Jeremiah 29:11

"For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope."

Jeremiah 29:11

Last Friday we received an email from our adoption agency in regard to a waiting child in Ethiopia.  This email was sent to several families that, like us, were part of the Ethiopia adoption program. Amazingly, this child fit our already approved home study criteria.  We immediately contacted All God's Children to express our interest in making this child a part of our family.  When John connected with our case manager on Monday, she told him she was expecting our call.  She said she had a feeling we would be interested in this waiting child.  We stayed up late last night making the last bit of revisions to our dossier in preparation for our follow-up call today.


The good news is, we finished our documents, John got them notarized, and they are in the mail headed to All God's Children.  On the flip side, our case manager was out sick today so we were unable to reconnect.  We are hoping to know more soon.


Although we would love to be the family this child has been waiting for, we really just hope and pray that this child gets home soon.  We realize that may be with another family, and we are at peace with that.  Please join us in prayer for this waiting child in Ethiopia.  Pray that this child gets home to their forever family as quickly as possible.


If you are curious about the waiting child program, or just want a little lift, I've attached a video from our agency below. To read more about the waiting child program click here.

Be The Difference from Videos for AGCI on Vimeo.



Nicole and John Scott

Happy Birthday ah-By-ah (Daddy)!

Yesterday we celebrated John's 30th birthday with a dinner downtown.  Usually we do not go out to restaurants outside our zip code, but thanks to the Wharton's we had dinner reservations at The Common Table.  Here's a picture of John celebrating.

When I asked John how he wanted to celebrate his big day, he responded with, "Can we just go to bed early?"  Ha!  I guess that what's you get when you hit the big three-o!  Annie hit the target when she gave John this card:

On another note, yesterday morning we received a newsletter from our adoption agency.  Unfortunately, the timeline has changed for our adoption.  From what we understand, the U.S. Embassy has revised the requirements to declare a child an orphan.  This means it will take quite a bit longer for the children to be declared orphans, and a slower process for the adoptive families.  At this point our agency is predicting 18-24 months for our referral.   We definitely weren't expecting this, but are trying to stay optimistic.  We've been saying from the beginning that we will do this in His time, so there must be a reason for this change.  In the mean time, we will enjoy the time we have together and continue to pray for our sweet child.

Hope you all are doing well!  Happy early Valentine's Day!

Paperwork Sent!!!

After many months of working hard to get all our paperwork in order for the adoption, it has arrived in Oregon.  It seemed as though it was taking forever, but we able to persevere through delays and changes to get it completed.  In total we had 46 pieces of paper that we had to have 2 copies of for a grand total of 98 pieces of paper sent to All God's Children.  This completes our dossier stage of the process.  We are now in the review stage, which shouldn't take too long.  We are also waiting on the completion of our Addendum to our Home Study.  Since John now has a new full time job, we needed to note that change in our file.  Luckily we did not have to totally redo our Home Study, but were able to just make an addendum to it.  Our next step is for All God's Children to review all our paperwork and have them okay everything.  From there they will send it over to Ethiopia where we will get in line for our court date that will result in our referral.  The referral is the courts sending us the information for the child they believe will most benefit from our family.  We will then have one week to review and pray over this information and decide if this is the child that will become ours.  This is when things get exciting.  After we approve the referral we will be making two trips to Ethiopia for court appearances finalizing our adoption.

We are so excited to be making this giant leap forward in our adoption process.  Again we cannot thank everyone enough for their love and support and most importantly their prayers as we continue moving towards growing our family.

Love,

Nicole and John