It is lonely at the top, but I'm happy we are finally there!

Well, Bryan has been asking me to post for a while now. He has actually started a parallel blog at a different site so we will have to see how we can merge the two. Then I actually won this crazy contest that my friend, Gina Root was having on her blog and she linked to this blog and I'm totally embarrassed with my ONE post on here!

So we have been DTE since 8/14/2009. That means that we are a little shy of waiting for 6 months now for our Ethiopian little girl's referral. We belong to a group of fellow AWAA families that all compare notes and see who is in the top ten of waiting for referrals. Of course, there are "mystery" families with our agency that have not joined in all the fun we have on our group as of yet. So there is a list that is published in our group that is called "The Top Ten Waiting for Referral (that we know of)". We are at the top of that list! We are very excited to be at the top, but it is lonely at the top! We don't know how much longer it will be before we get a referral and there is no one ahead of us to compare note with. We do know that the last people that requested little girls had to wait just a little over 7 months, so that is encouraging. So funny that it was easier to wait when we weren't at the top yet, though. I loved getting to the top ten and then watching our name move up, but now that we are here, I really hope that we can be off the waiting for referral list soon!

To make things even more interesting, there is a magical email that our agency sends out that is called "on deck". It is kind of like a courtesy email that reconfirms your requested age and gender and tells you that you are likely to receive a referral in 1-3 months time. So, every morning I get up and check my email to see if we are "on deck" yet. But alas, the magical email has eluded us thus far.

So to recap, we are #1 on the unofficial list of families waiting for referral, but we are not "on deck". I've been fortunate enough to make friends with quite a few families with our agency. It has been such a blessing to be able to follow their stories and keep up with their journey as they travel to Ethiopia. We also have quite a few friends that are waiting below us on the "top ten" and look to us to see if there is any movement at the top. Man, I will be so very happy to get our referral for our daughter and be done at the top of this list already!

Finally getting around to starting a Blog!

So glad to finally getting around to creating a blog.  I'm finding that in the adoption world, you must have a blog to make friends/be friends with those who are traveling that road with you.  We have been waiting for our daughter from China for a REALLY LONG TIME already, and are paperchasing for our Ethiopian daughter and it seems that I can no longer resist the blogging world.  I have blog stalked others for the last 2 or more years and am finally ready to give it a go myself.

Where we are now in the process:

• We have been logged in with China for a daughter since 9/3/07
• We have already had to update paperwork for China once since applying
• We are paperchasing for a daughter from Ethiopia and hope to be DTE in a few months.
• We are almost done with all paperwork and are now waiting for our I-171H
  

We are so glad that we have an agency that allows us to do concurrent adoptions and we plan on bringing our daughter home from Ethiopia while we continue to wait on our daughter from China.