"RARS"- What Dinosaurs say

Ted finally finished pulmonary on Friday and began another round in the Emergency Dept on Saturday... but the beautiful thing about the ED is that it's shift work. This allows for some family time too!

To celebrate my one year anniversary of full time mommy-hood and Lucas 2nd Bday.. we decided to go to the dinosaur exhibit at Union Station. Lucas was so excited about the big dinosaur in front of Union Station.. that he was very upset that we were driving past it (to park!) without stopping.

He loved the exhibit.. but as you can see some of those big T-Rex "Rars" could not be looked at without holding on to Mommy or Daddy at the same time. For safety :-)









This is what his face looks like when he makes his dinosaur noises..





And then we went home for a big nap...

More visitors to KC

During Lucas B-Day weekend.. we enjoyed a visit from Grandma and also Uncle Andy from Minnesota.

Here are some photos from Lucas' time with Grandma at Paradise Park. His two favorite things are the water discovery area and the Lucas size grocery store.. where he usually chooses to purchase unlimited syrup for waffles.. his favorite food.









Andy arrived on Friday night (when Ted had to be on call for pulmonary) so it was up to me to entertain him. We drove around to see the highlights of KC.. Power & Light, the Plaza... and Ted's ghetto hospital! We found ourselves back at Power and Light to catch up. One of Ted's childhood friends, Angie, was also in town so we met up with her and her friends also!





Two men enjoying waffles



Ted and Andy were finally able to get together on Saturday and enjoyed some good times at Kaufman stadium watching the Twin's play the Royals. I made them take pictures to prove it.







We look forward to more visitors in the near future :-)

Lucas 2nd Birthday- Missouri

MY BABY TURNED 2 ON APRIL 22ND. I only cried a little..... :-)

Here are those cake pictures that I'm sure you expected. We celebrated with the Sibley 3 and my mom who came down from Iowa to help :-)















You will have to trust me that the end result of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting was a bit intense.. and following this he was de-diapered and thrown into the tub for scrubbing!!

Enjoying the Wait- adoption update ;-)

Well we have officially been "waiting" now for two weeks. It feels good! We had some time and decided to go ahead and put up the crib. Yes, it's a bit premature, but we wanted Lucas to get used to looking at it and it's much prettier assembled than in a big ugly box.

Here are a few photos of the assembly and our finished product.







This is the view of both of the cribs in the room.. but the lighting wasn't working out too awesome for me..



So here are some more details about where we are at with the Ethiopia process...

I spent the past two weeks working on grant applications. We have finished the last one and it is ready to go on its way to be reviewed. We are praying that the grant organizations we have applied for will prayerfully consider helping us in the financial aspects of this endeavor. PLEASE PRAY :-) We don't expect to hear anything from them for awhile.. because most grant organizations review these things quarterly.

We are currently in the mid 20's in terms of the wait for referral. There were over 50 referrals in the month of March! Because there were so many, we were told to not expect a whole bunch this month (April) and May as the children are "legally abandoned" in batches by the Ethiopian court. There have been 3 referrals in the past week or so. If I were to estimate.. I would think that we would have some news late in May or perhaps June... but in the world of adoption one never knows. Another giant batch might give us something to talk about sooner than we think!

It is different than when we were waiting for Lucas, in that this time we will be getting "the call" that so many adoptive families are referring to. Although we do not have an assigned "buddy couple" this time, the Wagners from our FANA group have remained faithful in their moral support from all the way up in Minnesota! With this adoption, we will receive a referral and will be prepared for court at that time. We expect there to be about 2 months from our referral to the first court date. At this time, we expect that we will both have to travel to Ethiopia for the first court date. Once we pass court, we will be assigned a visa appointment where I will return by myself to take custody and bring baby home. We expect that to happen sometime this fall.

As you can see, there are pros and cons to both situations. With Lucas we were able to travel right away.. we just had no idea when we would be coming back. Ethiopia trips are shorter, but the process from referral to bringing baby home is much longer. I suppose all siblings are different with different pregnancies... so here is my adoptive parent equivalent :-)

I am part of the Holt International Yahoo Group... which is where we crazy waiting moms get together and track each others processes. Very similar to what I was doing during happy hour with the ladies from the FANA waiting mom's group 2 years ago at this time! It's funny how things are different. Right now, I just need to train myself to not check my email 20 times a day because I want to see who is getting referrals!!!! Really, it's hard. Even right now I want to check it!

That is all the news I have for now.. that we've moved from #26 at least 3 spots in the past week or so.. anxiously.. but not too anxiously.. waiting to see what will happen in the next month. It's exciting :-)

Baby Sibley #2 Dossier Complete and on its way!!

