HeBrews Faith Cafe

We watched the last DVD and completed our adoption training this week!! I thought we had 4 more sessions but it ended up being only one. Thank goodness! We actually had to watch the DVD two times and then review the main points to "get" all of the information. It was about attachment, bonding, non-traditional discipline and up close parenting, etc. My brain is still mush from She Speaks so it took a lot of effort to absorb it and prepare for the test we had to take online as well.

But we passed!!! Yeah!! Now we take the next step - finish our dossier. We've got to figure out who is getting which documents notarized and then schedule to have more passport photos taken. We need 6 each. Not sure why but we do. Our goal is to get all of this done and mailed before mid-July in hopes that we can apply for our girls before the courts in Ethiopia close for the summer. Please pray we'd be very timely in our assignments.

This weekend we're going to relax and enjoy some fun with our two boys. Joshua and Andrew have invited friends over for the day. We're getting ready to cook-out hamburgers and then take all five of them to play laster tag. Then we'll come back for dessert and a game of capture the flag before crashing in front of the tv for a movie. Their friends are also spending the night and then going to shoot paint ball with our youth group in the morning. I am making up for all lost summer "adventures" that we haven't done since school was out due to all that was going on pre-She Speaks.

I love being a mom and seeing how much I can win all these boys' hearts with food and fun. You should have heard them grunt and grin when I got back from the store and filled the fridge and freezer with French fries, hamburgers, ice cream, Gatorade, cookies, chocolate milk and cinnamon rolls.

Welcome summer - I'm so glad you are here!!!!

Wow, it's been a while since I updated our family blog. We've been so busy with moving, getting unpacked and getting prepared for the She Speaks conference I was part of this past weekend with Proverbs 31 that I didn't realize it's been more than a month!

Many of you have asked me where we are with our adoption so I thought this would be a great time for an update, since this is the week we get going again. For those of you new to our blog, we are in the process of adopting two daughters from Ethiopia. That is why we recently moved - to make room for our girls! We hope to have them home by the end of this year or early 2009.

So, here is where we are. Our home study is complete and has been approved by our adoption agency. We got our I600 approval in early May. So now all we need to do now is complete our DVD Adoption training (required by our agency) and our dossier. We have watched and taken tests online for 3 training sessions. We have 4 to go and hope to get them completed this week.

Now the dossier is a bit overwhelming. There are SO many documents that have to be notarized. We had already gotten a lot of them completed for the home study but they didn't have to be notarized. So now we have to go back and get them signed again - ie. doctors approval for everyone, employment letters, bank statements, marriage licenses, birth certificates. etc. Not sure how to go about it all but once my brain recovers from the conference I am sure we'll get it figured out.

Once we complete our training and our dossier, we'll watch the "Waiting Children" dvd again (with over 100 kids who need families) and prayerfully search for the treasured ones God already has chosen to be part of our family. It's about to get really exciting!!!