Today we are officially one month into the waiting process! Our dossier is now in Ethiopia in the right hands, so we just pray that they find our little one soon. We are so excited to be done with what's called the "paper chase", and now in the waiting phase...although the waiting is tough! We have been busying ourselves with painting his room and getting things ready which has been fun. We are trying to pace ourselves though so that we don't run out of baby projects before we have a baby! It seems to make the waiting easier to have things to do. You may find us wandering aimlessly around Babies R US just looking at things, but I'm thinking that's probably normal, right? :)

I love to read, and I just started a new book called One Million Arrows (Raising your children to change the world) by Julie Ferwerda. I would encourage anyone who is a parent, is expecting a child, or wants to be a parent in the future to read this book! I have only read the first five chapters, but so far it talks about how it is nobody's responsibility to raise our children but our own - not the pastor, youth pastor, teacher, or sunday school teacher. We have a very short window of time to impact our children's lives for eternity, and we must be intentional about it. I want to raise a world changer! In chapter 5, the author quotes a (famous) father:

"If I could get my kids to the age of twenty-five knowing and serving God, and having character that pleases God, then I knew God would be happy and I would be happy. The only way I could do that was to do it myself - commit to God that this is my job. Our goals weren't just typical goals. I tried to give him a vision early that if he worked hard and became a successful quarterback, he would have an amazing platform for Christ." - Bob Tebow

A few of the principals that the Tebows employed in their parenting were teaching them to memorize scripture daily, encouraging them to pick heroes who modeled good character such as humility, teaching them at an early age to care about the problems and needs of others, and using smaller problems to teach them how to deal with bigger ones. I think they did a pretty good job, don't you?