Out of Our Hands

Today is the day that the paperwork portion of the adoption process is finally over. We just sent our completed dossier to a courier service in Washington DC. It is cleverly named The Assistant Stork because they help adoptive families by delivering adoption paperwork to various places in DC. They will first take our dossier to the State Department and wait while each document is authenticated. Then they will drop off the dossier at the Ethiopian Embassy so that everything can be authenticated again. I guess that can take a couple of days, depending on how backed up things are at the Embassy. Once all of that is done, they will send the dossier to our agency, and from there it will be sent off to Ethiopia.

Having the dossier submitted means that we will officially be on the waiting list to receive our referral. Right now, it looks like we will be at #11 for our agency. Several of the families ahead of us on the list want a child of a specific gender (we are open to either gender) and some of them are requesting children in a different age range (ours is 0-3). Most are only adopting one child, but at least three families are adopting two. Because of all these factors, it is hard to guess when we can expect a referral. We are just glad to have all of the paperwork behind us. And now we wait.