What's Next?

We are still spinning from our surprise referral of E! I keep staring at her sweet little face wishing I could just scoop her up. There are a few other families from our agency over at Hannah's Hope right now with their children, who I hope will be able to take a few pictures of E for us. We treasure any little glimpse of her!

Hannah's Hope is a very nice transition home that E will stay at until we can bring her home. Special "mothers" (caretakers), doctors, nurses, developmental toys, clothes, food, etc are available to her. Before E was at HH, she spent about a month in an orphanage. Before that, E lived in the Gambella region of ET with her family. Our sweet girl has experienced a lot of loss and heartache in her short little life that we hope to help her grieve and process through. We want to honor and protect her, as well as her family so we are keeping that part of her story private.

We were referred E on Feb 24th, which was her 3rd birthday. Yes, Oliver is only 7.5 months older than her! We look forward to watching them grow up together and can't wait to watch Oliver be a big brother. He already told the bank teller today that when he was a baby he used to live in Ethiopia until his mommy came and picked him up! So funny!

We had just finished up our referral paperwork only to learn we must update our Homestudy too. Sometimes I wonder if this paperwork process ever ends. Once we complete paperwork, we will be waiting for a court date which we expect to have in the next 2-3 months. When we have a court date we will fly to ET and spend about a week with E. Passing Ethiopian court will acknowledge that E is our daughter! The hard part of this is that we must return home without her, and wait for an Embassy appointment. Once we hear back from the Embassy (which likely will be a few months) we will fly back and spend another week in ET with E before flying home.

Obviously, leaving E in ET will be very difficult. She is old enough to grasp what is happening and we are concerned that she might feel we are abandoning her. Please pray for her little heart through all of this. We can't imagine all that she is having to go through.