WE ARE HEADED TO ETHIOPIA!!!

Wow! I can hardly believe it. It was a regular Friday. What I was doing was a little different. I was working from home. Sitting on my couch with my laptop open. Working on plans for our middle school service project camp that is happening in July. I was going to Karston's annual parent BBQ and so I decided it was best to just work from home and not waste all that time driving. But then...something that would change the way I viewed that day forever.
 
At 10:55 I heard that special ringtone I only have for Dove Adoptions International. I was not expecting it to be honest. When I was waiting for our referral call, I had my phone on all the time making sure I would hear the ringtone. I would even apologize to people I would have lunch with, because I don't like to have my phone interrupt my time with others. I have had my phone on silent plenty these days. I just happened to have it on this day. It rang, and Mercy Me sang, "On the other side of the world, she is just a few days old. A helpless little girl with no family of her own. She is not to blame for the journey she is on..."

Man that song gets me every time I hear it. It has such deep meaning for me now, especially as it is my special ringtone connected to my children!

Anyhow, this was THE call. Well, the other THE call. The one where they told us we had a court date! That's right. You did not read that wrong. We got our court date! June 20th!!! Can you believe it? On June 20th we will be standing before a judge in Ethiopia explaining that we want to legitimately adopt these two amazing children.

I seriously can not believe it is actually happening. 3 weeks from now we will actually be in Ethiopia! They want us there the week before so we have time to visit our kids and meet with our lawyer who will walk us through the process of our court date. It is so surreal. I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. I have equated parts of the adoption process to being pregnant before.

* Getting accepted into the process was like finding out we were pregnant.
* Knowing our paperwork was received in Ethiopia and we were on the list was like hearing the babies' heart beat.
* Getting our referrals was like seeing the ultrasound and finding out the gender (plus seeing their actual faces)
* Getting the call with a court date was like going into labor, albeit a very long labor.
* "Meetcha day" (the day we actually meet the kids) will be like the birth, and then they will have to put in the NICU, so they have to stay at the "hospital" for a while and we can visit them and love on them.
* When we pass court it will be like taking the babies home from the hospital.
* I guess passing our Embassy appointment and arriving back in the US don't really fit into the "pregnancy" equation, but maybe that is more like the follow up doctor appointments. ;)

Soon I will be blogging from across the pond and letting you in on the life of us in another world. Our children will be going with us and we are currently planning on staying from court to embassy. We have no idea how long this will take. We have seen people do that in as short as 3 weeks, our friends Josh and Bex Mann did it in 6 weeks and my sister and bro-in-law did it in 3 months. Theirs was an extreme case and is not the norm.

So here we go. We are launching on a new chapter. It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's scary. It's unpredictable. It's breathtaking. Sitting completely in the hands of God...it's good.

Join us, won't you? Now...where is that to-do list?