I've had nothing to update in the last couple of weeks. Like I mentioned, things from our end are pretty much finished (at least in the paperwork department). We have our adoption rummage sale coming up at church in a couple of weeks, and are working on applying for various adoption grants. Other than that things are pretty quiet for now.

I have started reading There is no me without you. It is the best adoption book I have read so far. It gives a good history of Ethiopia and it's people. I'm not to far into it, but it does not seem to have the negative spin that most of the other adoption books have had. I know we need to be prepared for the worst case scenarios, but reading them for hours gets a bit overwhelming!

The past week has been filled with paper gathering. Doctor's notes, police clearance letters, bank statements, reference letters and more! I'm pleased at our progress. We have all but 2 documents needed from our end and then we are finished with the paperwork. From there we just wait for approval from DCFS and then for a fingerprint appointment and processing from USCIS. Although I hate waiting (as if you didn't all know that) it is nice to have things from my end done.
All 3 of the families from the Bethany that had court last week passed through court with no hold ups and are now officially the parents of their new children! They will be travelling shortly (probably about a month from now) to pick them up. One more family that I know of has court at the end of the month. Hopefully that will go smoothly as well.

HomeStudy Complete!!

Last night we had our final home study visit with Alison (Social Worker). It went as smoothly as all the others have gone. She went over all the dossier guidelines with us and got us well under way. We also found out that she is a notary and will notarize all of the documents that we need to sign. Also she is going to have the entire dossier state sealed for us and make all of our copies for us! This is huge, as these are some of the most time consuming jobs of the dossier.
I also found out that Illinois is the only state that requires a letter of endorsement from DCFS before applying to Immigration. This is going to add about 3 weeks to the process. Immigration then takes approx. 6 weeks to process their paperwork. (It is longer in other states.) So we are still looking at a while before our paperwork goes to Ethiopia, but at least the work on our end is winding down.