Just The Same

This Poem was published in our church's monthly magazine, The Ensign.

I love it.

Just The Same

By Diana Lynn Lacey.

Sometimes-

God sends rain

Straight from the sky

To nourish the young flower

and it grows.

Sometimes-

God sends rain from the sky

To the mountaintops,

Then over hills and through valleys

Until it reaches the flower

and it grows, just the same.

Sometimes-

God sends a child

Straight from His realm

Into a mother's arms

and love grows.

Sometimes-

God sends a child

From heaven to another's arms,

Then over hills and through valleys

Until he reaches the arms of his mother

and loves grows, just the same.

We're Getting Closer

I bet you're all wondering, "Hey, what's the deal with Carrie and Zack? When are they going to bring their baby home from Ethiopia?"

Aw, thanks for asking. You are too kind to think of us.

Here's where we are:

The next couple waiting for a girl sent their dossier in July of 2009. Our dossier was sent in September. Sounds like we are pretty far down the list, right?

WRONG!

There's only, like, 2 people ahead of us now who are waiting for girls! Possibly even just one couple ahead of us! That means we could get a call any day now...ooor we could still wait for another month or so. You just never know.

If we had kept with our original plan to accept a boy, then we'd already have a referral. We think it's pretty amazing that the timing was just perfect and the wait was just long enough for us to feel like we needed to change our preference to getting a girl. If things hadn't gone just as they had, then we'd have a referral for a boy right now and we would have missed that little girl waiting for us. The Lord is definitely in charge of our family.

The other night Zack was feeling pretty sad because our baby has most likely been born by now and he was picturing her all alone in a crib in some orphanage. If you have kids, just for a minute imagine your child in that situation right now. Kind of rips your heart out, right? But then Zack got the feeling that our loved ones who are in the Spirit World right now are watching over her and keeping her company. Just picturing that in my mind gives me so much peace. She's in good hands.

Fingerprints or How to Feel Like a Foreigner

Today we got fingerprinted for the 3rd time. When you adopt you need a background check and you need to be fingerprinted so the powers that be can check to see if you are felon and deem you unworthy to have children. Because our I-171H expired (the piece of paper that says we can bring an international orphan home) in February, we have to have it renewed. Being fingerprinted is a key part of that renewal process.

Getting fingerprinted is fun! You first have to ask permission to be fingerprinted. (We had to ask permission from USCIS. If you want to know who or what that is, google it because I'm not even really sure who they are or what the letters stand for. I just know they are the ones who grant us permission to bring an international orphan home.) Then you wait for them to send you a piece of paper telling you what time you get to be fingerprinted. Then you go to the designated place at the designated time and they get all your info and then you sit and wait. While you are waiting you notice that EVERYONE around you is either a) Hispanic or b) from some other foreign country. (And you are reminded that this is an immigration office and you are actually here on behalf of your child. And you think "If I feel uncomfortable here because I don't look like anyone else, just think how my child is going to feel growing up with this feeling ALL THE TIME." And then you make a mental note to read another book on trans-racial adoption and/or possibly move to Clearfield where there is more diversity.)

After you get fingerprinted (It's electronic! Not messy! And won't take a week to get to the USCIS office!) you walk out of there feeling happy that you have checked off yet another item from the continually growing list of things you need to do to get your child home.

BTW, the next item on the list is: Wait. It shows up on the list multiple times!

A side note: The first time we were fingerprinted it was just me and Zack. The second time we were fingerprinted is was me, Zack and Caleb. The third time we were fingerprinted it was me, Zack, Caleb and Noah. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this pattern.

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?