My 5 questions

Sometime in the month of April we'll get some more pictures of our son and the answers to our 5 questions:
1. What date did he arrive at the AWA transition home?
2. What orphanage(s) was he in before coming to the transition home?
3. What does he eat (solids, what kind of formula) and when?
4. When and how does he sleep?
5. What makes him smile?

In the meantime, we're trying to figure out how to arrange travel, when we won't know concrete travel dates until a few days before, or the day before we need to leave. Since we want to go a week early, it makes things a bit tight. Thankfully I've heard back some helpful stuff from travel agents and our agency's travel coordinator.

Keep praying for May 11th and all the arrangements that need to happen before then.

What now?

I keep being SO thankful for God's goodness to us these past couple of weeks. There are some families who turned in paperwork the same day we did who are still waiting for a referral and many who received a referral months before us who have a court date later than us. I don't know why God has been so generous to us, but I am so very thankful to have received a referral and court date this month!

So, what happens between now and traveling? A lot.

1. April 1 - Joseph and I will get re-fingerprinted up in Indy. We might have committed some terrible crime in the past year and our fingerprints expire in early May. Silly, silly.
   
2. April - Joseph and I will finish up our vaccinations. We'll receive tentative travel dates from our agency and begin working on flights and planning travel.
   
3. End of April - We'll get an update on our baby boy with pictures and updated medical information. We can ask five particular questions too, so if you have any good questions to ask about a 7 month old we'd love to hear them!
4. April, May or June - We'll have a baby shower!! I'll let you know when and where as soon as I know.
5. 1st week of May - Week of prayer for our pending court date, MOWA (Ethiopia's social services type organization) will prepare paperwork for our court date, our agency should find out if our baby's birthmother and/or living relatives will be summoned to court, if so, they will contact them and arrange/pay for their travel
6. May 11 - court date!!!! This is the biggie. About 30% of families do not pass their first court date, so we do covet your prayers that all paperwork is in order, relatives can appear at court if needed, judge is not sick, electricity is on . . . you get the idea :-)
   
7. From here it takes one of two paths. If we do not pass, we're back to waiting for our agency to get a court date, which can take 1 week - 3 months. If we DO pass, we move on.
8. May 12-? - We will get our official travel dates, AWA gets adoption decrees, a birth-certificate, passport, ID's, official consulate TB testing, and all kinds of other stuff in order for us to come to Ethiopia for our final consulate appointment.Pray that this is all able to be completed quickly. Any number of factors can delay this process and it needs to be completed before we travel.
9. Late May or early June - we'll travel to Ethiopia to sightsee for a week, then meet up with other AWA families in Addis for a week of adoption activities.
10. Finish up some final paperwork in Addis, meet our baby boy for the first time!!!!, go to the consulate appointment, get him a Visa, and head on home!!
11. Met with MUCH rejoicing back in Bloomington!!!!!!!!
12. Re-adopt in Indiana :-) Fun, fun, but at least I'll get to see our cute son.
    

Yipppppeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

When I checked my email today I got a nice surprise, an email with the subject "Court Date." I expected it to just be an email about court dates and what happens and why and stuff like that, which is was. BUT, at the end it said our son's court date is MAY 11!! I was quite shocked, surprised and thrilled! We gearing up for a wait of at least a few more weeks if not a month before even hearing when our court date was scheduled. This is also an entire month earlier than our best case scenario we had in our minds.

So, thank you for praying. God is SO generous, despite my doubts!

We are thrilled that we may have him home soon! Keep praying, as about 30% of the cases don't pass their first court date for a number of reasons. Please pray that we do.

Last night I had two dreams. One was that when we received the pictures of our son from a fellow AWA family, he was about 4 years old. (I've been sad about losing the next few months with him). Another one was that the Moore family offered us their old crib. We said yes and brought it home. However, when we set it up it was a giant's crib, about 6 feet by 4 feet, with HUGE legs to hold it up! I think this is because Laura told me her babies were always over the 100th percentile for height/weight.

Dreams are weird.

It's Official-the referral that is

We officially accepted our referral this week, so our agency will begin petitioning for a court date. Today I also FedExed a care package to the Whipple family, who is traveling to Ethiopia next week. They'll deliver it to our son and share some pictures with us. So, next week our baby boy will have an awesome stuffed giraffe and two very cute outfits from us.

