Weekend With Family

We returned to NYC this morning after a fantastic four days with our family in Minnesota. It was so wonderful, in fact, that both of us spent several serious moments this morning contemplating reasons to stay for another day or two that wouldn't conflict with work. Unfortunately duty called and our weekend had to come to an end bright and early Monday morning with our MSP to JFK flight.

This was the first time that both Mike and I were in MN at the same time since we began the adoption process so as you can imagine there was much to discuss. The questions ranged from "We were hoping you would arrive with your child this weekend!" to "What names are you considering?" to "What is a dossier?" Of course we would have loved to have been able to reply to comment #1 with a solid "We did, he/she is right here!" but alas the reality of the adoption process is that of patience and waiting. As for the other questions, answering them out loud to family for the first time only lengthened the discussion and brought on other questions! It's amazing how different the most logical thoughts sound when you're saying them out loud to your mother instead of just thinking about them quietly to yourself.

Specific things that came up had to do with the color/design scheme of Baby Bean's room, his/her name, where we're at in the adoption process, and finally general Ethiopia related questions having to do with history and geography. In general our responses were as follows:
1) We have an amazing crib thanks to an amazing community of artists always willing to exchange one art form for another. In this case this meant amazing portraits of a father and his children in exchange for a crib custom designed by the father.
2) We like Lyric, Hattie, William, and Wylie.
3) We just finished the home study and will be sending in our form I-600A to CIS this week. Once we receive this approval (6-8 weeks) we will be in the final certification stage and then onto sending our dossier to Ethiopia. The current wait time for a referral at that point is 3-9 months.
4) Ethiopia is an amazing country rich with history and culture and there are so many books that detail the trials and successes of both Ethiopia the country as well as Africa the continent. Google Ethiopia - I promise you'll come up with something interesting!

I'll end on a quick summary of our mini-vacation in MN with family this past weekend. We started by having dinner with the moms (my husband and I are fortunate to have mothers who have developed a strong friendship) and enjoyed a night out with just the four of us. This was followed by breakfast with our child's Godmother, Phoenix, who sheds amazing amounts of enthusiasm, hope, knowledge, and love on the adoption process. I then took off for a ride with my dad on his Harley, simply put - priceless. The weekend continued with multiple family meals and gatherings and was topped off with tickets to the Vikings vs Packers game where my sisters and I, our husbands, and my dad, witnessed Favre history. It actually did hurt a little to type that, I'm a tried and true Vikings fan. Nothing can top an afternoon with dad and his two favorite teams battling it out on the field though, even if my team did lose. Baby Bean will eventually have to select an NFL team to support and I'll support little Bean no matter what - as long as he/she is a Vikings fan.