Ethiopian courts re-open, interview assigned, and we hit a delay

Ethiopian courts re-opened on October 6th. We received a wonderful email a few days later that Trent's case was assigned an interview date on October 22nd. The interview is a repeat of the same investigation that was done with the embassy in July, except this time instead of the American embassy investigating, it is the Ethiopian court process due process.

We kept busy and began to really plan for our trip to Ethiopia, as it was always possible we would be traveling soon after this interview took place and we did not want to be caught surprised.

We waited or news of the interviews success on 10/23 but successful news we did not receive :-( The court was unwilling to hear our case or accept our agencies supplemental documents because the Ministry of Women's Youth, and Children's Affairs (henceforth called MOWYCA) had not prepared their letter of consent for the court. No need for shock and horror. This happens a LOT. It happened in Ben's case as well as about half of my friends cases. The difference, is that this past fall and spring while my friends were going through the process, the courts were allowing cases to be heard still, and they would give MOWYCA a deadline to turn in their stuff. Usually MOWCYA got it done about a week later as best I can tell from many of my friends timelines.

But they changed the rule.

Now MOWYCA must have their stuff there BEFORE our case can be heard. MOWYCA was on trainings through last week, so starting Monday my agency has promised to pester them, letting them know this child's case is sitting there until they write their letter that was due before 10/22. Even if we get the letter in the next few weeks, it is likely this will cost us about a month of processing time. We need to get the letter and then re-apply for our case be heard again, and those things tend to be scheduled a few weeks out. We are really hoping this can happen in November and that I can hopefully travel sometime in December.

This stinks for Trent, and it stinks because it is also pushing me into holiday airfare time and means I will likely miss out on holidays with the boys, but it does give us some really good time to prepare our home, hearts, and physical bodies for the task that lies ahead, and it is a big task.

So now... we wait. We just wait for the email that says we have our MOWYCA comments and a new court date to go with it.

This is what we have been doing while we wait, besides ordering a whole lot of stuff on amazon to prepare our home.

We did handstands

We sent people to school

We visited the Ozarks with some very special friends

We ran some races and hunted pumpkins too!!

It was even possible for me to sneak away for 2 days to the beach of Galveston, TX to collect myself before the tasks of the Fall really set in.


Please keep us in your prayers in the next few weeks as we wait for news on the letter from MOWYCA, and you will know as soon as we know that our case can move forward for little Trenton, holding steady at 30 lbs!

PAIR Letter Received and Submitted to Ethiopian court!

We have more quick movement on little Trenton's case, and we are so thankful!

I greet you from our rustic rental cabin at Lake of the Ozarks. We had planned a little 2 day family time before school starts for Lucas next week. It has been an eventful past week, as we added a little girl to our temporary care. We took her little brother in last month. We anticipate we will be helping this family up until school starts for their district. The kids are doing wonderfully considering their circumstance. 4 of the kids are outside with Ted doing cannonballs into the lake and I'm inside her with Sammy making sure he is getting a little rest (that will greatly enhance his ice cream experience later today).

ANYWAY

We received our physical Pre-Adoption Immigration Review (PAIR) letter in the mail on July 29th. We think we received ours so quickly because we live rather close to the national benefits center so it didn't spend as many days in snail mail. The next morning, I made a trip with all 4 boys to the capital of Missouri, Jefferson City, which is about 2 hours away from us to make sure everything that i needed to send with the letter was state authenticated properly. Considering I had to enter a state capital building with 4 crazy little boys I think things worked out rather well. I quickly returned home to organize everything to overnight a packet via Fed Ex to Washington DC where a courier that Holt contracts with named Ray would do some legwork for me. Ray spent the next few days authenticating my letter Federally as well as with the Ethiopian embassy. There is nothing remarkable looking about this rather sacred letter. No raised seal or obvious original signatures. It probably wouldn't be that hard to replicate if someone wanted to put their head to it, that is why all of the extra authenticating is necessary. There are specific numbers on it relating to my case that need to check out in a computer somewhere.

It was later that afternoon that I needed to pick up little girl as well. I thought surely I didn't have enough on my plate that day, that it meant total logical sense for another homeless child to move in. CLEARLY. I was a bit stressed. Stressed or not, all 5 kids as well as myself got the first packet to Fedex for its overnight journey to DC. Following a few days of authentication, our letter left DC in another Fed Ex envelope and just left the Fed Ex hub in Memphis, TN. It will arrive in Addis Ababa to our Holt contact on Monday.

