A Few More Pics

The top one is in J's school room. The second one I guess he was breakdancing or something. The third one is at G'ma and G'pa's with the little girl they babysit. Gotta go for now.

I tried to post a video

But it didn't work. Oh well. It was of J at G'ma and G'pa's house being silly. I'll have to try again but I don't think our connection is fast enough. We've made a couple of vids for J and in one of them we all showed him our "stupid human tricks", like wiggling our eyebrows or ears or touching our nose with our tongue. While we were the grandparent's we discovered that he had a "stupid human trick" of his own. We had a good time with J. He eats so much that we'll have to get a raise in order to feed him! He was interested in food prep and just what went into his food. I had oatmeal one morning. It was maple and brown sugar and he turned his nose up because it was brown, not white like at the O. He had a huge problem with yellow cheese too. White was okay but yellow was bad. G'ma was putting cheese on a pizza and J was watching so I whispered to her to put only white cheese on one corner and put both cheeses on the rest of it. He loved the pizza but would only eat that one corner. We're going to bake a cake when he gets here and I'm going to show him how to make multi-colored frosting with food coloring and prove to him that it all tastes the same. When we got back to the O the director told us that some of the kids think that yellow cheese is bad or rotten. It's late. The time stamp on this is wrong. A needs the computer.

Adoption

Oh, it worked. This was like the third try for the pic. This is our son.

Adopting from Haiti is something we always thought we'd do some day. I had always pictured a little boy, like toddler age. But we got older and the girls got older and then I discovered that in adoption, anyone over age 2 is considered an older child and not many people wanted to adopt older children. So, older child it was.

We started thinking about adopting, again, and asking our home Bible study group to pray with us about adopting in July '05. The girls were always okay with it in the past when we had talked about it but when we brought it up to them this time, they looked at us like we were nuts. R finally broke the silence by saying, "Where are you going to put him?" Yikes! Well, we figured out that we could make a room in our attic and then Tim would make a spiral staircase. That all worked out well.

We began searching orphanages in Aug. '05 and were interested in 3 boys at one particular "O" (that's how I refer to the orphanage). I had printed out pics of the three boys and one little guy kept smiling up at me. He had already been at the O for a year. We committed to him in late Sept. but when his birth mother came for her visit she said no to the adoption. We were crushed at first but then had peace. We considered the other boys but had no peace with that. A few days before Christmas '05 the O director called and said the birth mother had changed her mind and wanted us to adopt J. What a Christmas gift!

We had our dossier to Haiti by the end of January '06. It took six weeks to get the file in to Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another 7 weeks to get out. Then they couldn't find the birth mother to sign papers that needed signing to get in to IBESR (Haitian social services). She finally came in early July and signed the papers and our file was in IBESR. R and I got to meet him in July '06. What a character! In Jan. '07 we were notified that there was a mistake on his birth certificate and it had to go to courts to be fixed. We finally got out of IBESR in March '07.

Our file entered Parquet and stayed until late May when we got the email that said congratulations, you are new parents. Since then, our file has been stuck in the Ministry of the Interior. The O had been told that their files would be signed out a few weeks ago and that still hasn't happened. So, here we are. We did get to visit J again in June and take him to his grandparent's. I'll try to get pics and vids up from that visit real soon. That's the story so far!

Here we are

I created this blog to help family and friends keep up with "this, that, and life's joys". So here is the first post. I plan to tell our adoption story so far and our family tales. I'll post pics and vids of the kids, critters and maybe us if I can figure out how. Thanks for checking us out and stay tuned for more.
Amy