The longest journey begins with...

Hold onto your hats...the rumors are true! After celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary, we have decided to expand our family. Yesterday Peter and I finished the last of our home-study interviews with a home visit from our social worker, and we are that much closer on our journey of adoption.

We are very excited! There are still mountains of paperwork to assemble (and notarize) and many, many months of waiting to endure before we really add our new son or daughter to our home. We are hoping to have him/her home by Christmas 2010. That's a really looooong time isn't it? We'll pray for a faster timeline, but are expecting an elephant pregnancy (2 years of gestating).

In the immediate time horizon, we've already completed a series of couple and individual interviews with our social worker, 10 or so hours of pre-adoptive education requirements, two sets of paper work, and are attending our last formal class on Tuesday. In the coming month we assemble our dossier, send paperwork, birth certificates, our marriage certificate, our fingerprints, and a vial of blood (just kidding on that last one) to homeland security for permission to adopt (did I mention we are pursuing international adoption?) If we are done with all the paperwork by Christmas 2008 we'll be making excellent progress.

This is very much a "hurry up and wait" process. After our paperwork is finalized, we are anticipating a 10 to 22 month wait for a child referral. This partially depends on the country we adopt from and how the socio-political conditions play out internationally. We are leaning very heavily toward adopting from Ethiopia, but are also considering Korea. We are working with a Massachusetts agency, Wide Horizons for Children, with well established programs in both countries. WHFC also has the notoriety of being the agency Angelina Jolie used to adopt her daughter Zahara, also from Ethiopia. Talking with her and Brad about their experiences with the agency has been a real trip. :-) Yeah, we wish.

We are now open game for all the friends we've tormented with baby name suggestions during their pregnancies. We, like expectant parents anywhere, just have one response. Bring it!