Enjoying more Fall and family wedding

Missouri has no shortage of pumpkin patches. We have already been to 3! We spent some family time at the official Kansas City pumpkin patch. It was a good day :-)

















We traveled back to Minnesota in the early part of October for Ted's brother Brad's wedding. Lucas was a ring bearer and Ted was a groosman. I gave out lots of fruit snacks.















We're hoping for some MN visitors sometime around the holiday season and hope to be able to travel back up shortly after baby comes home :-)

Lake of the Ozarks

Ted had another vacation in September (that we really didn't want to use but they sort of made us) and we decided to spend a couple days in the Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri. It was kind of our first and final vacation as a family of three.

We stayed at a Sleep Inn that had a wonderful continental breakfast (that somewhat became lunch as well) and a big pool for busy little boys. We spent the evenings watching super hero movies and hanging out at the pool, and our days traveling around to different free events.



Here we are watching movies and hiking























We also went to visa the Mother's Shrine at a large Catholic church out in the country. We really enjoyed it and plan to have my name engraved there soon :-)









We also spent a morning at Ha Ha Tonka state park and hiked around a burned out castle/mansion, but Lucas was kinda of done..





Our little trip was a great way to re-charge our family time and also kick off the fall season in Missouri

Court date update!

I'm late again, but it's because I was so busy last week getting our court papers signed and sent and submitting our visa applications!

We leave on December 2nd for a December 6th court date to (hopefully) become baby boy's legal parents. All traveling families have passed court in the two trip process so far. Even if something is missing for our date, we will still have fulfilled our requirement to be there and testify regarding him. After that, it takes a few weeks to secure some important documents that need to be translated and submitted to the US embassy to secure our visa date- which is when I get to go back! We're hoping to travel sometime during February with a slight possibility of March if things take awhile. We are enjoying our countdown. Going through this entire part of the process during the Holiday season will make things a little easier since I'll have a nice distraction. I'm sure I will be missing him big time on Christmas morning, but by then I still at least have the comfort of being his legal mother.

Some of our friends will be traveling for court between now and them and we wish them happy travels!

Please continue to pray for Ben's health and development between now and then. As of August 2nd, he was 11.4 lbs and eating well ;-)

Submitted for Ethiopian court on 9/15!!

So my post is a little late.... sorry :-)

We were thrilled to find out that we were submitted to court on Wednesday, September 15th in Ethiopia. This was a surprise, because the courts were still closed and we were originally told that they would not be submitting any families until the courts were to re-open on September 27th.

What does "submitted for court" mean? Good question :-)

That means that all of baby boy's Ethiopian papers were in order and ALL of our papers were translated correctly and in order. All of that is submitted to the Ethiopian court. They review it and schedule our court date. We will fly to Addis Ababa for this court date and will become babies legal parents. For you Colombia families, we are basically flying to be present for the signing of "sentencia".

So far, we have friends that already have court dates through the end of November. Although there is a very tiny chance we might squeak in someplace in November, it will likely be December or maybe even January.

Usually it only takes 1 to 2 weeks for the courts to come back with your assigned date, but we haven't received ours yet. Hence my waiting to update the blog... It's been 2 1/2 weeks now so hopefully this upcoming week we will have news and will be able to start working on our plane tickets and visa applications.

We were very very happy to find that all 4 families that traveled for court this week passed court with flying colors and are now the legal parents of their children. They just have to wait for the court decree this next week, and the Holt staff in Ethiopia will secure the new birth certificate and submit the needed documents to the United States Embassy in Addis to secure their visa appointments.. they are then invited to travel to pick up their babies! We hope they will be able to do this in November. A few more families leave for court next week and we hope all will work out for them as well.

We will send out more news as soon as we have it! Please also pray for a medical/developmental update on baby boy, as our current information is now 4 months old :-) I want to know if he is actually getting some chub!