Our baby is getting closer....

We will be having our caseworker here on Wednesday for the final meeting on the home study. She will be looking over our house...we have been cleaning and organizing like crazy for the last week. The house looks great, the challenge now is keeping it clean for 3 days.

We had out first adoption related training in Denver yesterday. The state of Colorado requires 24 hours of training in order to adopt a child internationally. The teacher was great and gave us a lot of great tools to use with our kids now. The focus was on parenting a child with special needs. As we have found in Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew , all adopted children experience trauma when they are relinquished (given up for adoption). Children who experience trauma are considered special needs. Although we don't know what other needs our children (any of them) will have as the grow, this class gave us an idea of some of the symptoms we should be looking for. Nicholas is going through the phase again where he is terrified of the bath tub. We were really struggling with how to deal with this...the kids HAS to have a bath. Learning about sensory integration disorder yesterday taught us that when children have this, the therapy involves slowly introducing the "scary" thing to this child. We are going to try this technique with Nicky and the bath and see how it works. We will start with the tub with no water in it. He might not be squeaky clean for a couple of months, but we need to do what is best to reduce the terror he experiences with bath time. We thought it was a great class and we got to meet other families adopting from Ethiopia with our agency who are in about the same phase we are.

We also had the opportunity to meet and talk to our agency Representative yesterday. Aneata is wonderful and we would recommend our agency, International Adoption Network, to everyone! She said we will probably have all of our paperwork in by the end of September. Our agency will do a referral once the paperwork is on the way to Washington D.C. All agencies have different processes, but ours will do the referral before the paperwork is in Ethiopia. Currently there are five families waiting for a baby girl and only 2 waiting for a baby boy. Since we are open to either, we will probably be getting a baby boy. They are expecting more children to come available in the next couple of months. If everything moves quickly, we could have our baby home by Christmas at the earliest! Wow, we are going to be ready for that, but things have slowed down in Ethiopia, so we are anticipating it will be sometime after the New Year.

We made the decision last week to leave our kids here. It was a tough decision, but there are so many things unknown about how the trip will go, that we want to be able to focus on the new baby and know our kids are safe here at home. Simon's wonderful brother and sister in law, Jonathan and Jenny have so graciously agreed to keep them while we are gone. We are very blessed to have them in our lives...THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!