We're Approved!!

I was so impatient today. I could not concentrate on anything besides waiting for that phone to ring. Last night Adam told me not to get my hopes up. Um, too late. Then today I wanted to call our agency at 9:30 a.m. and he told me that I needed to wait until noon. We've been married for 11 years . . . he should have known that today was not the day to introduce patience to me. :-)

I managed to wait until almost 10:30 and I left a message for the director of our agency. In the few hours that followed, I heard from all of the other traveling families (who were also waiting on a call) that there had been questions on their files and it is causing a short delay. I expected the same for us. So you can imagine my surprise when the director calls me in the afternoon to tell us that the embassy approved our file without issue!!! We were given permission to travel to Ethiopia on Friday and they are hoping that we will know our embassy date (next week sometime) before we leave!! Better yet, we get to travel with our really good friends Hollie and Brian (we stayed together last time) because they got approval last week!

So what does that mean? It means we are done. There are no more hoops to jump through. We are done. We just have to go to Ethiopia, pick up our daughter, go to a meeting at the US Embassy to get her birth certificate, passport and US citizenship documents, and then we can bring her back home. We are done with the waiting. The relief is amazing (and then my crazy mind starts thinking that there must be some mistake if we were the only ones that didn't have an issue with embassy . . . aahh, crazy never stops).

So it's official. We leave Friday morning!!! Oh yeah, and what a perfect day to get this news as my mommy mobile (aka my Jeep HUMMander) was getting a little bit tougher. We had planned to get new tires when we bought the car a year ago and Adam said I could lift it a little when we did. Finally, after having to use my ABS brakes a few times this weekend when it rained, my tires/wheels/lift were ready! And what matches a tough looking HUMMander on the outside . . . a super cut carseat on the inside! We now have to use all 3 rows in the Jeep to get my kids to comfortably fit! This is the very reason we traded in my Cherokee for the HUMMander -- we were expanding our family. A year later, we get to use it! I love it!

Trying to step up into it and get Allie into her carseat will take some maneuvering. :-)