Because we were able to send a copy of our clearance letter to the Ethiopian staff, we were looking forward to being submitted to court in Ethiopia to start the last half of Trent's legal journey.

I just received the email that we were officially submitted to Ethiopian court on Wednesday, August 6th.

SO ERIN, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??

It means this: We only have 2 more hurdles to clear before I am invited to fly and meet my son. One little setback is that the Ethiopian courts close every year for the majority of August and September for the rainy season. It is hard to do business in that time of year because it downpours every day. The power goes out and roads are washed out etc. It is hard for people to arrive for their set appointments, so they just close up shop to some degree each year and re-open when the weather is more likely to cooperate. We had the same thing happy during Ben's process in 2010 so we are used to this and expected it.

OKAY ERIN, I NOW UNDERSTAND RAINY SEASON, BUT WHAT WERE THOSE 2 HURDLES?
Ethiopian court will now go through our translated dossier from January and Trent's information that was already cleared by PAIR. Before Ted and I receive our invitation to come meet Trent and testify before the court that we want to be his parents, Ethiopia needs to

1: Re-interview the woman very central to his case (who was already interviewed by the US embassy a few weeks ago as part of his PAIR investigation) to make sure everything still is as she has been saying it was all along..

and 2: Ministry Of Women, Youth, and Children's Affairs.. who I will further refer to as MOWYCA (Colombian friends, think "Bienstar")has to write a letter to the court consenting to his adoption. I am not concerned that they will not consent to his adoption, as we already have a letter as part of his PAIR documents by the regional head of MOWYCA for his birth area to please be released for adoption and "preserve his life" (woah. HEAVY). it is just a thing that has to get to court in order for us to pass. Some of you remember, this is one of the reasons we didn't pass court on one of Ben's many court dates. Sometimes they are slow and it just doesn't get there when its supposed to.

In the good news I received this morning on court submission, our agency said that interviews for "important people in the case" are still taking place during the closure (YAY!!) so it is possible that part of things will be done before the court re-opens. I don't know, however, if MOWYCA is issuing any comments during the closure. We may have to wait until October for those when things re-open.

Once our authenticated PAIR letter lands in Ethiopia on Monday and our agency runs it over, and the interview is completed and the MOWCYA comments letter is added to our case... we will be invited to fly and meet our son.

WWWWWHHHHHHAAAATTT???

A year ago TODAY I applied for the Ethiopian program, assuming I would be waiting a few years. Assuming we would do OUR thing. I didn't know he was sitting on a "find me a family" aka "waiting child" list for over a year. He had been sitting there all along, ready to go. All of this has happened sooner and smoother than we anticipated.. and we have been blessed in odd and unexpected ways financially to be prepared to take This on so quickly after bringing Sam home last year. All of those things added together tell me that Trent is supposed to have a Mom and a Dad and that he has been provided for this whole time. I have just been along for the ride, trying to be obedient as possible in the process.

I will be staying in between our court date and our final clearance from the Embassy. We anticipate I will be living in Africa about a month. Maybe a little more, but likely not less. Every one of those days will be spent snuggling Trent and learning to communicate with him. He has been in an orphanage for years. Of course, he had a mother and birth family at one point, but we don't know how much of that world remains in his conscious mind.

Ted and I were just talking in the car this morning.. how last Christmas I was finalizing our dossier, never dreaming that someone could be here before Christmas 2014. My mom tells me about how her pregnancy with me was so short in her mind because she was a bit in denial through most of it (I was planned ya'll, just not so close to my older brother as I ended up being). That is how I feel. I purposefully didn't emotionally engage in this adoption because I expected such a hard process with PAIR. I'll probably be on the plane in October and be in shock that all of this has happened. Clearly, Trent is supposed to be here, with all that should have been stacked against him. We don't think this is because we have been more obedient or prayerful or whatever than anybody else. I think God is very present in messy adoption situations as well (as we experienced in the past with Ben where we hit quite a few snags that tested my faith and where I put my hope). Some of my dear friends have hit every snag possible when PAIR first started and many of them received referrals many months or almost a year before mine in some cases and are just now coming home.

So it looks like we will be hanging another stocking on the mantle this year at Christmas everyone, because this little lad may be coming home SOON... and he will have the snuggliest fuzziest Christmas jammies EVER :-)

Trenton update: I say "PAIR!!!" you way "waaahhhh??"

