Within minutes of deciding that Josh and I did indeed both want to adopt Solomon, I had emailed Adoption Advocates International (who we used to adopt our Belane and highly recommend), and let them know that we wanted him! They were already aware that we were considering adopting him because we had requested his file and an updated medical report. I got an email back almost right away saying that if we could get our paperwork updated quickly, that they would put him on "unofficial hold" for us.

Well, "quickly" is my middle name when it comes to doing adoption paperwork. I got right on the phone with our homestudy agency and got the paperwork we needed for a homestudy update sent to us. I had AAI send us an application packet. I pulled out Belane's paperwork and started getting things ready that I knew we would need. In less than three weeks I had all of the paperwork turned in to our homestudy agency, all of the paperwork turned in to AAI (including our completed dossier) and our I600A filed. Everything on my end is officially done. Phew!

The only thing we are waiting on to be able to officially accept the referral and get in the line of families waiting to get through the Ethiopian courts when they reopen is our homestudy update, but all of our paperwork is done for that and our social worker should have it completed and into AAI in the next few weeks.

A lot of people assume at this point that this adoption stuff is just "business as usual" for us, but we are every bit as excited for this adoption as we were with our first (and consequential adoptions). In fact, in a lot of ways we are even more excited because we are not nervous about paperwork (been there done that), we don't have to deal with the waiver process taking months (we got that changed) and we know that parenting an HIV+ child is something we can do just fine.

With Belane, we were confident about adopting an HIV+ child, but there were still a lot of things we needed to figure out. This time around we already have a wonderful doctor, we already have our insurance figured out, we found the right pharmacy, we're good at giving medications and know a lot about them, we understand the tests given and what the results mean, we have made up our mind about how to handle disclosure and we know in day to day life, it is no big deal. Having some experience behind us takes a lot of worry and stress off, and makes room for more excitement.

So, we are excited. We're very excited. We're at it again.



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