Our Progress

We would like to give you an update on our progress. The paper chase is over for the most part...thank God for that! What a process that is. Our dossier, the packet of paperwork needed to send to Ethiopia, is complete. It will all be notarized tonight. A copy will be sent to our agency and upon approval, they will send us the final two documents we need. We will then send the original dossier by Fed Ex to our courier service in Washington DC. This protects this precious paperwork as our courier hand carries it first to the Secretary of States office to be authenticated, then to the Ethiopian Embassy to be translated. When all that is done, she overnights the dossier back to our agency who then sends it off to Ethiopia. We will then be in the waiting process. What will we be waiting for?

After the dossier is sent to Ethiopia, our agency will make plans to move our children to the Care Center in the capital city of Addis Ababa. We are anxious for this step as they will get their medicals done here. We will be waiting on a coveted paper from the US Citizen and Immigration Services called an I171. This document gives us permission to bring our children to the US. We cannot proceed without it. As soon as this document is received, we will be waiting on a court date in Ethiopia. We do not attend this court date, but our agency representatives do. The judge will look over our paperwork and any biological parents that are still living must be present to relinquish our children. If all goes well and the court date goes through, our children become officially Colemans! This is when we are now legally their parents and we can show their pictures to you! After the court date, it is usually 4 weeks to an embassy date. We will get two week's notice and will have to arrive in Ethiopia on a Saturday and stay until the next Friday. So, that is where we are at this point. Sending in our dossier is a pivotal moment. As most of you know, we already have our first child chosen. We are not allowed to give his name or picture until he is officially ours. We are into a month now of waiting on a referral for our baby girl. Average wait for baby girls in Ethiopia is 2-3 months. In a month or so, we should have a face and a name of our daughter.