Okay adoption junkies, it's time for class. What is this "PAIR" that I keep speaking of? It stands for:

Pre-
Adoption
Immigration
Review

aka PAIR. Back in the olden days, you would get a referral. Wait around weeks/months for all of your "stuff" of your file and kiddos to be put together and submitted to Ethiopian court. For Ben in 2010 this took 2.5 months. Then you receive a court date. For Ben, that was 4 months post referral to appear before the court in Ethiopia. At that time you hope that all of the stuff is at the right spot at the right time for you to pass. This was when Ben's process went all wonky and we were in limbo for another 6 months before we finally did pass 10 months post referral. In his case, we were submitted to embassy quickly after, and just happened to "clear" quickly. For other families in recent history, that wasn't the case. They would go through the entire process with Ethiopian court, only for the US Embassy to find fraud in their case and deny the child a visa to the USA (as should happen when fraud is found, but how heartbreaking for all involved).

It was after those fraud issues occurred that the United States decided to shake things up last year. Now, with PAIR, all of the investigating is done BEFORE things are submitted to court. My dossier and all of Trents stuff are sitting in Ethiopia right now at my agencies office, waiting for the magical "PAIR" letter, which states that the USA found no fraud and green lights for all. That investigation is what is happening right now for Trent.

I was able to get through to my immigration officer a week ago Monday to verify that she did indeed have my file, and that I would be ever so helpful in any way I could should she need anything or have any questions. It is normal(about 80% of the time) for folks to receive an "RFE" which is a Request for Evidence. I have received 3 in total in my adoption experiences for a few tiny little things that held things up and resolved. I spoke to her on Monday July 14th, and she said that I was on her stack for "this week". woot woot.

I woke to an email the morning of July 16th that my documents had been uploaded to the US Embassy in Ethiopia (Embassy in Ethiopia is always at work when we are sleeping folks!). There was fist pumping. This means we didn't receive an RFE in our first round and passed through!!

Our I604 "investigation of orphan status" had begun!!

Then a bit of a downer. I awoke to another email on Thursday morning, informing me that 2 documents would need to be amended. These were small fixes and nothing to be alarmed about... they don't smell of fraud etc.. just an Ethiopian vs American calendar issue (Ethiopia runs off of the Gregorian calendar which is 7 years behind us. One doc said it had been issued in 2006 rather than 2013). So right now, an important interview of someone close to his case as well as those 2 documents are being worked on by the staff in Ethiopia.

Please continue to keep his investigation and his little self in your prayers. We hope to see some movement in the weeks to come either with the interview or these documents being resubmitted.

Thanks ya'll :-)

Trenton Eskedar Sibley.. waiting for pick up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia :-)

***I wrote this a few weeks back....*****

So I get to greet you today in a moment of peace :-)

Ben fell asleep on the couch. Sammy is resting in his space. Lucas is watching a horrible super hero movie he earned and if I tell you the name you will judge me.

I just ate a rather awesome mango that made me miss Bogota.

You know what else? I'm PREGNANT... Sibley style :-) and I DIDN'T TELL YOU.. unless I did in person and shoved adorable pictures of my 4th son in your face over the course of the last few months. I see that my last post was in February while we were still caring for one of our little people with Safe Families. At that point we were fighting for this guy, but we didn't have our "yes".

So.. getting back to this whole pregnancy thing :-)

A matter of days after turning in our dossier on 1/10/14 we were looking through the Ethiopia "waiting child" list with our agency. Sidebar: we should be, like, BANNED from doing stuff like that. There he was, little man, smiling back at us from the screen with a description that wasn't exactly a "big seller". Severe delays. Possibly deaf. Incontinent. Nonverbal. According to their description he wasn't doing much but sitting on the floor at 4 years old... but there was this thread of friends of mine on our agencies Ethiopia facebook group that had met and played with this child.. and he understands. He plays. He walks. He even runs a little bit. It is entirely possibly that this child's mental delays and physical issues are consistent with a person that didn't get at all what God intended for the first 4 years of his life. He was abandoned early on and obviously disabled since. What is unclear at this time is whether the disabilities are an actual brain injury, or what the human body does when its needs are not met in any way for a prolonged period of time. So there we were.. confronted with this little person who had already been on a website for almost a year.. where anyone in the continental United States could have volunteered and fought to be his Mommy.. and he fit the paper we wrote.. that had already been approved and was on its way to Ethiopia already.

