The wait has a light at the end of the tunnel...

This adoption journey has been a roller coaster for sure. We entered this adoption thinking we would have a child home in 24-30 months from the time we filled out the application. We started the process only to have doors slam in our face. It became very clear that a Ethiopian adoption was not going to be happening for us.  We had never really considered Haiti until God truly opened the door for us and pointed us in that direction.

We took a leap of faith and quickly switched to the Haiti program... we started in the Haiti program 7 months into our adoption journey.  At that time we were told we would have a child home in no more than 24 months. Here we are exactly...
... 35 months and 1 week after emailing our agency to tell them we wanted to switch to the Haiti
     program

... 32 months after the orphanage telling our agency they had a child that met our request.

... and 876 days since the orphanage submitted our dossier with a child's dossier to IBESR (Haiti's           social services department) to begin the official adoption process.

Adrianna had her 5th birthday... we were preparing for 3 of her close friends to come over for pizza and cupcakes, before making the trip to Disney on Ice with 5 little girls.

I was literally elbow deep in frosting, decorating cupcakes with the girls, and the phone rang. I glanced at my phone on the counter and I saw it was a phone number that is not in my contacts (just a number) so I decided not to answer.  I quickly glanced again and saw it was a caller from Virginia, I only know ONE person in Virginia.... I instantly knew... I instantly started crying tears of joy. Ethan was home for lunch and just about to walk out the door.  I said hello and heard Michelle's (our agency rep) voice say "Stacie, I have great news for you today".  I flagged Ethan down, put her on speaker phone and began to cry more tears of joy!!

We have a son and we get to fly to Haiti to meet him!!!!

We wish we could tell you more about him and show you pictures of him. Unfortunately, we cannot until we have an adoption decree (when he is legally our child in Haiti).  This is a different timeline for every adoption in Haiti (there seems to be no rhyme or reason) but we are praying about 6 months after our bonding trip we will get that.  I can tell you that if you see us in person anytime soon, you may see a picture of him on our phones or the ones the girls have been carrying around since we got our first picture of him yesterday.

We are thankful for this step in our adoption as it truly does put a light at the end of the tunnel! We still have a wait to bring him home (see our adoption timeline) but we are thankful to know who our son is, how old he is and that we get to travel to Haiti to meet him!

Ethan and I plan on traveling to Haiti November 15th-December 2nd (still waiting for IBESR and Embassy appointment in Haiti to approve our travel dates).


PS: to those still waiting... it truly does happen like they all say... when you least expect it!  We were told in May 2014 we had a 6-9 month wait for our official referral and being able to go on our bonding trip. Every day for 20 months (the amount of time we have been overdue for this call) I have thought "maybe today".  With the distraction of Adrianna's birthday this was the first time in MANY months I had not thought about the adoption at all, I truly was caught by surprise! It truly does happen in God's perfect time, not ours!