Days 41-42: Taking Lucas to his birthplace and packing his bag.. sniff

So the more kiddos you adopt the more complicated the actual travel situation becomes. Most couples need to send someone home to work and make money (us) which leaves the other parent to stay in Colombia with the new guy (me and Sam).. so then what do you do with the rest of the people? Due to our kids attachment concerns they need to stay with Mom (the routine) but at some point for Lucas the routine and consistency (and English and Daddy and his yard) of home outweighed the need to be with me. Sending him and my mom home on the original plane tickets means that is 2 less tickets for me to juggle and makes my work load here a little lesser as I move into a more labor intensive time. Starting next week (hopefully) I will start the shuffle of all of the paperwork pieces needed to wrap this thing up and prepare for the US Embassy, which is our last stop.

Tomorrow morning I put my oldest baby on his first plane ride without his Mom and ship him home to his Daddy. This leaves me with one diapered child and one who still needs a lot of assistance. This leaves one kid that can ride on me all day and one in a stroller. This leaves zero people to be hit by a bus... well I guess we could all get hit at the same time, but you could blame that on me and I'll see you in heaven (where I will look much better than I do now. Mama needs a curling iron and some heels).

Knowing that Lucas' visit to his birth country was coming to a close, meant we needed a big Lucas and Mommy date. Ted and I had already agreed we wanted to go through Lucas' old information and then make a trip to his birth hospital. It is still a bit over his head now, but we hope in a few years, he can look back at these pictures and make sense of a part of his story. Many children don't know the place of their birth in international adoption, so this is a gift.

On the way there, I initiated a sticky conversation about parts of his story that we haven't talked about enough. He knows he is adopted and he knows his story of Fana and coming to us, the problem is that he hasn't been confronted with other people's pregnancies lately and his brothers are all adopted.. so he thinks that everybody flies somewhere to pick up their kids when someone tells them they can. Hence, you see the predicament. So.. what I'm saying.. is that if one of my kids ever asks you who your birth mom is, you can explain your lineage. He is just trying to figure stuff out. He didn't seem to be upset about any of this, but he was very snuggly and wanted to hold hands.

Below, a few selfies of us being silly.

Also, our bling.

I don't know quite how to describe his birth hospital.. as in Ted's line of work we have seen everything from 4 walls where someone gives birth on a dirty table with blood chipped instruments and everybody just hopes for the best.. all the way up to American grade. The best I can explain is that this is right in between. It is a hospital, in that this is where you go, and someone qualified can see you to some extent.. but it was also the public hospital of his area of Bogota. Everyone was being triaged at the door. I was hoping to at least go into the lobby even if we couldn't go to the maternity area, but I quickly realized they were more concerned with why I was standing there and what my emergency was.. and since I obviously did NOT have an emergency, it was time to quit being the weird American and get out of the way. Many poor people were camped outside, and I felt bad enough walking around with my child with a camera. In this instance, my desire to record this event for my future mature son won, so we took a few discreet photos of him.

It is so humbling to know that this is how he started his journey to me.

He seemed to understand all of this, and talked about where everyone else that was dear to him was born. Things get a bit more tricky when kids want to know about their siblings situations.. and all 3 of my boys histories are very different so I had to dance a bit over those.

In the end, I gave him a big hug and thanked God for him and for watching of that little guy before I knew anything about a baby boy named Jonathan from the public hospital.

When that was done, we went for another little mini-date to Carulla for a brownie for him and an ATM for me.

Today, we are just hanging around here and preparing to send him and Grammy off on the plane. There will be some ice cream to celebrate his last afternoon here, and then Grammy and I will be partying at Crepes and Waffles tonight to send her off in style. Tomorrow morning, my brave little boy will leave his birth country again (but not for the last time) and I'm really going to miss him. He is a pretty cool guy.