Orientation Call

We had our orientation call this evening with Lorinda from AGCI. We are so excited to get our orientation papers in and start on our homestudy and dossier. It's amazing how much adoption "language" I have learned since starting this! It is still so confusing, but I have faith that AGCI will make this process smooth. We are so excited! and we are really nervous as well. I am sure that it is totally normal to feel that way though. During our call Lorinda said that the wait for a baby boy is a lot less than for a girl. She said odds are that we will get a boy. That would be awesome, but whatever God has for us is what we want. Continue to pray for us as we are getting into all of the paperwork and stuff.

Adoption Process

I wanted to attach a link to the All God's Children website where you can see all the different steps we have to take during our adoption process, for anyone interested.

http://www.allgodschildren.org/adoption/ethiopia/

Our Journey Begins

We have been married for 6 1/2 years and we have two beautiful daughters, Maggie and Hazel. We always wondered how many children we would have and little did we know that God would call us to adopt just when we "thought" we were done with two. We have always thought about adoption and thought maybe someday we could but never really thought we would. It seems so comfortable with 2 children, so then we aren't outnumbered! Two of them and two of us. But, God has different plans for us.

God gave us this strong desire to adopt and we chose to adopt from Ethiopia. There are over 4 million orphans in Ethiopia. The country is about the size of Texas. The country is stricken with aids and poverty. It breaks our hearts to think of all of the children who have no family to call their own. We chose to use All Gods Children International as our adoption agency. We have seen on their website how they call the adoptive family the child's "forever family". It is so awesome to think about. We will be this child's family forever. We are so incredibly excited to start this journey. We know that there is a special baby that is going to be hand picked by God just for us. The love for this child is already beginning to grow even if that baby is not growing in Christie's belly. Just knowing that we will be holding him or her in about a year makes us so excited and anxious. It brings tear to our eyes just talking about and imagining us traveling to Ethiopia to meet our new baby for the very first time. It seems as if we are pregnant but this time we are expecting just not pregnant. There is a mother out there that is or will be carrying our baby and we pray for her and the baby everyday. Please pray for us as we start this journey to add a new baby brother or sister to our family.