Update on Ethiopia

Now that I've finally blogged about bringing Noah home, I can get back to talking about all the inaction that's been going on with our Ethiopian adoption!

When we started the process to adopt from Ethiopia we didn't have any children. NONE. Our dossier was sent in September of 2009. We found out about Caleb in early October 2009 and then we brought him home in December 2009. Caleb and our Ethiopian baby can be twins! ...we thought.

Fast forward to August 2010. We need to adopt a baby NOW! was the thought we got. October 2010 Noah enters the world and finds his place in our family. Noah and our Ethiopian baby can be twins! ...we think.

Who knows when we will get a referral for this little one? We thought he was going to be our first child. ...then we thought he was going to be our second child. ...now we're almost positive she'll be our third child.

Did you catch that? I said SHE. We are officially going to wait for a girl! Yea for girls! We called our agency and told them that, even though it says we'd take either gender, we really only want a girl. It just feels right. What also feels right is increasing our age range from 0-18 months to 0-24 months. Not a big deal, but when you feel prompted to do something, you best just go ahead and do it. We are also now open to mild to moderate special needs. That also may or may not be a big deal. But you never know.

We are also in the process of updating our dossier. Turns out that the Ethiopian government has decided that if your paperwork is older than 18 months then it's too old. So you have to redo it. Basically, we've had to re-apply all over again. That means getting reference letters, police reports, bank statements, power of attorney, medical statements, employment letters, etc. ALL over again. And ALL notarized. So we've been busy these past few weeks getting all that stuff done. Turns out it IS easier the second time around. All we have left is updating our homestudy. And, as of this morning, we are almost done with that! Yea!

Where are we in terms of waiting now? Well, if we were okay with getting a boy, then we'd be about #2 on the list. That means we could get a referral in the next month or so. However, since we are now waiting for our little girl, the wait will be longer. And we are totally okay with that. Noah is only 4 months old and I would be lying if I said I'd be okay with adding another child by summer. As it is, hopefully we'll get a referral by summer. Then the REAL wait begins.

So, that's where we are in a nutshell. Happily waiting for a girl! I'm excited! Hopefully, someday I will be able to do cool things like THIS to her hair. :)

I guess I need to start practicing.

The Day it Rained and Homecoming (October 14-15)

Let me just start this post by saying that we are home. In fact, Noah is four months old today! This post is just describing our last two days in Pennsylvania.

Wednesday night Zack and I decided to indulge ourselves and paid to see "Toy Story 3" on our hotel TV. It took us probably 4 hours to watch it because Noah kept waking up crying. (We discovered later that Noah and his infant formula did not agree with each other.) We probably didn't get more than 3 hours of sleep that night.
We woke up Thursday morning to rain. Despite the rain we decided to go into Philadelphia and do some sight-seeing. We were only planning on seeing a few things anyway. We drove into the city and decided to splurge on the underground parking attached to the visitor's center. I think it cost us $10, but it was worth not having to walk through the rain with our boys.

We enjoyed all that the visitor's center had to offer, namely, gift shops (we are now the proud owners of a Philly Umbrella) and snacks.

Enjoying a snack.

After we purchased our grossly overpriced umbrella we headed across the street to see the Liberty Bell.

Here it is in all it's glory.

This was totally worth the trip.

Then we walked down the street to Independence Hall only to discover that we needed a ticket to get in. The tickets were free, but you had to get them at the visitor's center. Bleh. We decided to bag it. We ran through the rain and ducked into a mall of sorts where we got some Philly memorabilia.


We called it a day and headed back to our hotel. We spent the rest of the evening packing for our flight the next morning.

The next morning, while we were waiting for the airport shuttle, a nice lady in the hotel lobby took our picture for us. I think she said she was with the government or military security preparing for the President's visit to Philadelphia later that day. We missed the President by just a few hours!


Our flight was as uneventful as we had hoped for. Aside from Caleb's usual flirting with the flight attendants and all of the fawning over Such A Tiny Baby!, we were pleased that nothing much happened.


We were met at the airport by our parents. Much love to Noah and Caleb was had by all.

Caleb, showing off his "touchdown!"

When we pulled up to the house we were greeted by these awesome signs that our family had made. (I'm positive that's my mom's handiwork on the garage door.)

