Fingerprints update

I made several calls to the CIS offices on Monday and through a plethora of transfers, disconnections, and onhold music, I finally was able to speak to a LIVE person. Atleast I think he was alive. He was not of much help. I explained our circumstances of receiving this odd letter with the appt date but no appt time. He said this was not the actual notice and that I needed to go to the Memphis office to find out. WHAT?? We are no where near the Memphis office! I explained that I just needed someone to confirm if an additional letter was sent that was currently en route or did something happen in the mail or did perhaps our letter have a misprint?!! In the end, he gave me an email to contact the Memphis offices. An email! I also explained how we were on a time crunch since the appt was supposedly scheduled for 4 1/2 days away!! I asked for a phone number and was informed that no local offices have public phone numbers. OKAY! I was grateful I had internet access and a current email account.
After the phonecall, I emailed them. No response of course...for several days. However, to our great surprise, within hours of this entire ordeal, Chris brought in the mail and guess what was on top? Our fingerprint appointments with a date and time!! They were printed on official watersealed government paper. I had to immediately email the CIS in Memphis again and ask them to 'disregard previous email!'
In the end, actually later that evening as I was recounting the events and my anxiety, etc...the Lord clearly spoke to me that I should have trusted him more. Yes, Lord....I should have.
We look forward to our appt on Friday. It is at 8am..so we will have to travel with the kids early early to get through the school zones and rush hour traffic, but we will make a morning of it! We are just grateful the letters finally arrived in the mail.

CIS Fingerprints

We got our fingerprints appt today!!! Yeah!! We feel like we are moving closer and closer to our baby girl! We are a little confused about it but we will call our social worker on Monday. It said simply, 'your appointment date'. We understood that we would have a time and a date but ours only had a day specified, no time. Anyway, they dont give you much notice We have til the end of the week! We are excited though...we are moving, moving, moving forward.

Neighborly love

A friend of a friend's neighbor just came back from Ethiopia last month. They created this beautiful video of their adventure. They live just miles down the road. This video is much like the experience our friend had two years ago when she and her family were adopting their son from Ethiopia...and it moved her to tears. It did the same for me! Chris and I both agree that the moment the nannies were loving all over the babe was the quencher for us! We loved it. Check it out for yourself.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-LMFqU1WaVE

Why Ethiopia?

Probably the most frequently asked question as we have begun this adventure is: Why Ethiopia?
Well...the best way I can put it is, for all these reasons and more...
We have always known that adoption would be part of our lives at sometime, somewhere, somehow.
Domestic adoption, while completely needed in this country, did not seem like an option for our family.
We felt the calling to Ethiopia as we began to explore, in depth, the countries that were our options through the agency we had chosen.
The wait to get an adopted child through Ethiopia is about a year...which is incredibly less than most other countries.
We fell in love with Ethiopia and its rich culture and its great need to provide safe and loving homes for its near 5 million orphans.
Have you looked at their skin? It is irresistably beautiful!!
From all the experiences that we have heard, we were even more convinced.
We have many interracial families that have totally inspired us to think outside the box.
We have never felt so much peace and guidance from the Lord as we have during this adventure.
We have been sponsoring a child in Africa through World Vision for over three years. Our hearts have naturally been drawn to that country through our sponsored child, Charles, who lives in Malawi.
Without sounding completely crazy, we feel the Lord drew an arrow straight to Ethiopia for our eyes to see.
...and more!

Home Study

Well, today we had our second Home Study with our social worker and we were with her for about four hours. We had numerous questions to answer with many interuptions from our precious little 18 month old. We gave her all of the home work we have gotten done so far. We only have about three more things to do and our home work will be done!! It has taken some time, but we are on the road to be getting our precious one from Ethiopia. After we get the rest of the home work done, we just have to wait. We are getting more and more excited! We still can't believe that our dream is becoming a reality. We watch on-line everyday about different couples that our coming home with their baby. Everytime we watch and read, we get more and more excited! I can't wait to post our adventure on u-tube for others to watch the Cottrell Adventures! More great news to come soon..

Police Clearance Letters

A normal part of the homestudy process is to get police clearance letters. When we sat down with our social worker to discuss the infinite paperwork list, this was one of the items. She gave a brief description of what it entailed..and basically it sounded something like this, "All you have to do is go to the local police department and ask them for a letter of clearance". This sounded incredibly easy and so a couple of weeks ago while I was out and about, I dropped by our local police department and 'asked for a letter'. To my surprise, this process was a little more complicated than just the asking. First of all, I had gone to the city police and not the county sherriffs department. Since we live outside the city limits, we are supposed to use the county dept. I did not know this, of course... AND, I did not bring Chris, which is apparently a no-no. They will not submit letters unless you are TOGETHER. So, it took a week and half before we could go to the sherriff's dept because of our crazy busy schedules. Then, instead of simply telling them our names and addresses, we had to fill out a form with more info and describe in detail what exactly we wanted this letter to say. The lady was pretty adamant about this. We found out that we dont go home with this letter that day. Instead, it will take a few days to a week. This was again another shocker. I was glad we had not waited until the last minute to do this. In closing...our letters are supposed to be ready by Monday. Yippee! We can hopefully check this one off the list!

Valentine getaway

Chris and I are having some much needed couple time this weekend at the Chattanooga Choo Choo. We were so blessed to have some incredible friends offer to watch the kids while we whisked away for a night without the kiddos. So far, it has been a blast. We had incredible uninterrupted chat time on the drive down here, we got some great time to shop around and we just finished a fabulous meal at Niko's right around the corner from the Choo Choo. We started off with Rock Shrimp served over zucchini cakes...mmmmmmmmmmm. Then we split an entree of Eggplant Parmesan with spinach, artichokes, and feta cheese. It was VERY delish! We topped the whole meal off with a flourless chocolate torte served with raspberry sauce and whipped cream. Is your mouth watering? Well, it should be!!
Our time together has allowed us great opportunity to stay connected about our endeavors regarding our babe in Ethiopia and just enjoy the sweet moments of each other without the kiddos. Although I do have to say, I miss them--a little :)

progress

Well we got our Lap top today and we are able to relax in the bed now and blog. It's funny because everytime we do anything remotly related to adoption, our kids ask "are we getting our daughter yet?" As a matter of fact, our oldest son asked tonight, "what is her name?" We are almost done getting all of our paperwork done for our home study. We have our second appointment scheduled next week and hopefully we will have all of the paperwork done for our social worker. Our kids don't understand how hard it is to get all of the paperwork for the homestudy. As a matter of fact, we don't even understand. God is definitely working in our favor. Everything is coming together slowly but surely.