Third time is the charm?!!

Here is Kwame receiving a letter from us. He really enjoys reading them.



I have had a few people email me privately so I wanted to update you all that the passport process was started again for the third time on Monday for Kwame. We are hopeful that we will get a passport next week as we have had good luck in our agency with passports going through lately. If we do, then the visa can be filed the following week hopefully. Our visa will take a little longer since they have to do the orphan investigation still but even with that, we are hopeful it will take maybe two weeks. This means we could look at travel as early as the end of October.

It has been a long several months with every wait being for something that is supposed to come "next week". I am optimistic and have decided that I am going to believe this will happen at the risk of being disappointed. If I don't believe it will happen and have faith, who will, right?

We would appreciate any prayers you can spare. I have gone through a rough few weeks where I was very frustrated and upset about several things and was allowing it to show instead of keeping it to myself, praying about it and moving on. I am so grateful for all of my adoption friends who listened, understood I was just having a bad week. They brought me out of it and encouraged me to ask for prayer.

I do believe that prayer helps- Just a week or so ago, we were blessed by the prayers of one parent and her daughter when they were in Ghana. I had hoped it would have helped our passports come out but instead it basically shut the door and gave some clear signs that we were to start again. If that had not happened, we could have been sitting here in limbo as we kept jumping through hurdles as our adoption staff in Ghana worked to meet different requests of the particular passport person that was walking my passport through.

So we have a fresh start and I am more hopeful than I have been in the past few months that this will be it and we will meet our son very soon!

My recent post on a portion of the show The Office, called Parkour has really helped. It is a term that means you take the most creative route from point A to point B instead of going in a straight line. That is what this adoption has been for us. For some reason, seeing the clip on this and linking it to my adoption has made me laugh and has helped me through. I know this adoption journey will end, our son will come home and I will have many stories of the interesting and creative things done in our adoption along that way. I just have to hang in there until I get to point B!

Thank you to those that have checked in with me and who have met and loved Kwame as he waits for us. We are blessed to have such wonderful friends and family!

Parkour my friends!!

Kman Scores!!!

A highlight of our summer has been attending DBacks games. The kids often get free tickets from the various summer programs or we get cheap packages. We have gone to so many games, we pretty much have found the best bargains to make it an economical and fun experience.
Kman has been really into getting autographs and has had some good fortune lately by getting some incredibly awesome ones! The last two games, I have had him ask to get a picture with the player if it worked out and I could get a good shot. These are his pics from the games he went to in the last two weeks... Tomorrow and Sunday are the last two home games of the season and it looks like he will be at both of them. What can I say, we LOVE baseball!

Stephen Drew

Trent Oeltjen

Miguel Montero

Baxter

Brandon Allen

Parkoir: the creative path to adoption...

I saw this on another blog tonight and I had to laugh. It made me think about our adoption and our path from Point A to Point B and with all the creative ideas that were instituted just for us or the extra things asked of us...



Maybe I am in an odd mood or I just tried to see a little humor in our situation for a moment. I just saw a huge parallel between this video and our adoption tonight (no, I have not had a margarita)! Somedays, I feel like I have jumped off a big vehicle and fallen into an empty refrigerator box. I needed this today and loved it!! Either way, I don't watch The Office but I think maybe I need to...

First Day of School...

This is seriously the only picture I took on the first day of school. Now I can pretend we started school a week or two ago like some of my friends in other states but we started in early August so I have kept you from enjoying this photo obviously taken by a skilled photographer for over a month now!

So I am trying to remember that morning but I think I have blocked it out! I am sure we were running late (Selina probably decided she had to go potty on our way out the door). Or maybe I was trying to get Cater to wear her tennis shoes to school but she wanted to wear her $1 Old Navy flip flops. That can take up to five minutes to get settled depending on the day. Well by looking at the picture I can tell if that was the case, I lost or partially lost as she is wearing sandals- not the flip flops though!

I did have enough time to get out of the car and walk the kids up so I could get this fabulous picture. I even remembered to bring Kwame along- see, Selina is holding him! I obviously put my kids directly in the sun so that their eyes were either closed or they were squinting and positioned them so that the shadow of the fence surrounding the school interfered with the picture. I am sure I was exclaiming "Look at me!" and "Smile!" while they tried their best- bless them!

Ha, I decided that when Kwame comes home, we are redoing the picture and that will be our first day- TAKE 2!!

I just had to laugh when I downloaded this batch of pictures and saw that one and tried to remember what happened that day.

PS: Next year, I am going to KJag's house for her first day of school party. It is the most fabulous party idea I have ever heard of and would make the first day of school awesome for kids and moms. Basically she has the mom's back to her house for breakfast. I can't remember if there are mimosa's too at her party but they how fun would that be?! So click on her page and check out how happy and beautifully photographed her children are.. I think it is because she is about to have a par-tah!!LOL

The glow of my burning hut...

