A Year Ago

A year ago today, Crew officially became our son!  We celebrated Gottcha Day with ice cream and sprinkles.

a year ago

today

teeth and a haircut

Here is the big sister:

Crew has sprouted 4 teeth since we have come home. Since they have poked through, we have had a more restful sleep!

We finally decided to give Crew a haircut!

Here is the before:

During the cut:

This is the 1st look:

After a touch up:

home 1 month

Well, we have been home with Crew for over 1 month now! I truly feel as though we are adjusting well. Crew has turned me into an early riser (6:37 am) and still will wake up some during the night - but is easy to lay back down - it is just hard getting out of bed. Both Sadie and Crew had birthdays, so now we have a 4 and 1 year old. We are enjoying summer learning to be a family of 4!

More pics :)

more photos

photo shoot

We got to visit with our good friends who also adopted from Rwanda this year. One is a photographer and here is a sneak peek!

home

So good to be home! Crew really does adore Sadie right now. He can't take his eyes off her and she can make him laugh more than anyone else. Sadie wants to help him to everything and is a great diaper changing helper and is getting pretty good at feeding him his cereal.

Crew is getting pretty good at crawling, has velco hands- especially when my hair is close by, makes lots of funny faces and sounds with his lips, and right now is really into the legs on his high chair.

We are still recovering from the flights, our house looks like it exploded, but we are so happy to be home.

the past week or more

So sorry that we haven't posted in a while. We did get our kids passports on thursday (5/12)! The on Friday we headed to the US Embassy in Kigali for appointments there. The consulate was very surprised to see so many adoption appointments that day and told us she had never processed more than 5 in a day. There were 13 that day. At 6:00 pm, all 13 were finished! Thank you Consulate! The rest of Friday consisted of packing and frantically getting paperwork translated. We headed to the airport at 10:30 pm for our 1:30 am flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. If you are wondering if a 1:30 am flight for 9 families with 11 children is a good idea, the answer is probably no - no rest for the parents :) We did sit next to a Ugandan young man whose name was Elvis! (That is Crew's name at the orphanage)

We arrived in Addis Ababa early on Saturday morning and dropped our things off at Yebsabi Guest House and then took the kids to a clinic to have their medical examinations needed in order to get a visa. After that, most families napped, but I had to scan some of our original documents that needed to be translated.

Here is the official business that happened the rest of the week:

Monday- filled out I-600 and sent with AWAA staff

Tuesday - filled out some other form - 230 or something like that and went to the embassy to turn it in and got appointments for wednesday.

Wednesday - 9:00 appointments at the embassy that went well - the AWAA staff was to pick up our travel packets that afternoon! We had finished everything we needed to! We received our packets and some families were even able to fly out wednesday night.

Thursday - tour of coffee factory. Ethiopia is where coffee was discovered - some guy named Kaldi.

Friday - packing and headed to the airport at 5:30 so we could request a bassinet. They told us all the bassinets were reserved. Boarded the flight around 10:00 pm. Saw people sitting in the bassinet row that didn't have kids and they switched seats with us so we could have a bassinet! The next 17 hours was VERY LONG - not much sleep for Sten and I, but we arrived in DC at 8:30 am on Saturday!

Saturday- Long lines at immigration, a starbucks coffee, more lines at security, then we boarded a 12:30 flight to Chicago. When we arrived in Chicago we found out our 4:00 flight to Nashville had be cancelled. Our customer service lady worked some magic and got us on another airline to nashville at 3:15. We were greeted in Nashville by a sweet little gal in a princess dress who captured her new brother's attention right away!

To Whom

We received our "To Whom" letter from the Ministry and now Crew can spend the day and night with us! He is ours all the time. He is such a joyful little guy and is on the move. He learned to crawl on Monday and showed off his pipes last night:) (apologies to our neighbors in the hotel)

Our next step is to get passports for our kiddos - hopefully that will happen tomorrow. We head to Ethiopia late Friday night.

Our trip thus far has been fantastic! Our in country staff in Rwanda are amazing and the other families that we are adopting with are incredible. We are thankful to be on this journey with them.

We passed court yesterday! So today is the first day that we get to have Crew for the whole day outside of the orphanage. Here are some pictures from the last couple of days. Everything is going great and we'll update more later. Just thought you might want to see little Crew!

remembering

Today we went to the court early this morning so that we could state our case for adoption before the judge. We got that done fairly quickly and all seemed to go well. We hope to have a ruling soon! After court we came back to the hotel and had a few hours so we walked around town and ended up at the soccer stadium. They let us in and we watched the Junior Rwandan Team practice for a while. We made it back to the hotel to eat and then meet up with the other families. We went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial which is very well done. The beautiful gardens show the life that goes on next to the mass graves of over 200,000. Inside we were educated on the history of Rwanda, then events that led up to the genocide and the reconciliation after the genocide. There is also a room of pictures that families have sent in of those who were killed. Upstairs was an area dedicated to remembering other genocides throughout history and then a room dedicated to the children that were killed. Very sobering - but Rwanda is certainly healing and growing as a country.

We look forward to visiting our children again tomorrow!

In Rwanda

We are in Rwanda! It is a beautiful country - green and hilly. We have been here about 48 hours and able to see Crew a couple of times! He is precious and starting to show us his personality. Internet is slow and it has been a little difficult to get online, but a break this afternoon has given us some time. The other families that we are traveling with are wonderful and our in country guides are absolutely incredible.

Hopefully more later!

the intuition of a 3 year old

Have you seen Tangled? Probably not the best movie to watch right before you are getting ready to be apart from you kid for a while, but we had a sweet time together with a family movie night.

Sadie loved the movie and after it was over, in her royal fashion, she proclaimed she was Tanglie Hair and that mom was the Queen and dad was the King. We then rehearsed the end scene where they are re-united and hug.

Just what we needed :) - how does a 3 year old know?

BRINGING CREW HOME

Rwanda Bound

We leave for Rwanda on Saturday!! Please pray for our travels, for our time away from Sadie and our little guy. I hope to update the blog while we are in Africa.

Referral!

We have finally received our referral for our sweet boy! Although we cannot share details yet, we are so very excited.

Hopefully more to come soon!

Approval!

We finally received our approval! It came last week and we are pumped. The average length from this time until travel is 3-4 months. Not quite sure if those timelines will hold for us. Several families received approvals about 1 month before us, so their timing may give us a better idea.

It is very exciting to be able to write this post!