Adoption & Education Update

Here's a bit of an update on a couple things I hear people ask me about most often.

Our Adoption

Well, we've submitted our Home Study and Dossier to our agency and are kind of waiting to see how fast they can do their part. Getting our Home Study done took 7 months! Totally not what we expected. The Home Study wasn't that much trouble for us. We got the agency the list of documents they wanted then waited around for them forever to get it done. Getting the Dossier completed was much more of a struggle for us though. There were so many documents to obtain or create and a few had such particular specifications that it took a few tries to get them right and weeks to get them complete. So glad it's over! We still need our approval from the US Government via some form thingy. Our agency is supposed to be getting our documents authenticated through Ethiopia's Embassy here in the US, then they are supposed to send them all over to their office in Ethiopia for further translating and authentication. Then we are supposed to get a "referral" of our child soon thereafter. After referral, I've recently heard to expect 5-7 months. So it seems it's gonna be a long wait. I honestly have no idea of what to expect though because there is always something happening over there with the government to add some speedbumps into the process. Recently the government has added a couple of laws to the adoption process to make it a bit trickier, as well as de-license many orphanages to halt the process in some cases. So who knows...

Any questions? :)

Homeschool Decision

I wrote about this a couple months ago. I didn't know if I should homeschool next year or not. After much thought and worry over that decision, I finally decided I would homeschool all the kids next year. However, after making that decision, I felt sick. For one reason or another we decided it wasn't the way to go for now. So I then began investigating other options and ended up signing all the kids up at a local Charter School. It felt right and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out. I still would like to go back to homeschooling some day I think, but not at this time. The kids have taken the decision fine. Jonah was the most disappointed. Jonah I worry about the most because he was doing so well at homeschooling, but he has accepted it and I hope he will be happy at his new school.
I was surprised to find on the last day of homeschool I was feeling sad about it! But we are homeschooling each day this Summer for just an hour and so far so good.