Big News!

Over here in the Evans household, all it takes is one phone call for our lives to change forever.

We are happy to announce that we had one of those life-changing phone calls yesterday!

We were called by our international adoption agency, AAI, with a referral for a baby girl!

Before I start with the story of how it all happened, let me just make things really clear from the beginning:

We are adopting a baby girl from Ethiopia!! Her name is Yematawerk. She is about 4 months old. And she is gorgeous.

Okay, now for the story.

After we got more concrete news that the adoption of Caleb's birthsister just wasn't going to happen, we decided to stop thinking about adoption for a while. You know, give ourselves a break from all the craziness, stress and roller coaster emotions.

Yeah. That lasted for maybe a week I think.

Then it was conference weekend. October Conference weekend. This is a very special time for our family. For the past 3 years October Conference weekend was the weekend where we learned what Heavenly Father had in mind for our family.

October 2008: We felt we were supposed to start the adoption process.

October 2009: We felt that we were supposed to adopt domestically and not wait for our Ethiopian adoption to go through first. A week or so later we found out about Caleb.

October 2010: We were waiting anxiously to see if we were going to be chosen to adopt a little baby boy who was due to be born in Pennsylvania in a few weeks. The next day we found out Noah was born and he was going to be ours!

October 2011: We felt very strongly that we were supposed to continue our Ethiopian adoption and that we should get off hold.

So that's what we did. We initially decided to wait a month or so and then jump back into it, but last Thursday we felt strongly that we shouldn't wait. So last Friday I called our agency and told them we were going off hold. That's when I found out all our paperwork wasn't up to date. We had redone it all in March but then we went on hold before AAI processed it and sent it to Ethiopia. And now it was 6 months old and they didn't want to submit 6-month old documents to Ethiopia. They wanted us to do it all AGAIN. That means we had to get bank statements, reference letters, doctors forms, and police letters (all notarized). Bleh. That can take weeks and weeks. They said that if we could do our part in a couple weeks that they'd hurry and get their part done in a couple weeks so we'd be able to maybe get a referral by the end of November. Again, bleh. We felt that we had a little girl waiting for us NOW and we didn't have weeks and weeks to get our paperwork up to date. So we got to work, determined to get our part done as quickly as possible. Phone calls, emails, meetings- you name it. We did it.

And here's what happened:

Monday we got the police letters (our city is AWESOME). We called the doctor and were told that we needed to schedule appointments for physicals and they couldn't get us in until next week. Bleh. We prayed hard that things would work out, and obstacles would be removed. We prayed that if we needed to get our paperwork in by a certain date in order to be referred OUR daughter, that it would just happen somehow.

Tuesday we picked up a reference letter from our awesome friend, Nate, who has written probably 10 letters for us by now. We talked to the doctor personally (we were there for Noah's 1 year appointment) and he said we didn't need physicals and that he would get our forms filled out the next day. We went to the bank and got the letters we needed from them. We also got an email from our agency saying that they would still take us off hold and we would be considered for a referral even though our paperwork wasn't up to date because they knew we were working on it!

Wednesday we picked up the doctor's forms, picked up a reference letter from our other awesome friend, Jennifer (Who also happens to be my visiting teacher. She takes magnifying your calling to an unreachable height, people.), and then we took all the papers to FedEx and had them sent next-day air.

Thursday AAI received our documents.

Friday we got a call with a referral for our little girl!

I know a lot of you don't understand the forms and paperwork and all that goes into the adoption process, but believe me when I say that getting all of our paperwork to AAI in less than a week was nothing short of a miracle. Heavenly Father has a plan for our family and He made it so things fell into place. I know it.

And now we know we have a sweet baby girl waiting for us in Ethiopia. She's been in care since the middle of June so we were able to find quite a few pictures of her that traveling families had taken.

If you want to see a picture of our little girl, just ask. We can't post a picture of her on the Internet because the Ethiopian Government wants to protect her privacy. But we CAN show you a picture in person. :) She is A.DOR.ABLE.

The next step is to submit our file to the Ethiopian Court. It takes about 4-8 weeks to submit the paperwork and the average time to get a court date is 3 to 5 months.

Now the real waiting begins!