All Fruits Ripe!

Everything Cook and Curry

Don't you love the flowered onesie and knitted cap? The caps are knitted by a volunteer for the orphanage, and each child joins his or her family wearing one.

Our Last Night As A Group

Tonight all of our travel group got together for a potluck supper. It was so much fun! We had an added bonus of having a wonderful family from Ireland join us. The kids (and adults) were fascinated with the dad's sleight-of-hand magic tricks. Tomorrow we fly out at 10:30 pm. Yes, 10:30 at night! We will get home about 38 long, long hours after that. 

Laid Back Day

Today was our first full day as a family. We pretty much just hung around TDS Guest House and reveled in admiring our new little guy.

Holden Gets to Stay With Us ... Forever!

Today was another day of hurry up and wait. We were supposed to get together to fill out all the paperwork for the Embassy this morning and then go to WACAP House to bring our kiddos back to the hotel with us by lunch.  Well ... we finally got together about lunch to fill out the paperwork. I was so concerned that we were only going to get a few minutes' help on the paperwork so we could get to WACAP House on time, but I should have known that wasn't to be the case.


We spent quite a long time filling out the paperwork. I know I drove everyone absolutely crazy, including Ato Teklu (in fact I know he was terribly frustrated with me). Problem is, just before we left for Ethiopia, we got all this information about how self-employed parents who couldn't prove adequate income due to need to have a sponsor. Well, we couldn't prove adequate income because of a great accountant, and we didn't have a sponsor!


Teklu didn't seem too worried about the details of the Embassy paperwork. Maybe Ethiopia isn't too concerned about details, but from our experience, many other Embassies are! We did finally get all the paperwork filled out, and I don't think I made permanent enemies (although another parent, Kenton, was throwing highlighters and paperclips at me by the end).  Even still, I'm so worried about the Embassy appointment.


After that we waited to be taken to WACAP House ... and waited ... and waited. Finally after dark, a van pulled up with all our kiddos! They are ours! They will never go back to the orphanage!

We Meet Holden's Birth Mother!

  

Today started out a bit stressful! We were scheduled to meet Holden's birth family that morning, and we woke up to no hot water, no electricity and the breakfast buffet wasn't ready until the time that our driver was due to pick us up. It all worked out though because the driver was hours late, so we had plenty of time to eat and get cleaned up. In fact the driver even had to take us driving around to visit a park and go shopping because they weren't ready for us back at Ajuuja.


Our meeting with Holden's birth mother was amazing! She was so young, sweet and beautiful! She was terrified at first, but pretty soon she warmed up to us and would put her arms around us and hold our hands when we stood next to her for pictures. We brought her a photo album of all the pictures we had of Holden. We also brought her two frames. One had a picture of our whole family, and the other held three of Holden's best pictures. His mother lit up at the sight of the pictures and kept kissing the pictures of Holden.

Before she saw the picture of our family, she told us that she was Christian and prayed for her son to have lots of brothers and sisters since she was the oldest of seven children, and she wanted him to go to a family who valued education. When we told her how many children we had, that Ben was a doctor, and how many of our children had completed college or were currently in college, she was thrilled!

We visited with her about an hour. Conversation was slow though because we had to have two interpreters since she didn't speak Amharic. We took many, many pictures of Holden's birth mother to give him in the future, but I'm not going to post them here. I don't feel like I have that right.


We endured the long, harrowing drive back to Addis Ababa, and the driver took us directly to Habesha 2000 so we could eat a traditional dinner and watch Ethiopian dancing. We were hours late, so Ato Teklu was a bit stressed! Since we'd all been crammed in the car for the past seven hours, we all wanted to go back to the hotel first to freshen up, which Teklu wasn't terribly happy with.  We all cleaned up quickly and returned, Teklu relaxed once we are all there and he no longer had to hold our table, and we all had a wonderful time!