The inside was decorated, too! We have such an awesome family. And I haven't even mentioned the fact that they had dinner ready for us that evening, too. They thought of everything. I mentioned the awesomeness, right?

Welcome home, baby Noah. We are so so so happy you are here!

Wednesday: Moving Day

We only had our hotel booked through Wednesday and we decided to stay at a hotel closer to the airport for our last few days because adding an hour of driving time to our schedule of getting to the airport just didn't sound fun.

So we found a hotel near the airport and booked two nights there. We figured since we hadn't even heard from our attorney in PA about clearing ICPC in PA that it would take at least two days before we heard anything from Utah.

A quick explanation about our wait for ICPC: The attorney in PA filed the papers in PA sometime on Friday afternoon. The offices are closed Saturday and Sunday AND, just our luck, Monday because of Columbus day. That means PA doesn't really clear us until Tuesday at the earliest, then they send our paperwork to Utah who, HOPEFULLY, clears us before Thursday because Utah offices are closed on Friday thanks to their 4-days a week work schedule. So, basically, if Utah doesn't clear us fast, we are there for another weekend. Bleh.

So here we are on Wednesday with no word from PA. We are thinking we are definitely staying the weekend. A very very discouraging thought, but what can we do about it?

Back to the events of Wednesday....

On the way to our new hotel we stopped for breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts. Did you know they sell more than just donuts?!!! And they have a drive-thru?!!! Well, they do. And they DO! So we were actually able to eat breakfast, which we had missed that morning because we were too busy packing up our room.

Here is our old room is all of it's glory.

We checked into our hotel and relaxed for a bit.

Our new hotel room. Has a more 'business' feel.

Caleb took a nap. This was his crib at the new hotel. The old hotel gave us a pack'n'play. This hotel gave us baby jail. Caleb didn't seem to mind.

I think Noah took a nap, but I don't remember. He was either sleeping or eating. You know how those babies are.

We just chilled in our room for a bit. Watched some food shows, like "Chopped" which I think we became addicted to in just one evening. Then we went to Babies'R'Us for some more diapers. I swear we went to that store at least 5 times during our vacation. We also went to Target a lot. Those were our "go-to" stores everytime we needed something.

On the way home we stopped at Gino's Pizza for some philly cheesesteaks. Crystal and Keith told us that's the place to go for a good cheesesteak. (FYI, you can get a cheesesteak at any pizza place.) Zack went in to get them for us while I waited in the car.

When he got back he said, "I made the classic tourist mistake. I asked for two Philly cheesesteaks and the guy just kind of looked at me and said, 'So...two cheesesteaks?'" Yeah. We're tourists.

We ate them in the car and then attempted to find an on-ramp to the freeway so we could get home. I think I'll let Zack write a special blog post entirely dedicated to the freeway system in Pennsylvania. There is just not enough room here. Suffice it to say, it is a screwy system and it took us a while to finally get on the freeway. Memo to Philadelphia: Signs that actually take you to the correct place would be a good addition to your city.

When we got back to our hotel Zack went to go heat something up in the microwave (There was one microwave per floor. Luckily we were just a few doors down from it, seeing as we had to heat up baby food and stuff.) when his phone rang. I answered it and it was Lorraine from Act of Love. I think her words went something like, "Carrie. You can go home!"

.........

...what?....

We can go home? But we hadn't even heard from PA about clearing ICPC...

Well, as it turns out, PA overnighted our paperwork to Utah Tuesday night who received it that morning who cleared us that afternoon. Can I tell you how much I love Utah's ICPC office? We've had two adoptions and both times they have cleared us in one day. Thank you fast workers! I guess the guy in charge of our case on PA was out of the office and never told our attorney that we'd been cleared, so that's why we hadn't heard anything. So yea! We can go home!

But wait. We had our hotel room until Friday morning. Non-refundable. So, we had two choices. We could just go home the next morning and pay for a day we weren't using, or we could stay one more day, actually see some things in Philadelphia, and go home Friday. Either way we'd be paying the same. We decided not to try and rush to pack everything for a flight the next morning.

Up next: The exciting conclusion of our stay in PA or, The day it rained.

