The day has come!!!!!!!! We have a referral!!!!

We just accepted our referral today for a beautiful, precious, tiny 3 month old baby girl.

We actually received our call on Monday 1/27 at 1pm. I looked down at my office phone and saw on the called ID that is was Children's Hope. My heart was pounding so hard! On the other end of the line was Toni,our case manager. She told me she had John on the line and had some news for us! Toni proceeded to tell us about this sweet little baby.

Let me tell you, the last two weeks have been a whirlwind. Something really amazing happened.... There is an unbelievable story behind all this and I want to share it, but I have to wait until the adoption is complete write about it. There are a few people that John and I owe so much to, these people are such saints!

I also want to commend our agency. Childrens Hope International is a wonderful agency, and staff at the St.Louis office and from what I am hearing the group is Ethiopia is absolutely wonderful.

For our blog readers that are not in this adoption world, unfortunately we are not allowed to post photos of the baby until we have passed court. These are very strict rules that we have to follow! But...I will tell you, she is really pretty. She has huge brown eyes and the cutest lips. She has a lot of hair for such a little squirt!

We cant wait to meet her! So our next step is that we wait for a court date to be issued. This is a bit of a downer, because the process used to be fairly quick. Ethiopian adoptions have just taken off..the amount of adopting familes is increasing each month. There just isn't enough judges (only 2 or 3?) to process all these families, so the wait times have gotten longer.

I know we will hopefully travel in the spring. That means that she will be closer to 6-7 months old. She will have changed so much by the time we have her in our arms!