Guess What Arrived Today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh yeah! You guessed it!!!!! Our 171H arrived in the mail today - much faster than I expected after last week's fiasco. In the morning we are headed to Austin to have our dossier bundle State certified. Then we will overnight it to AWAA.

The way things should go from there is...

AWAA will receive the packet on Thursday afternoon. By next Tuesday afternoon, all dossiers that have been received by AWAA (that includes ours) will be taken for Authentication and then to the Ethiopian Embassy for further work. And if all goes well (meaning, no more hiccups and all paperwork is good to go) then our paperwork should be in the mail next Friday - headed for ETHIOPIA!!!!!!!!!!!! That Friday date will be our D.T.E. (dossier to Ethiopia date) which is the date our official wait begins until we receive that greatly anticipated referral/photo of our baby girl. Again - if all goes perfectly - we can estimate that our referral will arrive sometime between January and March of 2009. And I (Cindy) would travel to Ethiopia with my dear friend Cristie Martine (Billy is staying home with Libby - pray for them! haha!) sometimes between March and May. Again - this is an estimate that has the potential of changing a hundred times between now and then - but it's one I still want to be excited about!

Thank you for all your prayers. This has been quite a high-stress week for our family. We received our new CD (had 1500 printed for summer camps, online sales, etc) that we just recorded and it sounds great, but to our dismay, we discovered that all the digital information on the CD was wrong. Song titles, band name - it was all wrong and it has been quite stressful trying to get it fixed. On top of adoption drama and CD drama we have been working through several other high stress situations that aren't worth explaining here - but we have turned a corner this evening and God has graciously seen us through. We will rest in wonderful peace tonight. He has been so good to us!!!