The Hunter Home

“Tozer is going to get a severe beating.”

~Text message from Kristi today around 7pm.

What do you think she means? 

• Leave a comment...

Click here at your own risk.

“After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners.”

HT: Tim Challies

• Leave a comment...

The first is from my long time friend Tim Dyer;

“Folks, Didn’t win the trip to Beijing, but I did make the home page of YouTube today. C’mon Cheer Yo! Enter your cheer today!”

Tim works for a marketing firm that is a part of a 200 agency network called Omnicom. Bank of America recently challenged Omnicom employees to create an Olympic cheer for a chance to win a trip for two to Beijing. Tim has been featured on the front page of the Bank of America channel but today he is truly famous. Click here to go straight to Tim’s video.

Second (drumroll please)…we received an email from our adoption agency, Celebrate Children;

“Congratulations! Your dossier was sent today to Ethiopia via FedEx International Priority. The tracking number is … in case you want to track it’s progress!!”

This great news marks the end of our paper trail to Ethiopia. Last week Kristi made a trip to Frankfort to gather some Kentucky state seals, then everything was sent to a courier in DC who hand delivered our documents to the Ethiopian Embassy. From there, our dossier made the trip to our agency and is now out of the country. Our part of this process is largely done. Now we sit on the egg. We expect to learn about our children in four to six months. It can always be sooner. It can always be later.

• Leave a comment...

That’s how far we moved - And that’s where we moved. In our apartment community there are dozens of streets all named after birds; Canary, Pelican, Falcon, Blue Jay, Egret (whatever that is), to name a few. Then there is “Moonstone Way.” That’s where we live now. We like that name. We also like the name we found on our door when we arrived; “Raquel Carrillo.” We’re going to keep it there.

The layout of our new apartment is nearly the same with the exception of an additional room down our first floor hallway. We added about 100 square feet, $100 and an extra room in preparation for the arrival of our children.

In this move, we were greatly helped by a number of friends who helped us paint our new place and drag all of our stuff down the street and around the corner. 

• Leave a comment...

The Ethiopian program through our agency, Celebrate Children International (CCI), is a fairly new program. So far, no children have come home from Ethiopia through CCI. That is about to change, however! The first group of families had their court dates in early March, and by March 26 they were on their way to Addis Ababa to pick up their children! We are so happy for them, and also encouraged that there was only a few weeks between their court dates and their travel dates. Each part of the process can take varying lengths of time, and two weeks is very fast!

Another encouragement to us was that another CCI family received their referral of a 4 month old baby boy! Both the young age at which their baby was referred to them, as well as how long their dossier had been in the country (only a month and a half or so!) were great encouragements. Just as a reminder, here’s how the process looks:

1. Dossier is completed and sent to Ethiopia

2. Family receives referral(s)

3. Country issues court date to finalize the adoption in Ethiopia

4. Family travels to pick up their child(ren)

There can be months and months of waiting time between those steps. The fact that some of those steps went by very quickly for these families gives us hope that our own process could speed along at a good pace.

Another group of families had a court date a couple days ago, so we are anxiously waiting to see how soon they can travel!

• Leave a comment...