I wish I was in Ghana

Well, the adoption is proceeding.

So far we've gotten two pictures and a social welfare report. It is frustrating because with every little bit of information we receive, it just gives us more questions!

For instance, the social welfare report said that our little one has Kwashiorkor, a form of severe protein malnutrition. We later recieved a report from our contact in Ghana who said he had taken our little girl and her biomom to the hospital on Sat. and "they were fine" but baby needs formula. Ok, we can believe that if baby has kwashiorkor, then she needs formula, however, from everything I've read if a baby is diagnosed with kwashiorkor, then they probably need to be hospitalized?? Kwashiorkor is a medical term that has Ghanian roots, so I'm wondering if they use the term kwashiorkor interchangably with malnutrition?? The only thing we can do is email our contact again and again with questions....

Anyways, a family who is also with our agency is traveling to Ghana this week so we are sending money with them to take to our contact so he can buy formula for our baby and hopefully get her back on tracky nutrition wise.

We sent our I600A to be approved on Monday. The funny thing is that we got our I800A approval on Friday!! So I copied the I800A approval and wrote a little letter about our transferring programs..hopefully that will speed our I600A approval.

My understanding is that as soon as Ghana receives our dossier elements and our I600A approval we should proceed fairly quickly. Our adoption agent, Robin, said it could even be as early as March!! How fast!!! I am soooo not ready..so much to do. I'm hoping that Valentine's weekend will be spent painting the nursery and getting it ready.

Love!

Everything changes.....

Matthew Sweet so eloquently sang, "Everything changes, but change itself..."

It is so true.

Here's our most recent change.....

We are adopting a baby from Ghana, Africa!!! She is a beutiful little one not quite two months old.

If everything goes as planned we will be officially Mommy and Daddy by early May!

But Kasie, you say, we thought you were adopting from Armenia...what happened?

Well, our adoption agency recently started a program in Ghana. They sent out an email about a week and a half ago stating the had a referral for a little baby girl in Ghana. Scott and I were immediately interested. Of course, we had to wrestle with the thoughts and issues of transracial adoption, but we came to the conclusion that this is what we were meant to do.

I have to admit, as soon as I saw her little picture I was in love.

We officially accepted the referral on Saturday and ever since I've been doing nothing but thinking of our little girl.

I'll post more soon....but...YAYAY!! I'm going to be a Mommy!!!!

Fingerprints....check!

Well, we made our journey to the US Dept. of Homeland Security office in Durham to complete our fingerprints. Let me tell you, I was nervous and excited all at the same time.

So nervous in fact that I threw my appointment slip away with my coffee as soon as we entered the building into a very LARGE trashcan!

Here's the recap:

I happily pranced my way to the security guard and he says grimly, "ID and appointment slip.." I held out my hand and smiled. He looked at me then looked down at my hand. I then looked down and realized I was holding out only my license! So I slumped back to the very LARGE garbage can and dove headfirst in and luckily found my slip. I walked back over to the security guard, and handed it to him. He rolled his eyes, took my slip and sniffed it! Then he looked at me with raised eyebrows and said, "Coffee?" I shrugged and nodded, thankfully he then let us through.

Of course anyone who knows my husband, knows that he was standing there watching all of this just shaking his head. He is used to my excited nervous slipups by now I guess!

The rest of the appointment went smoothly. We made it safely through the metal detector, and then were finished with the whole thing in about 30 minutes! I was surprised at how quick and efficient the were.

So, now we just wait to hear from them. We are hoping by the end of January. Then we will send everything to Armenia. But we do have quite a bit of work to do on our dossier before then...sigh. It WILL happen, I know it will.