Flurry of Activity and Adoption 101

What an amazing few days in the Rwanda adoption program!

As of today, there are 9 families that I know of that have received their approvals! In case you don't know what that means, it means their families have been approved to adopt from Rwanda. About two months after you receive your approval, you receive your referral, which is when you see your child's beautiful face and their name! More on that in a minute...

So the adoption process goes like this:
I. Paperwork phase, including home study. This is when you gather all kinds of paper and get it notarized, certified, and authenticated. You meet with a social worker on several occasions and they find out all sorts of things about you. :)

II. Submit all of this paperwork, called a dossier, to your agency, who then makes sure everything is in order. The Rwandan Embassy in DC then looks everything over, translates all pertinent information, and sends a letter of non-objection!

III. Dossier is sent to Rwanda. You follow the tracking number like a mad woman. Once it arrives, you are officially DTR, which means Dossier To Rwanda.

IV. Now, you wait. You wait for Approval. The ballpark for this wait is 3-6 months. During this time, the people in Rwanda are working hard to read all that paperwork!

V. Once you receive your approval, you wait for your referral. In your approval letter, it is explained that it will be around two months until your referral comes through. During this two months, the people in Rwanda are trying hard to match your family to a child. They are praying over each one! What a gift! Your referral is when you receive a picture of your beautiful child and their name! The day you have been waiting for!

VI. You are assigned a court date, about four weeks after your referral. The court decides if this referred child will actually become a part of your family! This is a huge day.

VII. Travel! From what I hear, this happens around two weeks after court.

Now, the amazing thing about these nine families is that many of them have been waiting since June for their approvals. They were the families who had waited the longest of anyone--over five months!
Things pretty much go in chronological order so things had really come to a stand still with no one hearing anything. This saddened us all, and made me take a step back and not expect ANYTHING any time soon.

But, when the families received their approvals over the Thanksgiving weekend, many of the letters were dated in September! Which means that had been approved in the time frame that they were expecting, but just hadn't been notified! So lots of emails had been sent to inform everyone about the approvals. What great news!

But this morning brought even better news, as many of these families received their referrals this morning! The two months between the approval and the referral had already passed, since the letters had actually been written in September, they just didn't know it!

How great is that? That's like finding out you are pregnant when you go into labor. I've always been jealous of those women. Approvals and referrals within two days of each other! WOW!

Before

One of my very favorite things to do in the world is look at before and after photographs. You know, where somebody takes a picture of somebody else's desk BEFORE they work really hard on it, and then they show you the AFTER picture and you stand amazed.

You get to see the before picture, and hear a story about how the desk got to this state, such as bad habits, poor time management, and general busy-ness.

Then you get to read about how the person decided to make a change, get to work, learn some new skills, and get rid of some serious stuff. A weekend or 7 later, the person emerges from the piles, and their desk is now the perfect example of organization and beauty.

Shows like Mission Organization and Clean Sweep just are my favorites. What seems to be such a hopeless mess is really just a few work sessions away from being a "great space".

As I write this post, I am surrounded by piles. Piles of paper. Piles of notebooks. Piles of things that need to be given away. Piles of CDs. I am definitely in the "before" picture.

I have read many, many good books on subjects such as organization, decluttering, cleaning. It's just implementing the great ideas that is difficult.

So, I am actually going to post before pictures of our office. Yikes.

Two things that would be good for you to know:
1. I am doing this to motivate myself to show you the "after" picture at SOME point in the future, but I can't say when for sure.
2. This before picture in no way reflects my husband's things, he really is organized and gracious and just all around neat.
Tomorrow is the Sabbath, the Day of Rest (I know, I know, it looks like I've had a few too many of those!) so I won't be touching it then. But, maybe on Monday I'll have the courage to start!

Is it November already?

Does time fly or does time fly?

I really didn't mean to be a once every 3 weeks kind of blogger, but man, before you know it, the day is just gone.

What have I been up to?

**reading the Clutter Diet book, and trying to learn new tricks about being organized
It seems hopeless.

**Christmas shopping, as December really seems to do me in. Out of my family of 6, we have 3 December birthdays. Yikes. Can you smell the stress? I just know that our precious ones from Rwanda will have December birthdays! God likes to stretch me like that.

**checking emails in case of referrals from Rwanda. Not my own referral (it will be several months before we will receive that) but the referrals of friends in our program.

**emptying closets of "summer" clothes and trying to fill them with "winter" clothes. The upstairs of our home is a current disaster. I do pack clothes away for our next blessings, but some aren't worth keeping. But instead of just giving them away (or throwing them away!) like a normal person, I have to give them to the "right" person, which means they stick around here in a nice pile for months.

**trying to spend less time on the computer reading blogs. It is improving somewhat, with a long way to go.

**trusting God in new ways with our future, leaving it in His hands. Then I snatch it back, and then I trust again. What a process! My own plans exhaust me, yet God promises His yoke is light. Why I would exchange the two confounds me, yet I do it again and again.

Thank You, God, for planning for me, for thinking for me, for loving me.