A taste of Ethiopia

 So we ventured out to an Ethiopian restaurant last night to experience a taste of our what our kiddo's culture has to offer! My sweet parents came along too, because they're good like that! We went to a restaurant called Queen of Sheba (I'm not sure if it's a chain or not, because my friends Joely and Kelly Jo went to a Queen of Sheba too, but in OK?). Anyway, it was a really nice place and the gal who owns it is from Ethiopia and was so kind to order everything for us since we were clearly "newbies". We decided to just go with a family style platter that had a combination of chicken, lamb, and beef as well as veggies. In Ethiopia they don't eat using utensils, rather they eat using this injera bread to scoop up the food and eat it with their hands. I'm a fan of this because I can't tell you how often our silverware holder in the dishwasher is the first thing to fill up when we load her up! The injera bread was actually pretty good, not as tangy as I thought it might be. It's kind of spongy and crepe like. Mom, dad, Joshua, and I liked everything pretty well. Jude on the other hand must have said "It's spicy!" a hundred times! Notice his facial expression! To his credit, a lot of the stuff did have a bit of a kick to it. So just another step in figuring out a little more about where our babe is from!  

Sometimes it's hard for me to wrap my mind around what it's like there, the smells, tastes, sights, sounds... but I'm trying, and now I can say I have an idea of the tastes.

This also marked the last page to be done in our Eyes Wide Open workbook (a required education with our agency)! We had finished the whole book but still had stinking pg. 28 marked to come back to on "Experiencing different foods". And last night, we finished filling that sucker out! Woot woot! Our social worker , "B" will sign off on it tomorrow and I can mail that baby in to AGCI this weekend! So all our required education is now DONE, our online courses and this workbook, such a relief!

So yeah, I meet with "B" tomorrow to hand over just a couple things she was still needing from me, Jude's immunization records and a copy of doc visit- but then I think she'll be finishing up our home study report before too long! We're still waiting on our FBI prints and passports, but they're both being processed according to the sweet people I've hounded on the phone to find out from! (o;

Our biggest prayer request is that the remaining funds that we need in order to send in our dossier to our agency would come in all in His perfect timing! Once our dossier is complete (the FBI prints and the passports come back in- which I'm thinking will be a 2-4 weeks), it would be awesome if we were able to submit it to our agency ASAP to be put on the wait list- but it has to be turned in with $5k (Broken down this is what it looks like: Authentication $300, Translation of Dossier $200, International Service Fee $4,500). We currently have $1623.14 in savings, which we know falls over $3k short. We're not stupid, we know that's a lot of money to come up with in a relatively short period of time, BUT strangely, we have peace about the money being there exactly when we need it. We have another yard sale coming up October 23rd , who knows, maybe it'll be a whopper of a sale! (o;

God has been faithful each step of the way so far and we trust He'll continue to provide as long as we do our part! We have been blessed to know God's presence like never before throughout this process and honestly we're humbled and grateful to be in a place of complete reliance on Him. After all, what's better in life than God's presence?!