She's Perfect!

So now I'm sure you're wondering who she is! Well, we can't post pictures of her yet ( not until the adoption is official) but we can tell you a little about her. She is only two months old, weighs 8.5 pounds, is 22 inches long, and is perfect in every way!! We can't wait for you to see her! She's very smiley and just as sweet as can be! Okay, so this is what happens next. We have to go through the court proceedings in Ethiopia in order to make the adoption official. That's when we will officially be her parents. :) We will be assigned a court date within the next few weeks. Once we have a court date we will also have tentative travel dates. We are hoping to have a court date in mid to late July. Like I said, once we pass our court date Kaiyin will officially be ours and we will get to travel to pick her up 2-4 weeks after that. So we're hoping to travel in August. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we jump these final hurdles in order to bring our little girl home!

Christmas Came Early This Year!!!

The week of June 15th started out pretty rough. I was really hopeful that we would get our referral that week and felt like it couldn't happen soon enough. On Monday I got an email from our Family Coordinator with our adoption agency. The email said she would be on vacation the rest of the week and indicated that she would follow up with us when she got back the following week. For some reason this just left me feeling totally frustrated and defeated. At least another week of waiting, maybe two weeks by the time she gets back and gets caught up with work!! I just couldn't cope! Well, I had a total meltdown. I wish I could explain how it's possible to wait 10 months without losing it and then all of a sudden at 10 and a half months something like this sends you into a complete meltdown but I can't. Looking back on it even now, I feel so silly but that day it felt like no one in the world had ever wanted a child as badly as I do and having to wait any longer for her was just not going to be possible. I cried and cried and talked with Steve about it and came to the decision that I was going to stop talking about the adoption all the time. Maybe shifting my focus would help make it easier. I vowed to stop browsing the baby departments of stores and talking about her all the time. I closed the door to her room and prayed for peace. The next few days were much better. I went into a state of calm but could feel myself tense up everytime someone asked how things were coming along with the adoption. Then on Friday, June 19th (two days before Father's Day) everything changed. I was laying by the pool in our community and chatting with our neighbor, Denine. Steve was at work. My cell phone rang and I didn't recognize the number. This time instead of my heart racing I just assumed it was a sales person or something. I almost didn't answer it and then a voice in the back of my head said "you better just make sure". I answered and it was Caitlyn calling from our adoption agency. I had never spoken to Caitlyn before and even in that moment I thought maybe she was calling about paperwork or something else. After a few seconds I could tell in her voice that this was "the call"!! It was our referral call!!! She told me that she had some good news for me and wanted to know whether I wanted to try to get Steve on the line also. I, of course, said yes and the next thing I knew she was back and Steve was on the line too. Then she told both of us the news that we'd been waiting 10 1/2 months to hear. She told us that we had been matched up with a little girl!! She went on to tell us a little about her and I was so excited that I could barely focus. Steve and I just kept saying that we couldn't believe this. She told us that she was sending us an email with pictures of her, and information about her background and medical history. We got off the phone with Caitlyn and I called Steve back and said that I would run home and grab the lap top and head to his work so that we could go over the information together. I practically skipped home and Steve and I both started calling our families to tell them the good news. I remember my hands feeling shaky as I tried to call my Mom and Mariam. It was just so surreal. After all the wait and anticipating how and when we would get the news, it ended up being such a surprise. It was so awesome!!! I think Steve called everyone he knows to tell them the good news. I would listen to him talking on the phone and telling everyone about his little girl. I couldn't help but smile hearing him say "she's amazing". We went out to dinner that night to celebrate and decided we would sleep in the next morning and savor the day. At aroud 7am the next morning, I noticed that he was laying in bed wide awake and I asked him why he wasn't sleeping. He said "I can't sleep! It's like Christmas!". Yup, it doesn't get much better than that.