A little update

I guess I haven't been updating often enough...

On the adoption front, our homestudy was approved by the agency in Washington and sent our application for advance processing of an orphan petition to USCIS. We're still waiting for that to come back.

In the meantime, we have 10 hours of adoption training to do online (thank God we don't have to sit in a classroom and do it!) and we are halfway done with that.

We applied for and have already received our passports.

We have to get notarized letters from our bank, our city police department, our doctors and 3 more references (the old ones don't count because they're not notarized) saying that we are healthy, responsible citizens in good standing who are capable of raising children, and we have to send a notarized letter to the government of Ethiopia introducing ourselves and our intentions.

We have to sign and get notarized a form naming someone in Ethiopia as power of attorney for our kids there when we know who they are to secure medical testing for them and to represent us with the government and embassy.

After all of those things are notarized, we have to send all of them to the apostille in Washington DC, which from what I understand notarizes the notarized documents.

We also got our appointments to get fingerprinted (because for some reason the ones we did a year and a half ago for Vivi's adoption don't count). This time we got a letter saying "This is your appointment date and time" instead of getting to schedule it ourselves. And we have to go all the way down to Detroit to do it.

I think that's about all the progress we've made so far.

And on the home front, we're keeping busy and trying to keep cool! We joined a new play group for local adoptive families. They get together one Saturday a month to do something like go to the zoo or a park, and also do occasional things during the week. In a couple of weeks a few moms with African American or biracial little girls are going to get together and bring all our products and supplies and have a hair party to exchange ideas. I'm really excited for that! We learned about the group through a mom and daughter we met at the library. The little girl's name is Viviana, and they call her Vivi (pronounced Vih-vee). It's funny to have Vih-vee and Vee-vee playing together :)