Our last Christmas without Baby DuFran

Assuming nothing drastic happens, this time next year we will be parents!  We’ll be experiencing the Christmas season with a little one tagging along when we go shopping for gifts, when we go driving to look at lights, and when we decorate our Christmas tree.

We can’t wait to celebrate Christmas with Baby DuFran!

Update from the 6 month mark!

Well, we have officially been on the waitlist for 6 months and 1 day now!  This is a pretty monumental point, since the average wait for referral is about 9 months.  As usual, the month of December is going to fly by.  We're excited about the possibility of a call coming as soon as March.

We did something a little unusual this year and spent Thanksgiving in the Caribbean on a cruise with my entire family - 10 of us.  We had a wonderful time.  We realized this would be the last time we packed our suitcases and went off on a journey before we go to see our little one in Ethiopia - our last trip before we're parents.  Next trip: AFRICA!

The To-Do List

We have, what seems like, a forever long list of things to get done before we bring Baby DuFran home. Some of the items on our list have to do with parenting preparation, some with personal goals (like catching COMPLETELY up on my scrapbooking), some with home renovations, and some with just general things that we should get done while we have time and energy to do them! Well, one of these items is ready to be scratched off the list! We tiled our kitchen this past weekend! No more blue carpet! We can finally CLEAN our kitchen floor and it’s officially ready for Baby DuFran to be crawling around on it! :) It looks really good too. I’m super excited. This was one of our big items to scratch off our “To-Do Before Baby DuFran arrives” list and now it’s done! Splendid!

BEFORE

AFTER

About the halfway point

Christie and I started our adoption journey back in January of this year.  We attended a couple of adoption seminars and quickly knew we had found our adoption agency and country.  We started filling out paperwork a couple of weeks later and by June 2 we had been put on Gladney's waitlist for an infant from Ethiopia!  It has now been 8 1/2 months since we started and a little over 4 months since we went on the waitlist.  The average wait time for families waiting on infants has been 8-9 months, so we think we're about half way through the wait and about half way through the total time, as well.

We have been learning a lot about parenting, adoptive parenting and the culture of Ethiopia.  We have been meeting with other Ethiopian adoptive families at the Queen of Sheba restaurant in Oklahoma City pretty regularly.  It is so much fun to get to see the other little kiddos that have been adopted from Ethiopia and live so close to us.  At times you feel like you're the only person in the world doing what you're doing, but at those monthly dinners we feel like the norm!

We are so excited to be parents and are anxiously awaiting this new chapter in our lives!