Month: November 2007

I am going to try to explain the adoption process as best I can. It is the one thing we get the most questions about right now and every time we think we understand it we learn something new. So, this list is just my best understanding of the process right now.

Apply to Agency: Done, September 23, 2007

Apply to Home Study Agency: Done, October 3, 2007

Home Study Process, involves the gathering of paperwork, writing biographies, two in home visits, two days of classes, and then your social worker writes up the home study, which is then reviewed by our agency, and then the social worker sends to the courts (I am told the last one in Pinal County she did took a month, boo), if the courts certify us we can move on, completed everything on our end as of November 30, 2007, our social worker is writing the report now and it will get it to our agency at the beginning of next week

Citizen and Immigration Services approval to bring the adopted child(ren) home, our certified home study will then be sent to CIS and processed, sorry I don’t have an estimated time on that one

Certification, all of our notarized documents now have to be certified by the Secretary of State in the state where the documents were originated, basically they are stating that we used a real notary

Bundling, our agency double checks our dossier (dos-ee-ey: a collection or file of documents on the same subject, esp. a complete file containing detailed information about a person or topic), it then travels to Washington, D.C.

Authenticated at the U.S. Department of State

Second Authentication at the Ethiopian Embassy, both authentications take about 1-2 weeks, then it is returned to our agency’s main office

Dossier Sent to Ethiopia, in Ethiopia it is quickly translated into Amharic and the new translated copy is authenticated

Sometime after that we will receive our referral, we will get basic info on our children at this time, this step has been taking about 1-3 months but could increase due to more agencies being approved to work in Ethiopia

Once we accept the referral our dossier is then presented to the officials at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and to the court, after this we can expect to travel in approximately 2-3 months

Hopefully ya’ll find that helpful and not too boring! Please post any questions in the comment section or if you know something I don’t know inform me.

Matt and I decided to come up with nicknames to call our future children while referring to them on the blog (because future children just sounds so impersonal). The nicknames do not have to stick once we bring them home, because we might possibly come up with nicknames that are more fitting their personalities. We came up with Tom and Jerry (pretty sure Matt came up with it). We were thinking of favorite childhood characters when we came up with that one and Matt liked it the best, so it stuck.I came up with the idea for this from two other adoption related blogs Salty and Bonnie and Clyde.

I created a page on Ethiopia as a part of our blog. It is a work in progress and contains basic facts and some pictures I borrowed from other web users, since we have not yet been. It also has a few links to relevant info on Ethiopia and adoption.

If you have any questions about Ethiopia, please ask and if I don’t know the answer I will try my hardest to find out.

We want to share our children’s culture and heritage with you and are excited about learning more about it ourselves.