Who is going to Ethiopia?

For a while, almost all information about adoption and absolutely even the mention of Ethiopia was scratched from this blog. That is because a kinda scary note went out a few weeks ago saying that if we had any info identifying our child on our website, that our file would be closed and no baby! Forever! No appeals and no exceptions! (This very, very sadly happened to a couple a few months ago; I think they had photographs posted, I am not sure. But Ethiopian government saw their blog and said, basically, 'sorry, you broke the rules.' I can't imagine the heartbreak; I'm sure they didn't even KNOW the rules.)

Until the big letter went out a few weeks ago, I think all us "bloggers" thought the ban was just on photos, but it turns out it was anything identifying our baby, so, her age, even, or our her gender or our court date, maybe ... who knows what's identifying?! We decided to take no chances. I think we were all pretty alarmed, and most people with Ethiopian adoptions (who had not had court dates yet) just made their blogs private. Now I am out of all the loops, I don't know which families have what going on or who is progressing. It is sad for me, but mostly sad because I would really love to connect with anyone who has the same CHI travel date as ours. There should be three or four other couples, I would think, who we'll be grouped up with.

Does anyone have our court date? Please email us or introduce yourselves somehow! (wildmile@hotmail.com).

Our travel date is official (our court date went through) and it is April 14th to pick up our baby from the Thomas Center.

So, it's interesting: Now that our court date has gone through, of course Ethiopia does not consider our little one to be an "orphan" anymore because they've officially recognized us as the parents. So we can post to our hearts' content. Which means photos. But Eric and I both were very surprised to find out that we don't want to post any! Oh, we have them! And they are fabulous! We love this baby so much. But she is this sacred little thing and all ours and we just can't bear the thought of ... I don't know .. her being so exposed or something, just her little precious face in cyberspace. Is this odd? This might be the first sign that we will be the super hyper protective parents we SO don't want to be, who make our child wear a helmet in the house and will never leave her with a sitter. Dunno. But for now, this is where we are.

BTW, I got even BETTER tickets to Ethiopia, I went straight to the Ethiopian Airlines website and paid $1550 each for very direct flights with reasonable arrival and departures from Ethiopia -- just a 40-minute layover in Rome and not even getting off the plane; much better and cheaper than any of the big flight search engines were putting out. (Two hours later, I realized this.)

Take care,

Lindy