Where things stand...

Some of you have been asking where things stand right now in terms of time and things that still need to be done, so I thought I would answer that question on here for others who might be curious as well. Now that we have our Home Study visit complete, our social worker, Susie, from ASC will write the Home Study report. During this time, we will continue working on gathering the documents needed for our Dossier. In no more than four weeks Susie will give us and CWA an initial copy of our Home Study to review. We will read over it to make sure that she got all of our information right, and CWA will do the same. Susie will then make any necessary changes and create the offical Home Study report which will be sent to CWA (4-6 weeks). Hopefully by this time, we will have all of the documents we need for our Dossier. Once both the Dossier and the Home Study report are complete and approved by CWA, we will send these documents by courier to Washington, DC for authentication at the US State Department and Ethiopian Embassy. Once they have been authenticated, they will be sent back to CWA who will then send them to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, they will be translated into Amharic and reviewed by the Ethiopian government. Once approved in Ethiopia, we will be eligible for our referral, and therefore, put on the waiting list to be matched with a child by CWA. We think the very earliest this could happen would be around early May. So, hopefully that gives you a little clearer picture on what has to happen between now and when we get our referral...in having to explain it to you, it helped me better understand, too!