We looked at each other and we took a deep breath.. and we wrote the letter. The last time we "wrote the letter" we got Sam.

We wrote the letter and we waited. We called. We annoyed. We even learned later on that the reason they didn't return our calls at first was because they thought I was a crazy person (having already 3 little boys and at the time Sammy home for less than a year) and they needed to verify with the Missouri branch director that I was indeed NOT insane.. and that we really did have the logistical ability to parent a child with significant disabilities (which, by the way, they had already APPROVED ME FOR.. but people seemed to forget that part?). Then once the dialogue of the committee process got rolling we jumped through more hoops. For the 6 weeks this all dragged on I did get a bit annoyed.. I did. It was 6 weeks his case wasn't moving and we and he were paper ready for it to do that. In hindsight, I get it. Many adoption agencies in the past, and even present, let good hearted people bite off more than they could or should parent.. and it sets them up to fail. They needed to make sure that I knew what I was talking about and I knew what I was asking for. My response to their question about what the first year home with Trent would look like? "It's going to suck.. it's going to suck bad. I am going to go into a hole and think I"ll never come out (but I will). My husband and I will be ground down to the wire and 1 kid will regress and emotionally grieve, one will have super sensory behaviors and poop himself, and another will give up sleeping until he feels more secure.. all the while this little guy will lose it all and need/qualify for every therapy under the sun." It is going to be WICKED ya'll.. but it's the last international adoption of a young-ish person. Ted has the education, the insurance, and the income to ensure this kid will get everything he needs. We already know how to navigate the special needs systems of KC. I will always be home and I will advocate.

We raised our hands to be what we have always prayed to be and that is that we will "show up, on time, and equipped" for what God asked of us. After a year of sitting on the WC list, it was clear that no one else was coming.. let alone someone who had already turned in paperwork and was committed to what was to come.

I still remember looking in the mirror, taking some deep breaths, and reminding myself that this child may never get better. His brothers may be making his life choices for him if his brain doesn't heal. We may be never be able to go to normal family gatherings or vacations if his needs are severe.. not only were we confronted with a choice that could drastically change the dynamics of our family forever.. but we aren't doing it for free. His fees are the same as my other "normal healthy" individuals.

WHO DOES THAT??!! Apparently us... and what did God do for me?.. when I wasn't "perfect" and I was in my mess and a circumstance. He didn't wait until I was within the bounds of what normal people easily love (normal, healthy, controllable little ones). He got in and got His hands dirty and He works with me. We do life together.

Finally, On MARCH 10th, 2014 we got our "YES" from our agency and our referral immediately the next day. We are about to have "twin" Ethiopian boys.. with about a 30lb weight difference at this point.... His estimated birth date is fall of 2009 (6 months different than Ben on paper) but we will be advocating to have it changed. He is so tiny and so delayed and it was such a guess to begin with.. we want him same age or a teeny bit younger than Ben.

I wish I could post pictures here, but if you remember with Ben's adoption that that is a "no no" in Ethiopian process until you're all done. Sigh. I know.. but I can show them to you elsewhere if you haven't already seen :-)

Trenton Eskedar Sibley, currently 4 1/2 years old and hanging tight at 29lbs in Ethiopia will hopefully be coming home late fall 2014 or early spring 2015.

So why did we wait until today of all days to "go public" with this information? A little thing called PAIR.

This stands for Pre-Adoption Immigration Review. After all of the drama in Ethiopia a few years back.. where people would clear the Ethiopian portion of the process and be submitted to the united States Embassy for their visa to be issued.. well it happened that the USA would investigate cases, find fraud, and then that family loses their child because a visa would not be granted to the USA. As of last summer, the United States launches an investigation BEFORE all of this happens. They require a stack of documents now from the birth region to be submitted before they start their investigation. The problem last summer, was that all of these things were very new to Ethiopians.. and Trent was born directly on the border of Sudan where things are extremely unstable.. and the the roads are washed out.. and there is pretty much no electricity let alone internet. We knew when we said "yes" to Trent, that we could be waiting for these required documents to be completed for a really long time. Some families that got referrals last August didn't even get to this point until Jan and Feb of this year!! Some of them 6-8 months after referral where their case went absolutely nowhere. We didn't want to go through that publically. We decided that we would wait to share it with the world until we had that stack of papers in our hot little hands.

