Waiting on a letter...

Just wanted to give a little update on our journey. We are currently waiting on a piece of mail from USCIS to tell us when our finger print appointments will be. This will basically conclude the last step of our paper chasing process. However this step could possibly take a while. They recently changed the procedure for mailing in this application and supporting documents (home study, birth certificates, marriage license, copies of drivers license, big check) and now require the entire US to mail this to an office in Lewisville, TX instead of your local USCIS office so I'm not sure how that will affect us right now. I will tell you that the boys now know our routine of checking the mail REGULARLY for this letter! We check the mail ALL THE TIME now! Josh used to have to do it before coming in the house in the afternoons but he knows that more than likely I've already done it. Before all of this adoption excitement I wasn't really all that concerned with what came in that mailbox. Now it is quite the adventure!

I will tell you that we've been using this time to really get on our knees about what age and gender we request when we send off our dossier to Ethiopia. I think we've finally learned after 32 years that many times all God wants us to do is surrender our plans to Him and let Him lead us instead of choosing our own path and that is a lesson that I'm sure we'll continue to learn over and over. By requesting "either" gender we're pretty confident that would mean boy since the wait time for a boy is considerably less right now. I WOULD LOVE A BOY and would also LOVE A SHORTER WAIT TIME!! However, I also know that Josh would love to have a daughter (as would I of course...I guess spending all day every day with two boys leaves me leaning towards boys) and recently after both of us discussing this issue and finally coming to the conclusion that we just needed to put it in God's hands I've just kinda been having visions of a little sister joining our family next. I don't know where we're headed after this adoption as far as more kiddos (we'll be running out of car space and bedrooms!) so I think we'll be requesting a female infant 0-12 months. Our home study requires us to adopt a child at least 12 months younger than Wyatt right now so adopting an older child is not doable at the moment. I will say that I don't believe that chance is involved when it comes to the child that is born to you...down to the gender. I believe that God knowingly gave us two boys with two very different personalities as He gives to everyone. So being able to "choose" the gender has always bothered me a bit. However, I feel that we finally have a peace about requesting a gender and I couldn't be more thrilled to delve into the world of all things a little girl will bring! Oliver often refers to the child we'll be adopting as "she" or "sister" so maybe I should've known all along it would be a girl...

All that to say that this journey is a blind one and you never know...we might end up with a sibling group of 4 between the ages of 2 and 14! HA! Guess there is always our second adoption to accomplish that...anyone know of a good used mini-van we can buy???