Waiting Children

Several months ago I blogged about the changing trends in International Adoption and the great need for adoption of older children and children with special needs. Since that time, Jack and I have been praying about how God would have our second adoption unfold. We have also been praying over the children on our agency's Waiting Children list.

What is this "List" you may be asking? Well, most adoption agencies have a list of children who are harder to find families for due to various reasons. Some of them due to medical conditions, but most for the simple fact that they are older children. Many of the children are between the ages of 4 and 12. Many of them are harder to place JUST because they are older. Some of these children have been in the orphanage waiting to be chosen by a family for years.

Adopting a child from the Waiting Children List is different from most infant international adoptions. For those who wish to adopt an infant, there is often a 1-2 year wait for an infant to be available for adoption. I know this sounds strange considering the estimates that there are millions of orphans in the world. But due to government restrictions and lack of documentation of a child's orphan status, few of them are actually eligible for adoption. Of the children eligible for adoption, many of them are older children or children with special needs. However, most people who are willing to adopt are often only interested in healthy infants, hence many older and special needs children are left waiting.

(I will reiterate as I did in a previous post that this entry is not meant to dissuade anyone from infant adoption. We waited for a 0-2 year old with our first adoption and felt as though that was what we were called to do at that time. As Christians, we are called to adopt and God loves adoption of any kind!)

But this adoption has been different for us. As we prayed over our agency's waiting child list over the past 4 months, we felt as though God had laid a particular child on our hearts. We weren't allowed to be matched with this child until there was some final paperwork that came in. That piece of paperwork, called the I171H, granted permission from our government to adopt an orphan from Ethiopia. After stalking our mailbox for 6 weeks, it finally arrived in the mail last Monday! That same day we asked our agency to officially consider us to be matched with the sweet child we had been praying for on the list.

Stay tuned for more on how this story unfolds. . . .

Melkam Genna!

Melkam Genna means "Merry Christmas" in Amharic - and today is Genna, the day that Ethiopians celebrate the birth of Christ. We were excited to celebrate today with Joseph and decided to treat him to Ethiopian cuisine at one of the local Ethiopian restaurants. We even let him get dressed up in traditional Ethiopian attire.



Of course, this year we were excited to introduce Joseph to some of the American traditions surrounding the celebration of Christ's birth as well. He thought our Santa tradition was pretty fun and enjoyed some fun gifts as well.



He thinks the fact that one of the Wise Men may have come from Ethiopia is pretty cool. We attended a Birthday Party for Jesus in St. Louis and he was able to dress up as the Wise Man bearing frankincense.




And, as you can see behind Joseph, we had 4 stockings hanging this Christmas. The last one we are hoping will be for Joseph's older brother. We have no new news at this time and are still waiting on some paperwork, but hope that we can be matched within the next month or two. We will keep you updated.



Happy Birthday Jesus! Melkam Genna and Merry Christmas!