It's official!

Matt and I have decided to adopt and I have decided not to waste any time getting going on the process. After much investigating, reading and discussions with several adoptive parents, we have decided to adopt from Ethiopia.

Matt and I always talked about adoption but didn't spend much time talking about where or when. We know no one who has adopted from Ethiopia, have no Ethiopian friends at this time and only a few who have adopted internationally. Most of our friends have biological children and are quite disappointed that I will not be going through the experience of pregnancy. Sorry to disappoint, ladies. However, in the end, we decided that the world already has so many orphaned children and we wanted to adopt from where we perceived had the greatest need coupled with a system with minimal corruption, an established process and where we didn't have to wait years to bring home our child. Ethiopia seemed a natural choice.

I wasted no time in gathering documents (of which there are many), setting appointments and going full steam ahead, much to Matt's chagrin. We decided to use Hope Adoption Agency which is a small non-profit agency run by an Ethiopian man who has something like nine children of his own, at least four of whom are adopted. He also seems to spend half of his time in Ethiopia which allows him to have first hand knowledge of the children but can also be a bit frustrating as he isn't sitting by his computer just waiting to answer all of my and many potential adoptive parent's emails. It seems like all the other clients love him and constantly recommend the agency so I feel we can't wait too long or his client list will be huge and time frames for completion will slow down dramatically. So off we go.