J Cooper Photography

The paperwork stacks are getting BIGGER!  Our home study is in final review (it was sent back for some wording changes) and should be re-submitted this week.  Our sweet social worker was emailing me last night at 11:00 working on it!  Our dossier is VERY near completion and will be turned in as soon as our home study is approved.  It looks like we just might meet our Thanksgiving deadline that we gave ourselves which makes me SO HAPPY!

Along with the home study and dossier, we had our “Eyes Wide Open” workbook to complete.  We should have had this finished up before completing our home study but somehow we managed to complete things in backwards order.  So the workbook just came a week ago and we have been working through it as fast as we can so that it doesn’t hold up our home study approval.  One of the final activities was to cook an Ethiopian meal and go to an Ethiopian restaurant.  This weekend we packed back up the family and headed down to The Blue Nile in River Market to try out some authentic Ethiopian cuisine.

And no…we haven’t adopted another little girl   Some sweet friends came downtown with us to enjoy the food and that is their cutie-pie daughter.  It was a GORGEOUS fall day here in Kansas City yesterday so we opted to dine outside….which meant we gave up a bit of the authenticity of the meal (sitting on the floor to dine)…but the weather was too nice to pass up!  We ordered beef and veggie Sambusa for appetizers which are like a fried dumpling stuffed full.  They were delicious…Sam devoured an entire one all by himself.  Now I know how to get him to eat more veggies…he’ll eat anything that has been fried long enough

The appetizers came as a communal dish but our meals were served individually (again…probably not entirely authentic).  The native bread is called Injera and is made from Teff flour.  It tastes a lot like sour dough.  I loved the taste of it but had issues with the texture…kind of spongy for me.  You use the bread to scoop up the different dishes which is a bit problamatic if you don’t care for the bread and don’t have utensils to use.  I’m sure over time I’ll get used to the texture and enjoy it more.  We ordered the Doro Tibbss, Tibbs Watt, Yebeg Watt, Atikett, Fosolia, and Dinich Watt…in case you are  a food buff and enjoy reading the descriptions

Our workbook will be mailed tomorrow!  Hopefully our home study will be re-submitted in the next few days followed by our dossier….and then we should have a NUMBER!  Can’t wait to just WAIT (remind me I said that in a few months will ya?)