Let the Wait Begin

This afternoon I opened up my email and saw the name of our adoption specialist in the from column. These type of emails always make my heart skip a beat. As I began to read the words, my heart was now racing and then I couldn't stop smiling. This is what it said:

Dear Kevin and Sonya,
I received your remaining dossier documents and Ethiopia Country Program fee of $8,700. I've reviewed your dossier, and everything appears to be in order. CHSFS will send your dossier for authentications at the US Dept of State and Ethiopian Embassy and, from there, it will go on to Ethiopia where it will wait for you to receive and accept a referral.
Our records show that as of Tuesday, February 18, 2009, you are officially waiting for the referral of one infant girl aged 0-12 months, and that you plan to travel to Ethiopia when the time comes to receive your child(ren).

As with all international adoption, the estimated referral wait reflects our best understanding and projection at the time this email is being written, but it is possible that the wait could extend beyond that estimate. Although we are currently estimating a 12 month wait for referral of a single child, the wait for a sibling set is undefined at this juncture.

If you have not already done so, please submit your homestudy and I-600A application to you local USCIS office, and work with your local social worker. Once you receive approval of your I-600A application (a form called the I-171H or I-797C) in the mail, please forward a copy to me at CHSFS via post, e-mail, or fax (301-587-3869).

Please let me know if you have any questions.


We are officially on the wait list!!!! This means that we should receive our referral in about 12 months. After pondering the math for a bit I realized that our little girl is a already a part of this world...either in her birth mother's womb or just being born. It is so exciting and also hard to know that she will have to experience so much loss before we get to bring her home.

So now we wait. Once we receive our referral (hopefully by next February) we will then get to wait again for a court date which ususally takes between 3-4 months. Once that date is finialized then Kevin and I will take the trip of a lifetime to go meet our daughter and bring her home.

It's amazing going through this process after being pregnant twice. What I am feeling today is the exact emotions I felt the day I saw those two lines on the pregnancy test. It's official...we are expecting a baby!

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