New Friends

This morning I got to do the best thing ever. I got to go see a fully notarized and authenticated complete Rwandan dossier! I know, awesome, right! There is a small little group of us here in Austin that are adopting independently from Rwanda, and Emily won the dossier race. She was kind enough to invite everyone over to look at it before she sends it away to Washington and then to Kigali, never to be seen again. And not only that, she made lists of her table of contents for us to take home - a million thanks to her!
In this adoption journey, you need people to walk beside you. When we started, I'll be honest, I heard that advice and I despaired a bit. We have amazing friends, amazing friends who are adoptive parents, who are even currently in the process of adopting now, that share our heart for adoption and can relate to so many aspects of this journey. But its different when you have an agency walking next to you checking your p's and q's, making sure all your documents are in order, that all your i's are dotted and so on. Doing this independently is scary. Let me tell you how unbelievable it is to have this group of families seem to fall out of the sky and into our laps four months into our process. It is such a gift to have a group to turn to just to ask questions like "uh, did you include this statement in your dossier, and if so, did you get it authenticated or just notarized, etc..." Not to mention that the value of our kids being able to play together and share a common cultural background and appearance also can not be overstated. For now I am excited to have met a few of the women in this group, and I look forward to meeting the rest of the couples (there are six of us, including me and Jonathan). We have a no-kids-allowed dinner scheduled on March 6th so that we can all properly meet and get to know one another in person.
And I have finally decided on the home study. We are going to use Bonita, the independent social worker. I just feel like its going to be okay. So now I can move forward on getting the forms ready for that, and we can be on our way. Phew. Feels good to type that out loud.