What a Difference a Week Makes

So, the last time I posted, I was disappointed because there hadn't been any little boy referrals in six weeks. Little did I know what God had in store for us the following Monday... OUR REFERRAL!!!

It was Monday, October 5th, I had just dropped Paige off at school (she goes to afternoon Pre-K), and I was getting some lunch when the phone rang. I saw the Colorado area code and knew that it was Allison calling. I answered the phone...

"Hello"
'Hi Amanda, How are you?"
"I'm good, how are you?"
"I'm good. I just have a quick question for you. I know you said that you want as young as possible, but what would be the oldest age you would accept?"
"What do you mean? Are you talking about in our 0-24 month range?" We will accept anything in that range."
"So you will consider a one year old little boy?"
"Of course we will"
"Well, I may have some good news for you this afternoon."

As soon as I got off the phone, I called Robbie to tell him. He couldn't believe it, and he told me to patch him in as soon as she called back. After about an hour of waiting (which seemed like a lifetime), she called back, and as soon as I had Robbie on the phone, she told us the good news.

We have a referral of a beautiful one year old little boy, and as soon as we saw his precious face, it was love at first sight. I think we were both surprised at how quickly we fell in love with him. Although we wanted to accept the referral immediately, we had been advised to have his medical records reviewed before we rushed into a decision. So, Tuesday morning I emailed his records to our International Adoption Pediatric Specialist, at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. Unfortunately, they could not schedule a phone consultation until Friday morning, so we had to wait four days to make it official, but as of Friday afternoon, it is!!!!

Now, the wait begins again. This time, for a court date. We are expecting this to be a while, perhaps 8 weeks, because the courts have been closed for almost two months for the rainy season. In fact, they just opened today, so they will probably be backlogged for awhile. The court appointment will be when he legally becomes our child. We will not travel to Ethiopia for that, we have someone there who will take care of it on our behalf. Once we pass court, it will probably be another 8 weeks before we can get the immigration paperwork to bring him back to the United States, so we are probably looking at another 4 months before we can travel to get him. Now that we know what his little face looks like, it is going to be so hard to wait. The mommy and daddy in us makes us want to leave everything here and go over there now, but unfortunately that is not an option. In the meantime, we will continue to stare at his precious face and pray for him, as often as we can.