I'm beginning to get a bit intimidated by the 3 month wait we are in now. On one hand it's much happier to wait, knowing that we have a boy in Ethiopia. On the other hand, it's more painful because we are aware of missing every day with him. There are so many firsts in a baby's life and we're really sad to miss so many of them. I'm usually not a big fan of infants, preferring toddlers to infants, but this is making me appreciate what a gift it is to be a mother to a baby from day 1. So, all you mothers of spitter-uppers, poopers, and criers . . . take heart, and be thankful that you get to spend this year with your baby. I know it's not easy, and pretty stinky (literally), but it IS well worth it!

So, for the story . . .

Well, it's been quite the exciting life since Friday and we are so thankful for God's goodness to us. The excitement of receiving the referral call on Friday was followed by an all-church celebration of the marriage of Andrew and Kaitlyn Henry, which was followed by a Bayly-family celebration of our new baby, which was followed by a Sunday morning of praising God for both of those blessings.

Right after church, Joseph and I and Joseph's sister and brother-in-law drove to Toledo, Ohio, where we spent a night and morning with the David Bayly family, brothers and sisters at Christ the Word Church and with Douglas and Nancy Wilson. It was an incredibly encouraging time, and could take another blog post, but I won't do that now. We arrived back in Bloomington, and I'm now finally sitting down to write out the full referral story - you know, the female told version that includes all the details.

Friday morning began much the same way as each morning for the past two months has; wondering and hoping if today would be the day we would get our referral. I had been on a 'baby fast' for a few days to keep my sanity - this meant not checking the yahoo group or blogs trying to figure out if/when our referral would be, and not looking at baby gear. However, it was still always in my mind.

I rode the bus to Joseph's office to pick up our car, sat down in the driver's seat and saw a note on the windshield that said "Come talk to me," followed by a heart (which I read as an exclamation point). I smiled and hoped, but tried to check myself as I walked to his office door. He came out and said simply, "Michal called and you don't have to babysit this morning." I was disappointed, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I sat down to study some Latin and then met a friend for lunch before heading off to Latin class.

After Latin I walked back to Joseph's office to pick up our car and decided I would stop in and say hi to him. I knocked on his office window and he turned around with a big smile. We met at the door and he told me, "So, I was just sitting there figuring out how to get ahold of you. We've got to call Terra back. She said she has some good news for us." Then I smiled from ear to ear. After that we entered one of those surreal moments that you hope for for so long and can't quite grasp as real when it does come.

We called her back, put her on speaker phone and listened as she told us we had a 6 month old son. I didn't really catch much after that. The next thing we did was open up the referral email from Terra and look at his pictures. He was/is cute as cute can be and just looked like he should be our son. I doubted a bond could actually happen and I could get attached to a baby I'd never met, but, that's how it works. Then we opened the files about his information and found that he was already named part of the name we were going to give him! How amazing is that?!

We soaked up the next half hour together, reading about our son and looking at his picture. Then we decided to begin the phone calls.

We thought we would try the Bayly grandparents, but, knowing they were on their way back from Mexico, assumed we wouldn't get ahold of them. We didn't. So, we tried my mom at work and home. No answer. I didn't have my dad's cell phone number, so we moved to calling Joseph's oldest sister.

The phone rang and finally our 5-year-old nephew, Nathan answered. We both said hello and asked to talk to his mom. He very politely said "Just a moment, please" and we waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. After two minutes we began to yell at the phone "Hey!!! Pick us up!!!!" More silence. Finally Nathan came back on the phone to say "Mom said I have to go out. She's putting the baby to bed." Joseph and I laughed and decided we'd just tell Nathan first. So, we said, "Nathan, we have a baby!" His response, a deadpan "oh." We laughed and said to tell his mom we had a 6-month old baby boy. He said, "okay." We thanked him for praying for us and he said "you're welcome." So, that was our first reaction to telling someone the news . . . 'oh.' It still cracks me up.

