8

That's the number of children I always said I wanted to have. Call me crazy, but it's true!!! When Cory and I met, that's one of the first things we talked about and by the time we got married it was even mentioned in our wedding ceremony. When people hear that I wanted 8 kids, they would always make some comment about how after we'd "have a few" we'd change our mind. However, I'm not so sure. I LOVE kids and I've always dreamed of growing old with the man that I loved with oodles of kids around us. As the time passed and life happened, it's slowly becoming apparent to us that our dream of a large family is probably out of our hands.

Today, we received an e-mail from our agency saying that Ethiopia has now changed their requirements. It will now be a requirement to travel to Ethiopia twice to complete your adoption. This may seem like a little, simple change for those not involved in an adoption. However, there's so much to consider. I'm not sure if I am strong enough to meet our little 'baby E' and then leave him/her for 4-6 months before we can travel again to bring him/her home. How can I function during that 4-6 month wait? What will he/she think of meeting us, us disappearing and then reappearing months later??? How will we feel about that?

I keep asking God for signs of what we should do. We feel connected to Ethiopia already. I don't want to close the door on our 'baby E,' but I'm scared at how much Ethiopian adoption has changed in the past 9 months. What happens if we wait another 1 1/2 years for baby #2 and Ethiopia closes it's doors to international adoption?

Last week I called and inquired about a child that's on the waiting international children's list. He's an adorable, precious little angel from Korea. Our social worker was going to look into possibly doing concurrent adoptions (meaning that we would do both this adoption and the Ethiopian adoption at the same time). He said that they had only allowed that with China because of the extended wait time. He wasn't very hopeful about CHSFS allowing it, but he's going to look into the possibility of us doing concurrent adoptions. We haven't heard back.

I'm just praying for some guidance and wisdom right now...