First of all, I would like to issue an apology to baby Sibley #2... BECAUSE... Baby Sibley #2 will someday reading Lucas' caring bridge updates that I wrote while we were preparing his paperwork, and say "Hey!! How come he has more than me!!" (during the initial paper process anyway).. and this will be my response:

"When I was working on the paperwork for your brother, all I had to do was get up, go to work, come home, change clothes, and sit there and stare at his paperwork and update the blog every night... when I would always have 3 or 4 hours of time to do that. With you, my sweet child, I had about one hour of time each day during Lucas' nap when I would hit the books WORKING ON your paperwork. At that time, updating the blog was way down on the list of things that needed to happen during the time I was working on YOU."

I'm sure he/she won't buy it, but that is my excuse.

So see? Baby Sibley #2's paperwork has not even been gone 24 hours, and here I am, UPDATING THE BLOG ;-) I shall continue to update this blog whenever I get a hint of any kind of information about adoption things going forward, on Mommy's honor.

So I don't have any pictures of the craziness of yesterday.. because it was crazy.. but I do have some photos of the results of such craziness.. which was a finished dossier ;-) Long story shorter, I wandered the downtown streets of Kansas City to find a big un-labeled government building that was not at all the address that it said it was to the naked eye. We finally found it, got in there, Lucas was freaking out... left for Lucas to finish freaking out... returned to find out one of my two only documents that had to be state certified was no valid. Super sadness. Wandered back to the car.

Super Daddy... out saving the world and the extremely sick people of the pulmonary floor of St Luke's hospital saved the day by tracking down a notary on the nursing staff and sneaking me into a closet to re-sign our power of attorney papers.

Lucas, with no nap.. and bordering on losing his mind entirely... did okay at the 2nd visit to the Sec of State office.. because I brought him an entire bag of popcorn as bribery which mostly worked.

We left the Sec of State office on our 2nd time, document in hand, and our last piece of the dossier.

Once Daddy got home, I left to take over the big table at Kinkos where I made a few milion copies of everything, reorganized it, tabbed it, quadruple checked it... you get the idea.

Here below, the fruits of our labors, and our very tired child.





We had to do some intermediate reading during the photo opportunity.. because somebody was super tired.. and couldn't figure out why post-bath pre-bed time was the time to be taking pictures...






So after our pictures, we were off to Fed Ex to send it off as a family. Lucas wasn't quite sure what the deal was and why he was taken someplace in his jammies with no shoes.. but whatever we weren't going for fashion we just wanted to do it as a family! I sent it expedited to be received on Friday and it is in FedEx hands until then!

So what do we do now you ask? GRANT APPLICATIONS. You can't apply for grants until your homestudy is completed, and I didn't have the files of mine until Saturday so I got to work! The sooner we get these important packets out to the organizations, the sooner we find if we will be receiving any aid in this endeavor.

So I bet you're wondering what comes next for the future baby. Well, Holt has to come through the giant 2lb packet I sent and make sure it looks good. There were a ton of referrals last month so the "list" is on the short side right now, but it's also possible that there won't be any referrals this month because there were so many. They tend to go in batches, because the kids are legally free for adoption in batches and we travel in batches. It is yet to be seen if we will receive a referral in the next "batch", but it could definitely happen based on the numbers I see.

Here is a picture of 2 men and a baby.



Here is a picture of the men taking apart the futon that was our "guest bed" in Lucas room to make room for the crib! We were able to donate the couch to the garage sale for one of our friends also fundraising for Ethhiopia.



I will leave you with a few pictures of our trip to the zoo on Sunday.. and I'll have lots more to say about the Ethiopia process in the next few days when I feel like telling you the long story about the new "2 trip process" that has freaked everyone in the Ethiopia adoption community in the past month.



Obviously with my son on the move, NO WALLABY IS SAFE



He loved the train.. but was a wee bit tired..



Big boys prefer big sticks. Obviously :-)

A few words about Haiti

So... you might ask why I haven't written lots and lots about Haiti yet.. The truth is I've kind of hit a point where I need to take an emotional break from processing it. I've been blessed to have family and friends that truly want to know about the things I saw and what I learned there. I have had opportunities to talk in short and also at length about it. I've had time to cry about little things that I remember. I was able to go to the Global Orphan Project Haiti summit on Friday night where I saw pictures of my Haiti children up on the screen and hear stories about them from the leadership that I have a very personal connection to already. Because I was THERE. I held them. I smelled the smells. I saw their scars... and I know their stories. Amazing stories of faith in our God and horrible stories of horrible things happening to little babes that I love.

I have moments that bring it all back.. like when I get a whiff of diesel fuel on the highway.. or see a construction pile of rubble or when I think how far along one of my pregnant little girls is. She is due in April with a baby girl, and she is 13.

I'm still processing the faith of the pastors of Haiti and how they bring praising the Lord in times of trial to a level I can barely comprehend.

