Off To Ethiopia! --Our paperwork, that is...

I'm still getting used to this blogging thing, so I have not developed a habit of updating the blog regularly yet. We can report that we completed our foreign dossier, which is the paperwork that goes to Ethiopia. Gladney sent it to Washington D.C. via a courier, who will walk it through some final authentications before shipping it to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, it will be translated and then be filed in the court system, where it will stay parked until Gladney makes a match for us.

That means that we have entered the gray zone that I have learned is called "waiting for referral." This means we are waiting for Gladney to locate a child who matches the what we are hoping for, which is two siblings under the age of two. As I wrote in a previous post, we have learned that two siblings under two are not common, so we could be waiting for a while. Our case worker at Gladney told us that if we were requesting only one child, we would probably be only 2-3 months from traveling (based on similar placements), but making a match for two children could take a lot longer.