, long fingers.  and I love how the inside of his hand is a lighter color brown than the other parts of his skin.  

he already melts me.

we are still trying to figure out what we will call this little guy.  his ethiopian name is gorgeous and tremendously meaningful.  but also pretty difficult to pronounce.  so I'll keep you posted when we decide on something.  eden would like to name him "frou frou"  and charlotte picked "joe".  I'm not sure either of those will make the final cut.

I'll leave you with some funnies of the girls the other night when we took them to jungle jaks.  they got their make-up done and it was something to behold.  please don't call toddlers and tiaras on me.

girlfriends were SPARKLY!!!

thank you so much for your congratulations and sharing in our JOY.  I am still trying to believe that he is even real :)