You know how there are moments in your life when you take mental pictures of things that you will never forget. I think my time in Haiti was more pivotal than many of the other experiences in life in terms of how it impacted and changed me. I was changed when Lucas was put into my arms... but I was renewed in a different way while holding children in the back of a truck in downtown Port au Prince.

That is all I have for now. I thought it was time to touch on it, but I'm not really in a place to unleash all details to the world of Blogger just yet.

March adoption update

I haven't written in almost a month, but I have fantastic reasons. Shortly after my last post I left for Haiti. When I returned from Haiti on the 3rd, I jumped right into working on the dossier in a major way. That pretty much consumed all nap time for the last few weeks.

Just before I left for Haiti, Ted and I were able to hand in all remaining pieces to our Homestudy that we had any control over. Since we had everything done that was possible on our end, Holt set up times to send out our social worker. Barbara came out on March 10th and the 12th for our interviews and looking at the house. Since we've done this before, and lots of positive changes (stay at home Mom, Dad finishing medical school, we live somewhere that doesn't have "stairs of death"....) we weren't really worried about passing as much this time ;-) Everything went great, and Barbara was wonderful. She is working on the final written documents of our Homestudy right now, and we anticipate that to be done in the next week or so. Even after it is finished, however, there will be some time of sending it around to various places to get signed and then it heads to Holt's corporate office to be fully accepted by the Ethiopia staff.

While they are doing all of that, we needed to turn our attention to finishing the dossier- which is Ethiopia's stack of documents that they want. This includes things that were in our Homestudy, along with a few other random pieces. We're done with a little over half of it... and the rest of it is quite doable. This week we are trying to wrap up documents that needed to be created by us, and next week I will have to run around getting stamps on a few different things. I still need a notarized letter from the police, Ted's birth certificate from Minnesota to come back, my letters of recommendation back from a couple gals, a listed statement of benefits from Ted's HR dept (notarized of course and on their letterhead), and a bunch of random documents that Ted and I have to create, notarize, and have state authenticated. It's just nice to be able to look at my list and at least understand what there is left to do.

Things got a little interesting in the Ethiopia adoption front this week. I'm going to be vague, only because there is no reason for great alarm because we don't have enough details to be alarmed yet. Basically, due to a few incidents over in Ethiopia of people coming to get their child only to find out that their agency had lied to them (ie: their child was severely disabled but the agency had said they were healthy, or children being years older than their agency had said they were). The result of those indiscretions has resulted in the Ethiopian government issuing a statement that now all adoptive parents need to be present for court to testify that their child is their child as they were told it would be. Let's be positive- Ethiopia cares about their children that they want to ensure the correct placement and they are willing to step up the game to protect all parties involved. That is GOOD. It also means that we can get the same time of visa that we had for Lucas which makes things much easier when you get home. Oh...and then there's that little tid bit of spending time with our baby when they are a bit younger and more picture opportunities! The bad? Plane tickets to Ethiopia aren't cheap... and people in Ted's position at the hospital can't "just take vacation time" like most working adults. The man can barely get any sleep or come home, let alone leave the country for an undefined period of time.

We don't know yet just how interesting this will get. This news is fresh from the adoption headlines and our agency is really scrambling to get us all answers. There are a lot of dossiers sitting there ahead of us in Ethiopia right now... and those folks will have to do the same thing before we do. Many of them are in more difficult places than we are.. in that they have more children at home to find childcare for. In our situation... 2 of the 3 members of our family are easily portable and it doesn't cost anything for those 2 people to be away... it's just our breadwinner that we worry about :-)

IF only one of us has to travel to testify at court- we are only looking at an addition $2,000 of cost, if we both have to, it will be more like $3,000 more. If we both have to be fully present both times.. and each time for awhile... then the Sibley family may need to take a break from this process for a bit to re-assess the finances. Will that be hard? Yes... BUT we will not lose all sanity in the pursuit of another child so as to take on so much debt that we can't feed the child when they come home. At this time, we are cautiously optimistic... and have decided to just work on our dossier in our own sweet time.. and instead of rushing to get it there as fast as possible, we will just work on it as we feel like working on it. If and when we do have to go for the court appointment, it will be 6-8 weeks or so after referral.. and we aren't really expecting a referral until late summer or early fall... so this is all a ways off and not worth panicing about.

In the meantime, we continue to pursue God's will in all of this and HIS direction. HE will bring our 2nd child home when HE sees fit. He is the God of all orphans and the God of all money. He is the giver of grants, donations, and low interest adoption loans... and this is in His hands. The more I remember that, the more peace I have, and the more I enjoy this fantastic life that He has given me.

And now, it is time to turn off Thomas the Tank Engine and read Lucas some books :-)