AND WE DO :-)

Last night looked something like this:



Our PAIR documents came through yesterday.I jumped up and down in my living room. We processed them last night, and our I600 and supporting documents are now on the way to the lockbox in Texas. From here he is "on the grid" with immigration. Local immigration will comb through it. They will likely want something redone or extra evidence submitted (called the dreaded "RFE" for Request for Evidence). We don't want that, but about 75% of people get them. Then once we get that fixed and they are happy, everything is sent to the embassy in Ethiopia where the US Embassy launches their investigation and re-interviews everybody to make sure things are legit. When we get notice that the investigation is complete, we will have A GIANT HUGE MASSIVE PARTY because that means our PAIR letter is on the way. That gets authenticated in DC and sent directly to Ethiopia to be combined with our other papers and presented to Ethiopian court.. then they invite us to travel as the last piece of the evidence for Ethiopia. We pass court. We come home for about a month while they run around getting all of his new Sibley documentation done.. and then we are back on the plane for the pick up :-)

As you can see, we still have a lot of hoops to jump through.. but we have just gotten PAIR documentation in 3 months time and that was one of the biggest wildcards we didn't know wouldn't cause us to be still be in the same place months and months from now.

We love you little Trenton Eskedar.

PS if you are on our Sibley mailing list, you will be getting a magnet with his face and info on it so you can pray for him every time you open your fridge!!!

***** Okay back to live time. Documents were received 6/18 at the TX lockbox and we are waiting our officer on the case to begin his investigation. Pray that all will be well, and if it isn't, that it will be easily fixable. Until we hear more, we hang tight and we pray for his health and his development. We will be there as soon as we can little man. Godspeed.

On starting to work with Safe Families for Children

So I just wrote about us writing our dossier for Ethiopia. After the bulk of my work on that portion was done and I was waiting for things to come back, I happened to attend a meeting at The Orphan Justice Center in Grandview, MO about Safe Families for Children.

I had never heard of it, and I was instantly excited/convicted that I had stumbled upon a way to be hands-on in orphan prevention here locally. Because we have been in and out of adoption processes, we are unable to be foster parents as that involves having "custody" of another child (thus affecting our homestudy). Because in Safe Families we are just free childcare volunteers, we are able to help out without it messing us up legally.

I was so excited.. and then there was also the terror of doing it. Ted and I talked it over at length. We were at a great place. Sammy was very well adjusted. We agreed we could start the process of getting approved. Since we already had a perfect homestudy for our Ethiopian adoption, we only had to do a few additional pieces of paperwork to get our file in order. We went live in mid December with Safe Families.

We didn't hear anything over the Christmas season, but had a few near-assignments in January. Finally, a situation stuck and moved forward to needing our help. We are currently helping a 3 yr old little boy who has actually been able to stay with his mother at ANOTHER Safe Families host home. My other SF comrad can't do childcare for children but CAN help adult women and my situation is the opposite (due to the size/nature of our house, I can't give adults much privacy). He is with me during the day and some evenings/weekends while his mom is getting some wonderful help from the Women's Employment Network.

It is an interesting thing to have your life now intertwined with another little family. It is sometimes inconvenient and messy (example: we had a death in the family, but our friends need to be in court for a domestic abuse situation and we are responsible to both situations... hm...). Do you know what else? It is AMAZING. Just the other day, I was explaining to a stranger that these were my 3 boys, and my extra little boy was my "friend" who I help sometimes. He looked up to me with his big blue eyes, pointed and me and told the lady "mama (is) my friend". He knows I'm not his "mama", by the way, he just thinks its my name so it is used in more of a "hey you that helps me with stuff" tone. I love that he views him and me as friends. We help each other and we spend time together. What a great thing to call our relationship!

I can't really show pictures of him since he isn't my child, but I can show you a behind the scenes of my house without full identities and names.



We have been so blessed by Safe Families. I hope we can work with them for a long time. It is very good stuff.

