Ten Months Waiting…..

Hello and WELCOME!! to any blog readers who still stop by House of Horne to peek at what is not going on around here. 🙂 Summer and the start of school have come and gone while my little neglected blog sits here patiently. It’s not really that there is nothing going on, more like there is too much going on to sneak in any bloggy time. I have started several entries only to leave them unfinished. And thought of many more I’d love to sit down and write, if only I could find the time.

But today is important enough that I have to write. Today marks 10 months since our family was put on the waitlist in Ethiopia for our little girlie.

Back in November of 2010 when we reached this huge milestone in our adoption process, we were told that the longest we’d be waiting for a referral for our daughter was 10 months. The actual window given us was somewhere between 8 and 10 months. So you can imagine that we felt pretty confident (in that naive, never-before-navigated-the-waters-of-international-adoption sort of way) that by today, September 16th, 2011, we’d for sure already know the name and face and history of the little girl whom God in His providence planned to be a part of our family.

In reality, a lot has changed in Ethiopia this year, and these various changes and transitions mean that the wait time for referrals has increased rather substantially. So much so that a more accurate timeline for a referral now is about double that which we originally anticipated. Nowadays when someone asks me “How much longer?” I truly don’t have a concrete answer for them (though I love everyone who checks in with us — thank you!). We hope for a referral sometime in 2012, and pray that we have our daughter in our arms not long after. But we just don’t know…and on some days, like today, that is harder to digest.

In the meantime we remember what we do know: we continue to see God’s goodness to us in so many ways, and we are so grateful to be on this journey. Admittedly, it feels like there is someone missing until she comes home (I actually sometimes count heads and after reaching 4, look around for #5 only to remember that oh yes, she’s not here yet.)  But we know it’s out of our ability to control the timeline of events. And so….we pray for her and for her birth family and whatever they may be going through in these months before our stories and lives intersect. We don’t yet know who our daughter is or what she may be experiencing, but God knows and we trust in His loving care for her, no matter what the circumstances.

And for now…we continue to wait.