Happy Monday everybody. I hope you enjoyed your weekend! We had a lot of fun…on Saturday we celebrated Maggie’s birthday with a giant Snow White cake, dinner out with our family and some friends, and then a trip to the movies to see “Open Season”. (Pretty darn hilarious!)

Maggie enjoyed being “Princess” for the day (although truth be told, she is the princess most days!) and birthdays are always a lot of fun in our house.

The weekends are kind of nice…with all the kids home and all of our running around, I don’t have as much time to obsess over Belane and this dang waiver.

I am officially moving our tickets to October 21. Based on what the Embassy has told us and on the experiences of the last few families, Belane's waiver should be approved by then.

It is really emotionally draining…I want to be so excited that we could be leaving so soon, and yet part of me keeps reminding myself that there is no guarantee we will leave then. Since my aunt will be flying out from NY to watch our kids, she has to book at least two weeks in advance, so we have to get her tickets this week. Of course we can change everything if needed, but I am strongly hoping that we won’t need to. It sure would be nice to hear a promising update…

Our paperwork is now at the USCIS/Dept. of Homeland Security in Nairobi, Kenya, which handles waivers for Ethiopia (and several other countries). The email address for this office that is listed on their website does not work, so I had emailed the Rome, Italy office (who is over the Nairobi office) at the end of last week to ask if they would either give us a contact address for Nairobi or forward our message on.

This morning I got a pleasant message from Italy saying that they had forwarded our message on to the office in Nairobi. SO, hopefully Nairobi will respond to our email, and let us know when to expect this waiver to be done.

The Embassy told us that it would take 3-4 weeks total, which would make it done between Oct. 4 and Oct. 11. The last two families to adopt HIV+ children from Ethiopia waited three weeks from CDC response to waiver approval, which for us would make it Oct. 17.

So, we’re close. I know we’re close. I keep telling myself to chill out, and just know that it will happen soon, one way or another. But I am not good at chilling out when it comes to this stuff, so I am stressing myself out, too.

I definitely think that the hardest part of this whole waiver process is the “not knowing” how long the wait will be.

To keep myself busy, I have been learning American Sign Language. I am not sure if I have said this on here or not before, but Belane has been diagnosed with a significant hearing loss. We won’t be totally sure how severe (or not) her hearing loss actually is until we get her home and get her tested, but after reading about all of the benefits of ASL for toddlers, especially ones learning English, I decided it couldn’t hurt.

I purchased a bunch of the Signing Times DVD’s and my other kids have really been enjoying them and learning a lot. I’ve learned quite a bit too.

So, that is our un-eventful update of the day. Hopefully there will be something more exciting soon. Thanks again to all of you who are keeping us in your thoughts and prayers.