Talk with Gertrude and Home Study

We talked with Gertrude again today! It was another "yes, yes, no" conversation but she did speak a little bit. When I asked what she was doing she said "playing Barbies." I asked if she was playing with Kristina (her friend that also was here) and she said yes. I asked if Agnese wanted to talk and she said yes, then no. She talked with Tena and she told her about Barbies also. Tena told her she loved her and she said she loved her too, same with me. In case you're wondering, Scott wasn't able to talk this morning so he missed out! Mostly I asked a lot of questions, if she is ready to start school, how is Agnese, does she remember her room here. I told her I bought strawberries and thought of her, also bananas and that she is my little monkey. We would tease her when she was here about being a monkey because she ate so many bananas. She said "no" to being my monkey, then backtracked and said "yes!" So, it was great to talk with her but again, she didn't say much!

We had our first interview for our home study on Friday. It went very well. Our social worker is very nice. Her two children are adopted and they are from Korea. We have another appointment Aug. 30 then we'll have our last one a week or two after that. Then she said it might only take her a couple weeks to write it up! This is moving very quickly. We have an appointment to get our fingerprints taken on Sept. 14. If all goes as planned (I wonder what the chances of that are??!!) then we could be done with everything and ready to send our dossier in by the end of Sept or early October. Which means, we could travel as early as November! We are still waiting to hear if they have interviewed Gertrude again and she has agreed to be adopted. All this is very exciting but it is hard waiting and persevering without knowing for sure. It's hard to believe this rests on a 9 year old girl's decision about something so important and life changing. We just have to trust God it will all work out according to what is best for all of us. Which we hope, of course, is that Gertrude becomes ours!

We will call Gertrude again next week. Our plan is to call every Saturday at 9:30, then if there is no answer, Sunday at 9:30. So far it's worked out well.