Our Journey Begins

We are very excited to announce our decision to adopt a child frm Ethiopia! With two beautiful daughters -- ages 7 and 10 -- and our 40th birthday's this year, we both felt like we had much love to give, and weren't ready to move into the "easy" life quite yet! We started by doing some research -- speaking with friends who have adopted, floating the idea by relatives, hours and hours of internet research and correspondence. After a few months of that, in January 2008 we met with a local homestudy adoption agency, who helped us choose a country, and educated us on the process.



For us, we started out looking at Haiti. However, in the end, Ethiopia was chosen for a few reasons. First and foremost, the agency had very positive things to say about how the orphanages are run overseas. Ethiopians place strong emphasis on family, and are very loving people who hold their children constantly. This seemed to be consistent with our parenting style. Once the child is placed in the orphanage, the orphanage workers continue this type of upbringing, as they create strong bonds with the children. While there is never any guarantees, our feeling was Ethiopia gave us a good chance for a child who is able to accept our love. The agency seemed to have had quite a lot of experience with adopting Ethiopian children, with positive results.



A second reason Ethiopia was selected was timing. For various reasons, we did not want to be in a situation where we would be waiting 2-3 years for some bureacracy overseas to sit on our paperwork. We have heard this can be case with countries such as Haiti, Guatemala and China. For Ethiopia, we are being told both by our agency and several adopting parents whom we've chatted with that we can expect a timeframe of 10-18 months to bring our new child home (starting in January).



A third factor was simply need -- Ethiopia has a high degree of need for adoption due to it's poverty, and the high mortality rate of parents, primarily due to AIDS and related illnesses. We will be welcoming a child into our family. We believe he will add more to our family than we can ever imagine.



A couple of other factors played into our decision -- only one trip to the country is necessary, and in some cases can be eliminated all together. With Susan being unsure if she could make the trip (she's very much afraid of flying over oceans -- more on that later!), we wanted to keep our options open. And finally, the children from Ethiopia are absolutely beautiful!



Please check into this blog periodically for updates on our life and the adoption progress!