The rest of the afternoon was spent doing a few more phone calls and then posting the news on the internet. We have been SO blessed by all the responses from so many of you! Some of my high school classmates even wrote back thrilled for us! We are so encouraged that you all get to share in our joy . . . some of you crying for joy at your desk. We love it and love you and LOVE our new baby boy.

P.S. Since he is not legally ours yet by Ethiopian standards, we can't share his name or picture on a public site. So, you'll have to wait until we pass our court date to see his beautiful face!

One *Big* Step Forward

We just got a call from our agency, letting us know that we have a new baby boy waiting for us! He is 6 months old, and weighs 13 pounds.

We are so excited and can't wait to bring Little Joseph Tate Bayly VII home. We will let you know more as we get the opportunity.

Thank you all for your prayers and support.

-Joseph & Heidi

Phone Addiction

We've been at the top for one week now, and the days seem to be dragging by, particularly the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. when we could receive the phone call that will make us parents. I don't have a cell phone (by choice), so this means that most of the time I would prefer to be at home where I can answer the phone if it happens to ring. This, of course, makes the days go by even slower, so I'm trying to branch out and get out and *gasp* even use the phone to make other calls (we don't have caller ID or call waiting either). 

Most recently I've been flying through Anna Karinina for a book club I'm in. I read Russian novels like other people read Jane Austen - quickly, getting lost in the characters. I'm almost half way through on page 356, so it should keep me occupied for at least another week. After that I may have to move on to War and Peace.

Do keep us in your prayers - that we would trust God with assigning the right child to our family, trust him with how/when we get the call, trust him with all that needs to happen afterwards. 

Love you all and I'll keep you posted.

Mint.com - Avoid if at all Possible

I have been a very emphatic proponent and opponent of Mint.com in the last few months. In case you don't know what it is, it tracks your money for you -- online. There are all kinds of reasons to use a service like Mint.com, and there are other reasons not to. That battle has been waged, and I believe for the most part, won by the side that says it's ok to trust your financial information to third parties. Certainly that's the side I've fallen into.

Today gives me pause. Up until this point, my negative feelings toward Mint.com have stemmed primarily from what I would call intentional product limitations. They don't let you keep track of accounts that aren't available online. That irritates me. I figured eventually they would add that feature, so I stuck it out. They don't list our investment amounts (we have some money in a Roth IRA) correctly either -- at least in the overview page. But they get it right in the details page, so I filed a bug report and moved on.

But today, I'm done with them. They lost half of my transactions from January. Talk about questioning whether your data is safe! Gone. They were all categorized against our budget. Poof. No record of half the money we spent in the first month of this year.

I'm done.

What's After Referral?

After we get our much anticipated referral, here's a rough view of what will happen.

1. We'll turn in our referral acceptance letter as soon as possible.
2. AWA will petition for an Ethiopian court date.
3. We'll hear when our court hearing will be in Ethiopia. We don't need to be present since we signed power of attorney to an Ethiopian Representative. Court dates are usually 2-3 months after the referral date. (yep, you read that right, 2-3 months . . .)
4. More waiting. In the meantime, we'll start making travel arrangements on the assumption that we will pass our first court date.
5. Our court date in Ethiopia will happen. Please do start praying that we pass our first court date. About 30% of families don't pass their first court date and end up waiting for months longer before picking up their baby. Why don't they pass? Um . . . all kinds of reasons, mostly having to do with a third world court system and paperwork.
6. When we pass court, we'll finally travel to Ethiopia to pick up our new baby(ies)! We hope this will be this summer!
7. You all get to meet our baby(ies)!

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

I logged on to our agency's yahoo adoption group for my weekly check up on things and was thrilled to find that our group of DTE (dossier to Ethiopia) is now #1. In the past week there were 2 more girl referrals and 1 boy referral, one of them even to a family with our DTE. (DTE just means the date that we finished our paperwork, May something-or-other 2008)

It's quite exciting to be at the top of the list. We share the title with a few other families that we know of, so our referral could be today or in the next few weeks. HOPEFULLY it will be in March though :-)

So, for the next few weeks, pray that I stay sane, that we are matched with just the right baby for our family, pray for twins :-), and that we would have faith in God's goodness. We can't wait to be at the end of this journey and look back at God's faithfulness.