For any/all information on Safe Families (a national network, by the way) here is their website and a few more. Email me if you'd like even more information!

http://www.safe-families.org/

http://orphanjusticecenter.com/what-we-do/safe-families-for-children/

Back to Ethiopia? Re-entering the Ethiopian adoption process

So the story of how this happened started back when we were still in Bogota. When we happily exited the Ethiopian program in 2011 things were becoming a lot more difficult over there. Regulations were changing quickly (and many for very good reasons). Shortly after Ben got home, our agency stopped taking applications for children younger than 5 years old. Since all of our children were under the age of 5 and we aren't qualified to parent anything older, Ethiopian adoption was kind of a closed door moving forward (hence, the decision that Sibley child #3 would be Colombian special needs and we found ourselves back in Bogota in the summer of 2013 a bit ahead of schedule...).

So, the Colombian adoption completed, we started thinking about Sibley #4. Because we had felt Ethiopia was a closed door, we had planned to move forward with a domestic adoption of an African American child in a few years. I had looked into Ethiopia with another agency and was seriously considering enterring the program when we got wind that our agency was allowing returning families to enter the Ethiopian program (and only a select # allowed at that). This all happened while I was still sitting in my room at El Refugio in Bogota last summer. Who starts paperwork talks for their next child while the ink is not yet dry for the current child?! Apparently us, especially since another Ethiopian adoption is estimated another 2-3yrs to actually happen, at which time our kids will be significantly order than they are now. Surely I will be bored or something by then.

So we got Sammy home, got our savings account above $4.00 which, I kind you not, was what we had left when I got home, and started the paper trail yet AGAIN. Who writes TWO dossiers for TWO separate countries in one calendar year??!! Again, apparently us.

The timeline for people that like those:

*not yet 6 weeks after Sammy getting off the plane, we applied to the Ethiopian program on 8/8/2013

*final homestudy approved 11/3/2013 and immediately applied for our I600A the next day

*had minor drama with a Request for Evidence from immigration because they wanted a fresh date on my background clearance from MN since my previous one from 2010 was more than 14 mo. old. I really did promise them that I had not moved back to MN to abuse any children in the meantime, but alas, they wanted proof from MN and that cost me a few weeks. A few days after Christmas we had that fresh approval back to our agency and they immediately filed it with immigration.

*My 171H (immigration approval) for up to 3 children, ages 0-4 yrs at time of referral with any/all special needs (save 1) came to my mailbox on January 10, 2013. This, OF COURSE, happened while my husband was out of the country in he Dominican Republic, but luckily I already had the entire dossier prepped so signatures by him were not needed.

That, folks, is why this is the only photo I have, taken from my phone that day on our way to Fed Ex. I didn't have the camera, but it was monumental, as was 3 little boys at Fed Ex in the rain.



Lucas got to do the honors when we sent the papers for Sammy last February, so now it was Ben's turn. Our documents were found to be satisfactory with our agency, and we started the waiting process at lucky #35 on the wait list. I think we have moved down a few slots since then.

On one hand, we are in for a long wait, but on the other hand our dossier was written for special needs children. If a child comes in to care that does not fit what the folks above us wrote theirs for (most for normal, healthy, 1 or 2 children/twins) then it goes to us by default. So, in reality, we could get a referral at any time in our specific case.

We must tell you that the climate of adoption in Ethiopia has really shifted in the past few years. We are entering this process "eyes wide open". Our goal being to be in the right place at the right time for a child who is hard to place. The door for Ethiopia may close, and it may close abruptly and without warning. We know this. We feel we owe it to Ben to try to give him a similar relationship to a sibling that Lucas and Sammy enjoy. For lack of a better explanation, "sameness". "You look like me. You are from where I am from. Your birth mother looked like my birth mother in some way. They spoke the same language". This may not be possible, but at the moment we are at peace with the Ethiopian program and the type of referral we are open to.

On that note, just in the past weeks MOWYCA (Ministry of Women, Youth and Childrens Affairs, for my Colombian friends, this is the "Bienstar" of Ethiopia)made a sweeping change that requires all adoption documents to be signed by only the Regional head or assistant head of MOWYCA. Think of this like only one person in the state you live in can help with all of the adoptions, and this isn't America, people. That means a major bottle-neck of cases to go through 2 people, thus slowing an already slow situation. That wouldn't be a crisis, but the problem was that this new issue was made "retroactive".. meaning many of the kids already in process (and specifically all children with special needs that are cleared for adoption but haven't found families yet) and some already referred to families are stuck. The Regional heads don't want anything coming back to their desk/are refusing to sign off on old cases, but the kids can't move forward without the new signatures!!!