I am sorry, I have been so bad about blogging lately. I guess that while life goes on, there is a big piece of me with our son in Ghana right now. While we are plugging along and doing all the things we do, I really feel the void and haven't felt like reporting on all the things that we are doing that I was so hoping we would be doing with Kwame home.

There was some adoption drama late last week. A meeting was supposed to happen on Friday and knowing how that went would have helped us to know whether we are looking at days or a few more months before our son comes home.

Unfortunately we did not get news about if that meeting happened and if so, how it went. So our weekend felt especially long. In the adoption world, sometimes you don't enjoy the weekends as much because nothing happens with your adoption on those days. It will be nice when Kwame is home as the weekend will once again be what it used to be! (I think I can hear a lot of my adoptive friends saying "Amen" to that!)

My good friend Mary sent me this today and it really fit how I was feeling this weekend so I thought I would share. I know I am not alone and right now I have several friends and other families going through some difficult times for various reasons. If that is you... then this is for you too!

The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him. Every day he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming.

Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect him from the elements, and to store his few possessions.

One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. He felt the worst had happened, and everything was lost. He was stunned with disbelief, grief, and anger. He cried out, 'God! How could you do this to me?'

Early the next day, he was awakened by the sound of a ship approaching the island! It had come to rescue him! 'How did you know I was here?' asked the weary man of his rescuers. 'We saw your smoke signal,' they replied.


The Moral of This Story:
It's easy to get discouraged when things are going badly, but we shouldn't lose heart, because God is at work in our lives, even in the midst of our pain and suffering. Remember that the next time your little hut seems to be burning to the ground, it just may be a smoke signal that summons the Grace of God.

"If you can't be grateful for what God has given you, look around you and be grateful for what He's protected you from."

So while I have been a little discouraged lately and feeling as if my hut were burning, I have vowed to get past this and to do my best to look at things in a new light... the light from the glow of my burning hut!LOL

So in my next few posts, look for some updates on my everyday life!

Passport, passport, where art thou passport?

Well, we are making some progress and are on the final stretch to bringing Kwame home. We have received our I600 approval, it has gone through the National Visa Center and I am waiting for confirmation it has been received in Ghana.

This would be the best news ever and would mean we could get plane tickets except we don't have his Ghana passport still. I don't know when it was first applied for- probably sometime in March...if not sooner. So that means we have waited about six months for that pesky pasport! Last week we heard that the passport office wanted some additional information to process his passport. It is something not usually asked for and a change in the process that started with us.

Ha, we haven't heard that before! That seems par for this adoption. For some reason when it gets to our turn for something, the process changes which costs us more time.

So I could whine about that but I am so close that once I get the passport, I only have one more wait so that is only one more thing to change on us... there is light at the end of the tunnel!

Our filing of the I600 actually went pretty well. The person that processed it went on vacation for 10 days the day I turned it in and then once she got back, turned it over to someone else even though we had been communicating about it for months on and off so that added a little extra time but I was actually quite pleased that once it was addressed that it quickly moved on and it went through the NVC in less than a week. So for those of you considering filing stateside, it is possible to file here and have it go well!

I did get some pictures from my friend Stephanie who was in Ghana recently. She was so sweet to go out of her way to go to visit Kwame for me. I wanted to send something small for him. Families usually only send pictures and letters after the welcome bag so the kids don't get upset when other kids get things and they don't but since I did not file the I600 in Ghana and he still has not met us, I sent him a little pair of shoes and shirt from us.

Stephanie said he was really shy and that he had gotten hurt earlier that day.

It broke my heart so see his sweet face. I am thankful that he had aunties to comfort him when he got hurt but I wished that I would have been there. Also, his shoes that he wore all the time had big holes in them so it worked out perfectly that I sent him shoes as he was happy to have new ones. Look at his sweet little legs and feet...

I am trying to be patient but am so anxious to get our son home and settled in here. We all love him so much. Even Selina says his name when asked who her brothers are.

Get ready though because once we get that passport... the excitement starts! I will be taking donations for TR and Kyle to do do a few projects in Ghana like I did last year as it worked out so well. If you donated last year and want to participate in that again keep checking back for more details.

Thank you all for keeping up even though I have not been the best blogger lately. I promise I will get better and will definitely keep you all updated when TR and Kman go to Ghana. We still plan for them both to go which will be awesome!

Pray for Mercy...

Hello, for those that pray, please pray for Mercy- that she gets to court tomorrow in Ghana. For reasons I can't go into, it is very important that she pass tomorrow. If you want to read more about her family, visit my friend, Stephanie's blog. Thank you...