The Timing of It All..

There are two questions that I get asked more than any other:

• When do you expect to have your child home?
• How are you doing it financially? Or along those lines - how much does Ethiopian adoption cost?
  

I'm going to tackle the first question in this post, with the second to come later on. Here's an overview of the expected timeline for our adoption from Ethiopia:

The timeline can be broken up into 3 main pieces:

• Paperwork and Homestudy (approximately 3 months)
  
• Waiting for our referral (approximately 6-9 months)
  
• Court and Travel (approximately 4 months)
  

We started in July, so that puts us out to approximately September, 2011. We've got a 14 month pregnancy on our hands. Whew, seems like forever away...

• Paperwork and Homestudy - This includes getting birth certificates, having physicals, police checks, in-home homestudy visit, references, and endless signatures that all had to be notarized.
• Waiting for Referral - After sending our paperwork over to Ethiopia, we are then waiting for our referral, which is our "match". We'll get a picture, name, age, and medical information of our child. Once we accept the referral, knowing that the child will be ours, we are then just waiting for the courts to make it legal.
• Courts and Travel - A new rule in Ethiopia requires us to travel over to be in Court to legal declare our intent to adopt our child. This will likely be a few months after we get our referral. We'll get to spend some time with the child in the orphanage, and then go to court in Addis Ababa (the capital city). Then comes the hardest part - we come back home. We have to come back home after going to court to legal make our child a part of the Baker Crew, to give the paperwork time to get through the system and to the U.S. Embassy. Approximately 1-2 months after traveling to Ethiopia the first time, we'll go again to pick up the daughter that God has planned for our family from the beginning - what a great day that will be! (sidenote - in Adoption lingo this day is called your "gotcha day").
  

That's the general overview of our timeline, which we're leaving in God's hands. Hopefully these approximations are longer than what we'll experience, we'll certainly do everything as fast as possible on our end!

Drew