I have such mixed emotions about summer. It's wonderful because people are outside and it's easier to interact, make new friends, see old ones, etc. It's also terrible because it's HOT, people in the city get irritable and we all know where that leads... and it's BUSY. The past two weeks we have had mission groups staying and working at the church. Also both a blessing and a curse. We get lots of work done but it's so hot and so busy that it's hard to find time to take a rest. Even harder now that we're parents. Abe is working in the mornings at the chicken plant still so that leaves me to both run the group and be a mama. I'm lucky last week my mama came to help me. Today it's just me, Zeke, and the group. Zeke needed to nap so I left them to their own devices to get the work done. It makes us not such good hosts for groups, but it makes me a good mama to see my kid laying here next to me zonked out asleep. So I'll take it. I'm sure a bunch of junior high students and their leaders don't miss me anyway!
For those of you interested in the details of our adoption you'll be interested in this part of today's blog: Wednesday was our first meeting with our social worker from Catholic Charities the organization that is doing our home study. It was just an initial meeting for her to go over the paperwork with us and give us all the forms we needed. I felt kind of silly as I tried to answer her initial questions, "Why Ethiopia over other international places?" "Why international over domestic?" "Why adoption at all?" Sometimes I feel like I don't even have any answer because to say "I feel like that's where God led us." Sometimes seems not like an answer that people accept. But luckily, she's the kind of lady that seemed to accept it, even past all my ummms and uhhhs. I'm sure in a world where we see on the news that people have just sent their children back to their birth countries workers need to be very careful to be upfront about the risks of international adoption.
After she questioned us a bit on the why's and why not's she gave us yet a THIRD stack of papers to fill out and a check list of all the documents we need to get ordered and copied. She asked us what our timeline looked like and whether we were interested in getting it done really quickly or taking our time. We told her that with all the other jobs (pastoring, chickening, parenting, etc.) that we would probably be kind of slow going on the paperwork so it may take us until December. So that's our goal: To have all our paperwork done and have our interviews with her by December. Then we can quickly accomplish getting our dossier done and get waiting! Then maybe we'll have another baby by Zeke's second birthday!
So we've started writing out our very long "self study" and answering a million questions about ourselves, our families, our relationship and our goals. Very thought provoking to have to really think about yourself. We also have to do things that should have been done when we were pregnant with Zeke: pick someone to care for our kids in case of our untimely demise, get some life insurance, make sure our house has a fire escape route from every floor, etc. So it's good for our whole family going through this adoption process, it's making us better parents to Zeke and to our future baby.
