Waiting Family + Questions

Thank you sooo much to everyone who celebrated with us when we got the news that we are officially a waiting family! We are so thankful that we have such great friends and family walking this journey with us!

Now, for the questions. A lot of people have been asking great questions, so below I will try and answer them as best I can:

What does it mean that you're a waiting family? I thought you were already waiting!
Ha, good question! A waiting family means that our dossier (the paperwork we've been working on since we started) is all certified and authenticated and waiting with our agency. Now we can officially be put on the waiting list to be matched with a child.

What does 85 mean? Does it mean you literally have to wait for 84 other families to be matched with a child before you are?
85 is our number on the waiting list. Our agency asks us, however, to not cling too tightly to that specific number. All the families adopting from Ethiopia with our agency are on the same waiting list. Families waiting for siblings, infants, older children, special needs, they are all together on the same list. This means, for example, if numbers 1-13 are all waiting for an infant girl, and a toddler boy is available to be matched with a family, then those first 13 families are all skipped and the next family on the list waiting for a boy that age would get the call. That is just one of the many examples, and basically means we could move around the wait list at any given day based on the children that are available and the individual parameters of each family.

What about names? Have you thought about what to name your child?
We have thought about this! We've done a lot of reading and researching on the meaning of names in Ethiopia, read about adoptees and their opinions on their name being changed or staying the same, and asked families we know who've adopted and what they did. We feel like this is something we want to be very sensitive to, and that the decision will probably best be made when we are matched with a child and find out more about them.

How long will you be on the waiting list?
That's a difficult question to answer because there is no way to know exactly. There are so many variables, such as the number of children available for adoption, the number of families waiting, age range and gender, the changes to Ethiopia's process and the affects that will have, etc. The only thing we can really go on is to look at other families who have recently been matched, and see how long they waited. Our agency does this with each referral, to give families an idea of wait times, and right now if we were to go off of the wait times of recent families, we will probably be waiting around 10 months for a referral.

Have you started decorating your child's room?
Ah, you know me all too well :) Normally I would be a paint-swatch-crazy-woman and putting all sorts of ideas together if given the chance (because I just love that stuff!). However, we left our parameters relatively open for the age and gender child we could be matched with. This means, in turn, that we'll have to wait a while before we start putting ideas together. We're also in the midst of doing some reading (my crazy tall stack of books I bought recently!), about what the transition looks like for a child, how to help them transition into our family and home, and what things to think about when putting together a space for them. With this in mind, we have a lot more learning to do before we break out the paint rollers :) (Lucky for me, my brother has a whole lot of projects up his sleeve for me involving paint and decorating in his own place, so my interior design itch should be put to work soon!)

So there you have it. I hope that helps some, and please feel free to ask if you have other questions. I can't guarantee I will be able to answer, but you are welcome to ask :) Thanks again for all your support, kind words, and celebratory hugs! We love you guys and thank you for being a part of this process with us :)

xo,

Kristen