"It's time for me to fly..." (soon!).

Yippee!!! Tuesday I received some more good news from Michael, while I was on my lunch break. We got our travel date... which is the first day we can "check in" to the CHSFS guest house. And that date is September 14th. There was a possibility of traveling a week earlier; however, that would have meant we would be in Ethiopia's capital city, Addis Ababa, during their Millennium celebrations. Yep, it is going to be the year 2000 as of September 11th of our year 2007. CHSFS decided that it would not be the best idea to have families stay during that week since the US Embassy is closed for two days, flights might get tricky and the city will be on overdrive.

Getting the actual dates for our travel makes it feel even that much more real. But with getting "real" comes the need to get organized!!! Michael and I got into "overdrive" mode ourselves on Tuesday evening, getting out all of our papers that tell us what we need now (which above you can see Chewy helping us sort through) and making lists as to what kinds of lists we need to make now! I am glad that Maira, Peter and Stefan were able to stop by to help us get back on celebration mode with popping open a bottle of champagne - given to us by them on the day of our referral.


Oh yeah, we got an update on Mehandis's physical development. It looks like he has gained almost two pounds in a month and a half of an inch in height/length. So he is now 13.8 pounds and 25 inches. This is pretty similar to the size of the other children at the care center, even though it sounds alarming compared to children "homegrown" here in the US. It looks like Mehandis will take a bit of time to catch up to his friend Stefan's size, despite the fact that our little guy is about a month older.

Speaking of development, I had a funny dream last night. In my dream we were picking up Mehandis and he was the age he will be (9 months). However, his speech skills were quite advanced. He was speaking in two word phrases! As a speech-language pathologist I was quite impressed by this :)