I Shall Call This Post....Tuesday

Tuesday was our last day in Chester County as we were leaving the next day for a hotel closer to the airport. We decided to visit Hershey. Our days in the hotel were pretty much the same by this time: Sleep until 9:00ish, eat breakfast and such. Caleb goes down for a nap a few hours later, we get ready for the day, all the while feeding and taking care of Noah. By the time we are up and dressed and ready to go anywhere it is about 1:00 in the afternoon. The drive to Hershey is about an hour and a half. We drove through Amish country to get there. For those of you who are wondering, Amish country does have a McDonald's so we were able to get our daily fruit smoothies.

When we got to Hershey it was about 4:00 and everything closes at 5:00. That's been the norm for every place we've visited in PA, so we were expecting it. We weren't really there to sight see everything we could. We were just wasting time until we could go home. Plus, with two little kids, you can only last one hour anyway.

After feeding Noah and changing diapers (it really makes it easy to change a baby's diaper in your lap when they are only 19 inches long, btw) we were ready to take the tour of the "chocolate factory"! Why the quotes? Because it was not a factory. It was just a ride depicting a factory.

Behold! Pictures!

Chocolate World! Where you can buy the same chocolate you get in stores for double the price!

I am excited to see the cow behinds. Truly I am!

It looks as though Zack has on his cynical face, even though he wasn't the cynical one. I was the one asking throughout the "tour", "Where is the part where they add the wax? I don't see the part where they add the wax." Caleb just looks like we are about to go on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Do you feel his pain? Mike? Danny?

Maybe he was just concerned because we were about to go past the singing cows. Is it just me or do they look like inmates?

After exploring the grossly overpriced candy in the gift shop we drove home amidst the constant moaning of our 1 year old (he wasn't in pain or anything, it's just a thing he does when he's tired) and the crying/screaming of our newborn. Even the peace of Amish country couldn't soothe them. When we pulled up to the hotel I believe my words were, "You get the boy, I'll get the baby...see you on the other side." On the other side I think we had dinner at some point and then put the kids to bed. Can we go home yet?

Sunday and Monday: Sightseeing Days

The nice thing about belonging to the LDS church is that you can find a meetinghouse and go to church practically anywhere in the world. It's always fun to attend church in another part of the world. Everyone is friendly, the spirit feels the same and the feeling of one-ness is always there. Pennsylvania was no exception. The only difference was that the views from their meetinghouse were a lot different than the view from ours:



After church we hung out at the hotel. Caleb has been practicing his walking. I think he's determined to be walking on his own by the time we get home.

(


He's also been working on his Touchdowns!




Today, Monday, we had another doctor appointment for Caleb. He weighed in at 6 lbs 6 oz. 3 days ago he was 5 lbs 14 oz, so we're happy to see that he is doing so well. While we were there we had the doctor's office copy all of Noah's medical files for us to take to our pediatrician when we get home. (They have access to the hospital files, too, so we were able to get them all.) While we were waiting Caleb started to get a little restless. A nurse came out and gave him a few balls to play with and keep. 2 other nurses came out at different times to let us know the progress of getting the files and to let us know they were doing their best to be fast. Everyone was super nice.


After Caleb took a nap and Noah ate, we headed over to Valley Forge National Park.


After a quick stop at the Visitor's Center to peruse the gift shop and watch a short movie, we spent the rest of the time driving around on the self-guided tour of the area. We saw George Washington's headquarters and even got to see his room set up just like it was when he lived there. Caleb is a fan.

Then we saw where George Washington's personal guards, or "life guards" camped. Caleb was more interested in his leaf.
Valley Forge is a big hill and the views were amazing. This statue isn't of George Washington, but some guy named Von-something or other. But it looks like Washington from the back. So let's just pretend it's him.

There are cabin replicas here and there, but most of the area is just pretty landscape, so you have to use your imagination and picture what it must have been like 200 years ago.

We made sure to visit the "Patriots of African Descent" monument for our boys.

There are a lot of bike paths, footpaths, and walkways in the park and it looks like a popular place for people to jog and bike. Someday we'll come back and take our kids on a bike-tour of the park.

The whole time we've been here in PA we've been on the lookout for an ice cream place. Can you believe they've been hard to find? What's wrong with you Pennsylvanians? Don't you like cold, creamy goodness? Well, on the way to the park we passed an ice cream place and vowed to stop there on the way home. When we got there we discovered that a lot of Pennsylvanians actually like ice cream.

