court date scheduled in ethiopia

Today we received an email from Gladney saying that we have a court date set forMar 6th and that we should plan to be in Ethiopia on the 22nd of March! Wow. So soon! This is all becoming so real. Time to make travel plans, buy medicine, renew Mike's passport, ...and we still have to finish some already begun renovations to the basement to move the office downstairs and make room for the baby upstairs. And I (Anne) discovered that I will be switching positions at work, to a new office, all between now and our departure. It seemed like too much to do in such a short amount of time...We were pretty overwhelmed. After completing all of our immunizations and paying the remainder of the adoption-related fees (yikes), we purchased all of our supplies and many OTC medications in anticipation of travel sickness. :-p. Flight arrangements: Check Hotel: Check Suitcases, International cell phone card, baby sitting arrangements for Reese for an entire week...: Check, Check, Check!

we received a referral for a beautiful baby girl

We got the call today!!! We weren't expecting this call for months, but today we received the call from our Gladney caseworker, Mary. She called at around 3pm on our home phone on a Thursday and amazingly we were both home and even more amazingly we answered the home phone! (Many of you are well aware of the fact that we rarely answer our home phone---a sane person can only handle so many ways of being contacted: we have two cell phone numbers, work phone numbers, blackberry numbers, personal email accounts, work email accounts.... so the home phone gets lowest priority in our book!) We answered this call and I immediately felt dizzy when I heard Mary say "Are you both home and near the computer? I have some exciting news for you..." Within minutes, Mary sent us pictures of a little baby girl, just shy of 6 months old. This is one of the pictures that we saw: Gladney was able to give us a little bit of information on her history. When she was 6 weeks old, her birth mother took her to a house in Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia) and, after begging for food, left the baby there, promising that she would return after going to fetch holy water. Needless to say, she didn't come back. Her mother has tucked the baby's immunization card under her blanket. On it was her name: Yalem Zerf-nickname "Alem." Alem seems to be a fairly common Ethiopian name, and it means world. We immediately accepted the referral. When Reese woke from her nap we told her that we had found out who her sister would be and we showed her the pictures Gladney emailed us. She was very excited. The girls will be only 2 years apart, almost to the day (both August babies). What fun! We are sure that they will become the best of friends. A few nights later, Reese even made a picture frame with craft sticks, stickers, and glitter glue and placed the picture of the baby in it. It sits by her bed in her room. Every night, she prays for her baby sister, and she shows off the picture to anyone when they come to the house. We couldn't have asked for a better response from her! We were assuming that we'd receive a referral for a baby boy and Reese had been talking for the past month about how she was going to have a baby sister. I'd tell her that it might be a baby brother, and how great that would be also. She would agree that was fine, but kept saying she would have a sister. Maybe her intuition told her! WHAT NEXT? Now we just wait to learn the court date in Ethiopia. We don't actually attend that court date - Gladney attends for us with power of attorney. We can plan to be in Ethiopia about 2 weeks after the court date. Mary said to expect about 6-8 weeks from the date of referral. Our minds were racing. What a blessing to have this great news!!!