This is where you stop right now and pray for these kids. They are stuck. Pray that the MOWYCA officials would have compassion on these children and sign off on their cases so they can move forward, ESPECIALLY the little ones with special needs who need to be matched with families in order to receive therapy for their disabilities. We want transparency in adoption and we want ALL cases to be thoroughly investigated. These children were already cleared by their government. We pray that the government can look at their cases again and re-clear them so they can move forward.

Now that the blog is mostly caught up, I'll post when I have more developing news on Ethiopia. For now, we prayerfully wait and parent those we are already blessed with and pray for children waiting for parents, and children yet to be reunited with their parents who are still living.

After the Airport with Sammy: Fall 2013 until now

Hello dear friends,

I'm so glad that I gave myself grace last fall for updating. Sammy worked through a lot of transition last summer and fall. I don't dare tell you that portions of that were easy as many weren't. Last July and August were very difficult while he grieved. Sammy seemed rather well adjusted during the day, but his alter-ego "Alejandro" came out in the evening between 12a-5am. It was during this time that he wanted to be with us, but didn't "know how" to be with us. This made for a lot of restless nonsleeping for all. We seemed to turn a corner in September and the routine of the fall was upon us. We were really cruising until the holidays when "Alejandro" again came to visit us every evening from the week of Thanksgiving through January. Again, a rough time when Mom and Dad aren't sleeping much. About a week after being back in routine in January we were smooth sailing again.

Just today I was looking back at our photos of him from last summer. He has grown SO MUCH people. Although we still use Spanish at times around the home, he fully understands English now. He is still rather behind in formation of understandable words, but he tries to repeat about everything. He can say "Mama","Daddy", "please', "more", "milk", "puppy", "baby", and I'm sure a few more that I am forgetting. He climbs stairs on his hands and knees and uses railings. He climbs up into his own booster seat at the table as well as on and off the couch. Sometimes all of the climbing can be a problem if you know what I mean... He loves his brothers and always wants to be doing exactly what they are doing. No baby stuff allowed and don't you try to get away with it. We are moving more and more into the "normal"s of toddler-hood. He has figured out his has a voice and opinion on many things and he will let you know, perhaps even with a flair of defiance. Yes, discipline and required respect have kicked in and sometimes this is a battle.

Over all, we couldn't have asked for a better transition. We know him well enough to know that when he is "dealing" with things or becomes unsure, he will summon us unto himself late in the night to work it out. Here are a few highlights of our fall!

First, his first baby pictures and new family pictures taken by my beautiful friend Carmen who even gave us an "adoption" discount. THANK YOU Carmen!



Can I get a cumulative "AAAWWWWW" ? Yes, he is adorbs. Totes adorbs.



Everyone went home and took a nap after that shoot.

Although we missed the best portions of the summer, we were still able to soak up a little bit of it. Here are some highlights from Sam's first Independence Day, our trip up to MN for the Fana gala fundraiser with the Colombians, and some other random stuff.



Here was some of our time in MN meeting the extended Sibley's as well as our Fana weekend



We made it over to see Friends from FANA too



Meeting new Great Grandma and Grandpa Black and the Iowa State Fair!



We also spent a weekend at Adventureland in Iowa, which was a very big deal.



My baby left for M-F full time preschool at Traditions. Sniff. He obviously had no problem posing for his pictures.



We celebrated Sammy's 2nd Birthday too!! We went to the big Dinosaur restaurant in Kansas for a low key family party. He thoroughly enjoyed his chocolate cupcakes and his new Chuck Truck



Lucas started his professional career in soccer through the Upward program in Raytown. I spent my Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings with little boys in tow to watch Lucas on the soccer field. We loved Upward (Christian and teaching sportsmanship values) as well as the level of diversity there was in Raytown!



Halloween was just as epic as it looks.




Sammy and I were lucky enough to fly to San Antonio and see all of his new Aunties in November, for which we were very thankful!




It is at this point that I realize our Christmas stuff is backed up on another computer. My internet never fully recovered from Colombia and we finally sent my computer into the shop at Christmas and just got it back! So for Holidays 2013, stay tuned.

It this very moment I am tucked away in a lovely hotel room in Phoenix, AZ while my man is at a medical spanish conference for work. We are so thankful for this opportunity and I have gotten so much work done! We haven't been smart enough to take any photos (and also, we are well aware that expense paid vacations are a thing dreams are made of, so we really don't want to rub it in my taking pictures and making folks back at home in the cold look at them on this February day). Even more updates to come everyone!