And now, here are a few random shots of just hanging out at our home away from home.

Noah likes to pose when he sleeps.

These are everywhere out here. They're gas stations. I'm not sure why they're called the WaWa, but I like it. It's my personal goal to find as many as I can. So far I've seen 6.

We think Noah is just adorable. He's just a pretty baby. But sometimes he looks kind of frog-like to me with his big eyes and his long, thin appendages.

Well, at least I thought it was a frog he looked like. Turns out it was something else...

Maybe we should have named him Elllllllliot...

Friday and Saturday - First Family of Four Days

Thursday night Noah did not sleep nearly as well as he did Wednesday night. Whether true or not, I like to think of it as his way of mourning. I imagine his birthmother didn't sleep very well that night either, and maybe there is some sort of connection there. The only way he would be consoled was to be held, and we were happy to oblige. After all, you can't spoil a child in their first week, can you?

Friday morning we took Noah to his pediatrician for his 48 hour checkup. Noah is still under 6 pounds, which looks sooooo tiny next to Caleb, but the Dr said that everything looked just fine. The most entertaining part of the visit was when Noah decided to make the Dr change his diaper 3 times in less than a minute. I've heard people say that their baby likes to do his/her business in a fresh diaper, well Noah prefers it just as soon as the fresh diaper (or wipe, or....air) touches him. We will have one more Dr visit prior to heading home, probably on Monday.

The excellent PA attorney worked hard and got the ICPC (Interstate Compact to prevent child trafficking) paperwork completed and submitted by about lunchtime on Friday. He also went ahead and submitted a copy to Utah to try to get things moving. This was extremely important to us since it gives us our best chance of coming home next week. Ideally, PA would have approved the paperwork on Friday, but realistically not until Tuesday (Monday being Columbus Day) or worst case Wednesday. When we were in Florida, Utah ICPC did an amazing job and got the paperwork approved the same day they received it, but we can't count on that...but we can still hope :o)

It has been fun taking a couple boys around when we go out. Carrie usually takes the baby and I usually the take the boy, who is just a ton a fun to play with and take places.

On Saturday we officially began our vacation. Not all families decide to go on vacation when they have a 5 day old, but we don't have too much of a choice in the matter, so we want to make the most of it. We want to get to know the state where our son was born! We have plans to visit the Liberty Bell, Valley Forge, and maybe swing over to Hershey PA. We'd head north to some popular church history sites if they weren't on the other side of the border, and therefore illegal for us. If any you have any suggestions for good places to visit, let us know!

So Saturday we decided to go to Longwood Gardens, and we think it was an excellent choice.

Longwood Gardens is several acres of horticultural fantasy world. They have a bunch of cool sculptures in the topiary garden, amazing flowers in the flower walk, all types of cool plants in the gigantic observatory, and some areas we didn't even have time to go see, like the children's play areas, birdhouse, and the fountain garden.

Flower Walk

Topiary Garden

Squirrel!

Observatory

Outside the Observatory

Taking a feeding break inside the Observatory.

Noah loved all of the gorgeous gardens...

Our favorite section though, was the Forest Walk. It was just a simple loop, maybe 1/2 mile or so, of natural raw Pennsylvania, and it was gorgeous. I've never been to the sacred grove, but Carrie confirmed that this is a lot like the look of the sacred grove. A beautiful canopy of Tulip Trees along with a lot of other vegetation and animals.

We even saw some deer!

We did the same thing when we were in Florida. It was cool see in both places, and both times it was nice to get out and go for a walk. The boys did really well. Several people were in awe of our adorable boy and our sweet little 5 day old, but they were even more amazed at how Carrie had recovered so quickly! Imagine their surprise when they found out that she just found out she was pregnant with him 5 days ago ;o) Don't worry, we recognize that adoption has its perks :o)

I'm a tad embarrassed to say this, but on Saturday we also decided to play some McDonald's Monopoly again. (Carrie interrupting here. I'm not ashamed. We are totally going to WIN!!!)Actually, it has been kind of fun, and the thought of winning something, when we have to eat something anyway, adds an element of fun. We're one short on several areas (gasp with surprise with me everyone!) so if any of you have Mediterranean, Vermont, Virginia, Kentucky, Short Line Railroad, or Boardwalk, well you be sure to let us know :o)