Clothing, Bows and Shoes, Oh My! and a Brief Update On Our Paperwork Pregnancy

Our agency calls the adoption process, the paperwork pregnancy. Thought that was VERY appropriate considering the mountain of paperwork we've been drowning in lately :-) Our Homestudy Paperwork is finally complete and is being mailed to us tomorrow we think. It is one of the last pieces we're waiting on to have our dossier complete. Once we have the dossier reviewed by our agency, we can take it to the county clerk's office to have it county authenticated and then send it off to be authenticated by the US Department of State as well as complete our Immigration forms. After that's all done we can finally receive a referral. So, we're getting there, slowly but surely. Once we have a referral, we can not only learn whom we are adopting but find out more details for court date timeframes.

One thing we will be doing when we travel to Ethiopia is taking donations of shoes (particularly CROCS - they're lightweight and the kiddos love them), clothing and hairbows as well as soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and other hygiene items. If you have any of these items that you'd like to donate, please feel free to either send them to me now for us to store or hold them and once our courtdate gets closer, I can collect them from you. My sweet friend Kelley is also traveling in July to ET on a mission trip and is collecting items as well, so between the two of us and some other friends, we should be able to use all your donations and get them over there one way or another. This is a great way to put your Spring Cleaning to good use :-) We have SO much and they have SO little. Thanks in advance for your donations - feel free to email me if you need to make arrangements to get items to me - v_elaine@yahoo.com. Also if you have other items that would not necessarily be good items for donating to ET but would be good items for a yardsale, we'll be having one of those in the Spring too to raise funds for our adoption. Feel free to give us all your good junk - one man's trash is another man's treasure :-)

Blessings,
Valerie