Thanksgiving is such a great time of year. An opportunity to devour lot’s of wonderful food, spend time with our families doing the things we love to do – whether that be watching football, playing football, playing games around the dining table or simply hanging out and catching up, and spend time reflecting on the things we’re thankful for.  These are all things our family was blessed to partake in this Thanksgiving.  But, this year we are most thankful for the “referral”, which came the day before Thanksgiving – what timing!

This means that after about a year of adoption “stuff” – paperwork, home study completion, dossier assembly (that was fun!), fundraising (which we’re still working on), etc., we have finally received our official referral.

The referral can mean something a bit different depending on the path one takes to adopt a child.  Often times it is the beginning of ones relationship with a child or children.  In other words, it represents the initial introduction to a child that a family is to consider adopting.  Whereas in our case, we’ve known who we would be adopting for several months now and have been working towards bringing them home.  In this case, the referral means they are officially ours! Of course we’ve thought of them as ours for months, but now it’s official.  We do still have to go to Ethiopia and appear in court, and we’ll trust the Lord to prepare the way for that part of the process to go smoothly.

But except for the small little issue of traveling to Ethiopia twice :>) much of the work has been completed.  We’ll now wait for a court date to be set, which we hope will set for sometime in mid December.  As soon as that date is set, we’ll be booking our tickets to Addis Ababa.  We’re (especially Jacob and Emilie) hoping that we won’t have to be away from home on Christmas, but will go whenever we need to in order that we can get our kids home as soon as possible.

A memorable Thanksgiving for sure….