FAQs

We often get asked a lot of the same series of questions, so I thought I would take the time to list a few of our FAQs.


Q: Why adoption first?

A: For us the answer is why not?  Adoption has been a topic of conversation in our relationship pretty much from the very beginning. We know that God calls us to take care of the orphans and we felt the best way for us to do that was through adoption. We spoke with several different couples, and weighed the options. It didn't seem like one way was better than another so we sought God, prayed about it, and felt him telling us to do it now. We did, and that has led us here.

Q: Do you want to have your "own" kids?

A: This is verbatim the way we have been asked this. I know people don't mean any offense by it but we prefer to use the term biological kids since any child we adopt will be our own.  The short answer to that question is yes, we want to have biological kids. We haven't tried, right now we are just taking it step by step and trying to listen to God and his plan in all of this.

Q: Why Ethiopia?

A: This is a pretty simple answer. We knew International Adoptions was the route we wanted to take for many reasons. We really felt God calling us to adopt from Africa, we never felt a specific country, we just knew Africa and knew that we needed to be open while we researched agencies. As we researched and finally picked our agency, we both felt strongly that God was opening the door for us to adopt from Ethiopia. Honestly, after learning about the orphan crisis in Ethiopia the question became why not? If you want some facts about Ethiopia you can refer back to our About us page (here).

Q: When will you be able to bring your child home?

A: We do not know. We are hoping sometime in the late summer/early fall but, if we have learned anything through this process it is that you need to flexible and extremely patient. We pray it will be sooner rather than later and if you feel led to join us in prayer for that we would greatly appreciate that.

Q: Boy or Girl?

A: When we filled out our application we specified for a boy between 1 month-4 years old. At the end of December of 2015 we accepted a referral for a little boy who is currently  8 months old.

Q: What's next in your process?

A: We have submitted all of our paperwork called a (Dossier). Our agency has sent the Dossier to U.S. Department of Homeland and Security and we have received their approval. Now that it is complete, our documents are in Ethiopia for the same process. Their process takes 4-12 weeks (or more). As you can see, flexibility is key in this journey.

If you have any more questions feel free to comment below. As I mentioned in our previous post, we do have to keep some things confidential. So, if we do not answer your question, we aren't ignoring you, we are just protecting the many, many people involved.

Thank you for joining us on this journey, Barry and I greatly appreciate the love and support.