Back home from Texas.

We spent the weekend in Texas with the Stanley Family and celebrated an early Christmas. Unfortunately, the 80 degree temperatures that had been hanging around for the last month decided to evacuate upon our arrival. Still 50 and some sun wasn't so bad compared to 9 degrees and freezing rain. It's amazing how much perspective can affect our view on the world.... Christmas, as it should be, focused around the young, and for us that meant Austin. As always, he got more gifts than a kid deserves, but was very appreciative. We were planning on driving, but at the last minute used priceline to purchase some tickets. With all of the snow and ice that had been flying, it only seemed to make sense. We had a great time, but it's fun to be home as we have already napped and Austin, Dad and Fred went outside to sled, something we are quite accomplished at if I do say so myself (matt).

On the adoption front, I guess that we haven't really provided a timeline to let you know where we are. Here is where we are at..

We have selected the agency that we are going to work with, Children's Home and Family Services out of St. Paul, MN. We learned of them through Troy Nesbitt as their family used them to adopt their two boys from Ethiopia. Once we decided we were going to work with CHSFS, we had to complete our application, which was pretty thorough, including the fingerprints for the FBI ( which we might have to do again??). After that we attended a Pre-Adoptive Class in St. Paul that lasted two days. Now we are working on our homework, basically a self-evaluation report, and hope to have that completed in the next week or so. Next will be the home-study with our assigned social worker, more paper work, and then our information is submitted to the officials in Ethiopia. A child will be selected based on our requested criteria, we accept, wait.. most likely wait some more, and then travel to Addis for the great day.

FAQ: No, we don't know who she is yet, but we know she is out there, somewhere... Yes, we do plan to travel to Addis Ababa, we think that is pretty critical. Those are some of the easy ones to answer. We'll try to answer some of the harder ones later.