The Casual Email - Our Referral Anniversary

When you are in the process of adopting a child internationally one of the most monumental things that can happen is THE CALL.  The majority of adoptive parents can tell you exactly what they were doing and who they were with when the call came.  The call is something they have often waited so long for that they thought they might truly lose their minds.  Worlds turn upside down when it comes.  When the call comes families learn for the first time a little something about the newest member(s) of their clan.  There are often crazy ugly cries, non-sensical jabbering, and general hysteria when the call comes.  It's a big deal.


Today is the one year anniversary of the day we found out about Elsa.  However, we did not get THE CALL.  We weren't even officially waiting for a referral yet when we learned that she was out there in Ethiopia waiting for a family.  We had just mailed our homestudy to our adoption agency; I am pretty sure we hadn't even received our dossier packet yet.  We certainly hadn't started working on it.  Usually its not until your dossier is done that you can even begin to expect the call.  Instead, for us, information arrived in the form of a casual email - embedded in an answer to a totally unrelated question:


Hi Dakota,
It is nice to hear from you!...[answer to my unrelated question]...So tell me what ages/genders you are open to or hoping for? I have a little girl turning 6 this fall I would love to place, and several boys close in age to her if you would be open to that age. Let me know!


That was it.  Three little lines in an email and Elsa became something more than a daydream.  She was a 6 year old girl waiting for a family - our family?  I was sitting in my office checking my email during lunch when I first read these words.  I was shocked.  We had been told 3-6 months minimum after our dossier was complete until we might be able to expect a referral.  I did what anyone would do - I called Brent and stammered into the phone.  It was an awkward phone call.  We were both at work.  I didn't know how to drop such big, unexpected news on him.  "So, uh, there's a 6 year old girl for us to consider if you're interested (nervous chuckle)..."  I'm pretty sure he didn't even reply at first.  If he did it was with a weak, "what?"  


Instantly all of the signatures and reference letters and documents we had been gathering took on a whole new meaning.  Dreams quickly turned into reality.  There was a six year old girl in Ethiopia waiting for a family.  That family could be us.


We actually didn't reply back to the email right away.  We decided we didn't want to learn any more about this little girl until we were sure that the possibility truly existed for her to join our family.  Didn't we have to complete our dossier first?  We hadn't been married two full years yet.  Did we need to wait 2 more months until we hit that milestone to consider accepting a referral?  We inquired about the waiting little boys.  Remember, we wanted to adopt two children so one of the waiting boys also had to be a realistic possibility.  We mulled around the idea of parenting two 5 to 6 year olds.  We began to form pictures in our minds.  Things started to get exciting.  We were sent pictures of some of the waiting boys before we even asked for them.  On July 27th we saw this face for the first time.

Ashagre's referral picture.

We tried not to fall in love.  We asked for more information.  On August 2nd we let our agency know we were also ready to see this face for the first time:

Elsa's referral picture.

Again, we tried not to fall in love.  Things were still up in the air.  We had to complete our dossier quickly in order to officially accept Elsa and Ashagre's file.  Another family further along in the process could have accepted them while we were still collecting the last few signatures and notarizations.  We completed our dossier in record time.

On August 11th we received this email:.

Good afternoon:

Thank you for letting us know your thoughts on these referrals.  It appears we are only waiting for your documents to be returned to us from the State Dept and Ethiopia Embassy, your one reference letter and the Interagency Agreement from your HS agency.  Once we have these items, I will process the placement agreements on the children and send them out to you and your dossier will be put into final format and my co-worker with ship it to Ethiopia with the next batch of documents she sends out.

Again, congratulations on your referrals.

It was official.  We were no longer hoping to adopt two children of any gender under the age of 6.  We were adopting Elsa and Ashagre.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Elsa and Ashagre learn about us for the first time.  This is
the only picture we got of them together until we picked
them up in February 2011.  Our agency coordinator swore
Ashagre had just woken up from his nap and was not
devastated by the news.  Now that I have woken him up
from several naps myself, I believe her.