When will our proposal come?

The short answer is, we don’t know. It could be tomorrow (unlikely) or it could be another several months. We are praying that it will be this summer sometime. After that we have to wait between 4 and 9 months before we are able to travel. We are discouraged as the timeline seems to be extending out and out further. I allow myself to contact the adoption agency once a month to ask about progress (even though I know that they would call if there was news). When I called at the end of May, there were several proposals for baby girls to go in July still and several more in August… then us. This leaves me second guessing our choice for a girl. If we had been indifferent about sex we might already have a little boy home… Adoption is an interesting process emotionally. I go through periods where I think of little else, and I spend copious amounts of time (that I don’t have), on the internet, researching adoption, Ethiopian customs and anything else I can get my hands on. I feel very alone during these periods because our friends and family do not have similar experience to draw from and cannot relate. Occasionally, people forget about the adoption because I do not have a growing belly. It is easy to be discouraged and depressed. People that do know and care, have run out of questions to ask us and I get tired of telling people “no news yet”. Last time, I called the adoption agency was a couple of weeks ago. It left me depressed and I thought I would make myself feel better by going to a baby store I had heard about (you know… a little retail therapy). I wandered around the store and left even more frustrated than when I went in. I realized that nothing in the store was really applicable to our situation since in all likelihood our daughter will be over one by the time we finally have her in our arms. I have no idea if I should be setting up a crib or a toddler bed. How are the kids handling it? The boys are frustrated to. Ryan asked me the other day why we couldn’t just buy a plane ticket to go get her. He and Paul pray for her every night. Ryan is the only four years old I know that can pick out Ethiopia on a map. Paul is starting to ask if she will ever come home. Ryan tells me regularly, that he misses his baby sister and he wonders what she is doing. Had we known that the process would be this long, I don’t think we would have told them right away. Ah well hindsight is 20/20. This winter we had a cool moment with Ryan. He was looking at some mail I had pinned on our bulletin board and was focused on a picture of some people in Darfur sitting under a tarp. He asked me what was going on in the picture and I explained it as best as I could. I explained that the people had had to leave their homes because of war and go to the refugee camp. I explained that they didn’t have shelter and likely very little food or water and that they didn’t have any money to buy the things they need. Ryan asked me to show him where Darfur was on a map. I showed him and he was astonished to see how close it was to Ethiopia. Then my four year old went and dumped out his piggy bank and asked me if I would help him give his money to the people that live there. We made the donation and he had a very satisfied look on his face when he said “Today they won’t be hungry anymore”. Wow. I was so proud of him. --Leah