A lot has happened......

It has been far too long since I have posted on here.
A lot has happened since the last time.

Here is what we have experienced:
We finally received a "birth parent" court date of May 15th.
The purpose of the birth parent court date is to finally terminate the parents rights to the child.
The birth mother did not show for this date, so the courts issued another date.
She did not show up for this one either.
So, the courts issued an order that an ad run in the paper for 15 days asking for her to show up.
This ad ran for the 15 days, which expired on June 17th.

On June 19th, 2013, we received the following message: "Congratulations, you have been assigned a court date of July 1, 2013. The next step in the process is to travel and appear before the High Court of Ethiopia on your assigned court date to testify in regards to your adoption."

It was a much longer email than just this, but this is the simplified version, and gets the point across.

So, we now have to be in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by June 29th. So, we are quickly moving to get all of our travel arrangements in order. We thought that plane tickets were going to be very high priced, but we actually got great deals on all of our flights.

We are taking our 3 kids with us to Amsterdam, as we have family that are missionaries there. All of us, including our kids, are so excited to visit here not only to see the beautiful city, but to spend time with family that we don't get to see as often as we would like. We will leave our kids there while the 2 of us travel to Addis. Then, once we are done with court, we will travel back to Amsterdam and finish our vacation with our family. I am excited for our adoption stuff, but I am almost as excited to spend a week in Amsterdam, as I have never been there either.

We are so pumped! This will be the first time that we will travel to Africa & the first time to meet Lewis. We know that it will be hard to leave, as it could be up to 3 months before we are allowed to come back to actually pick him up. We really hope that this process goes quickly, so that we can just bring him home. This has been a 2.5 year journey so far, and we are SO ready for him to be home with us, so we can begin this next chapter in our lives.

Thank you to all who have prayed for us & supported us.
I will try to keep this updated more often.
See you soon.

3rd garage sale was a success!

This last weekend we had our 3rd, and hopefully final, garage sale to raise funds for our adoption. It was a huge success. Thank you to all that donated stuff, bought stuff, and helped work at it as well.

We are now waiting to hear from our agency, Holt International, about a court date, so that we can travel to Ethiopia for the first time. Once we go to court, we then will come back to the States and wait to be approved. Once approved, we will travel back to Ethiopia (about 2 months from first trip) to actually pick the little guy up.