Author: Stephanie Adams

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.

The home study went fine today. I was actually much more relaxed than I thought I would be, I did start to get nervous an hour or so before, but not overly nervous. I had everything done that I had wanted to get done and was happy with how the house looked. We even let her see the samples of green paint on the bathroom wall that we have yet to paint over with the one we chose, she agreed with us on the color, we will make sure we paint it before her next visit. She asked us questions from how we met to how we plan to raise our children. She is coming back for our second visit November 30 and after that will write up a report to submit to the court here in Pinal County.

For those of you wondering how Tank did, he was an angel for Tank standards, seriously I prayed all day long for that boy to be good and he was. He did his happy bark for her not his scared bark. We have been working with him a lot lately and he is doing a lot better, but still a little neurotic.

We also got word that our second letter of introduction was good, so we are done with that too. Thanks honey for doing such an awesome job on it. We have our classes this weekend and we have a booklet we have to finish before our next home visit, plus the 10 hours of dvds, so we are busy for a while.

We got the word last night that our first home study appointment is this Friday afternoon. Now I was fully expecting this to happen after Thanksgiving, and let’s just say there was some stuff I planned to get done around the house next weekend. I know I have enough time to make my house presentable, but there is that part of me that wants it to be perfect, I clearly do not have time to make that happen. I think I am okay with that, I have to be. We didn’t have time to do anything last night after we got the call, because we already had plans, and we have plans again tonight. Seriously, we never have plans two nights in a row except for the one week we have our home study. We have our appointments at the doctor this morning, hopefully that doesn’t suck two hours out of our day like usual.

By the way unusual happening this morning. It is raining!

We have been working diligently, albeit slowly, on our all our paperwork and have sent the bulk of what is needed to our home study agency, and we received confirmation yesterday that they had received it. We see the doctor Thursday to get letters from her stating she found us to be in “good mental and physical health,” and we also are still waiting on our police clearance letters from Pinal County. After we get those to our agency we will officially start the home study process.

This weekend we have International Adoption Preparation Classes from 8 am to 4 pm both days. It looks like we will be learning a lot of helpful information. We also get to meet other people adopting internationally, some of which I have already been talking to online.

Matt wrote our letter of introduction (I was told the most important document in our dossier to Ethiopia) last night and I thought sent it to our agency coordinator to get her opinion, but just got an email from her that I sent the wrong attachment, so I just sent it off. I had already written one, but it was no quite up to par. So, I turned it over to Matt since he is a much better writer in the creative aspect of it, and after rereading this blog post like five times and still finding mistakes I am beginning to wonder if he is also better at the grammar aspect.

Next week we plan on starting our 10 hour dvd course. I think that is it for now.