Dossiers, Band Aids, & Injera

A week has passed since our last post and we have been trucking along on the paperwork. We were contacted by the Ethiopia team on Monday and are now gathering the necessary papers for our dossier while we wait for our background checks to go through. For those of you who are not familiar with international adoption, the dossier is the document we send to Ethiopia telling them about us and requesting a referral. Our hope is that we will have everything notarized and ready to be certified before the home study is written up so that we can get it off to Ethiopia quickly. Even though we have been through one adoption with China, Ethiopia is a bit different. For one thing, we have found that the documentation required is less intense than with China. This is a welcome change and is one of the reasons the process takes less time.

Adoption is definitely a hurry up and wait game. You hurry up, get your paperwork done, and then you wait for a referral. You then hurry up and send in your acceptance documents. Then you wait to pass court and get the okay to travel. We have had much practice in the waiting after our experience with Eliza's adoption--we shall see if we have gotten any better at it.

In other family news, we are officially on Spring Break!!! We are taking next week off from school to hopefully enjoy some extra sleep and sunshine. I am not sure about the kids, but I know I am looking forward to it. This is the time of year where I get a little worn out and very ready to be done. I truly do enjoy teaching and learning with the kids, but I am not kidding when I say it is A LOT of work. It's hard to turn it off and just be in "mom" mode sometimes. Right now I am over analyzing my grammar in this post--have I ever mentioned that I prefer just about every subject over grammar?

Here are some important lessons I know I have learned in the last week. I'll share them with you in the hopes that you can learn from my craziness =).

1. If you put a band aid on your daughter's favorite stuffed toy--it won't come off easily. Seriously, we did this with Eliza's Wolfie last week when she got shots and spent a lot of time trying to pry it off piece by piece before bedtime. He still has some goo on him that Eliza reminds us to pray about every morning. If you remember you can pray too for "wolfie Doro band aid", as Eliza would say it.

2. God will and does find new and creative ways to grow you. Just go with it. Finding out we may have to travel twice to Ethiopia was not what we wanted to hear but I have no doubt the Lord will use whatever happens to grow our faith in Him.

3. Mommy time-outs rock! I took one of these a few days ago after dinner and really enjoyed sitting in a quiet room alone finishing up a book. Of course, what really helps is having an awesome husband like Toby who will hang with the kiddos.

4. Sunshine really does make even the most serious person cheerful. The girls and I were so giddy the other day about the sunshine we just had to dance in the kitchen. Really, even Emma, our most serious child, was getting down to the 50s music on my iphone.

5. When going to an Ethiopian restaurant in Portland for a cultural experience, the culture shock is more likely to come from Portland itself. Really and truly the food was so delicious and fun to eat. You use your hands and a bread called injera to eat even the salad. The drive around Portland afterwards in search of dairy free donuts--now that was a bit shocking to this small town girl.

I hope you all have a wonderful week full of God's many blessings!!!