Praise God, We have a Passport!!

We received the fabulous news this morning that our son now has a passport! We are thrilled beyond belief and I took one minute to celebrate before I moved on to planning for the next steps!
We just now need the visa and then TR and Kman can go to Ghana to bring Kwame home! We are hoping to have him home in the next month!
I am so excited to have so much to do to get ready for Kwame's arrival!
We are so thankful that our time has come and that our son will be coming home...

Stay tuned because now it really gets fun

As Dora would say.... We Did It!!

We did it!! Five days and over 20 hours later, Selina's braids are done!! I had no idea when I started on Sunday if she would even let me do braids again. We did them in April but I did most of it while she slept, staying up until 3 or 4am two days in a row.

After over a year of disliking having her hair combed, braided or touched the majority of the time, she sat down for 20 waking hours and let me braid her hair!
We did about nine hours on Sunday alone and then every day this week, we sat down as soon as we got home from school and work and braided until bedtime. It usually would not take that long but I used really small pieces of hair and did about double the braids I did last time. I think they look better now than they did last time but I am interested to see how they last and look over time. This time I also did two knots to hold the beads in place at the bottom instead of one as I found last time that as the braid got older, the knot got smaller and sometimes the beads would fall right out.

Selina usually does not like having her hair combed and does not have much tolerance for having it done. I think this is partly because when she was younger, she had her hair done while she screamed sometimes and so it was kind of traumatic for her and I also think she is extra sensitive on certain parts of her head.

My recommendation to other adoptive moms regarding hair if you are having some of the difficulties we have faced would be the following...
1. Make hair time fun. We watched movies, sang songs, had snacks and laughed a lot. For your own sanity, I would not recommend the 30 episodes of Dora that we watched but Selina did best with Dora. If I turned something else on, she was not happy so Dora it was!
2. Do a little at a time at the beginning. If you don't finish in one session, it is okay. Selina could not handle too much and so we would stop when she got tired of having her hair done so that our experience was positive.
3. If you can get together with others and have a hair party, try it. That helped us a lot. When she first came home, I went to several gatherings of a local adoption group I belong to where we got together to do our kids hair. Sometimes Selina and I just went to hang out and I would just comb her hair and let her see that doing hair is fun! We also would go hang out with Rita and Racheal as they got their hair done or go visit them and see their hair if they had it done in a new style.
4. Consider the hairstyle you do. If I am putting things in Selina's hair, puffs and things where I am not manipulating her hair as much works best. The braids while taking longer are much better than cornrows or twists where you are doing something where you keep grabbing and tightening hair. For the braids, once I got started, she did not feel it at all because I was done touching her hair. So for her, 20 hours of braiding is more desirable than two or three hours of cornrows.

We have slowly eased into this the past 16 months and I have not stressed out about it. I figured that she would do better with time and as she got older. I have to laugh as when we got home today, she started pulling me over to the area where we braid her hair and asked for Dora. She wanted more braids! I don't know how she is going to react tomorrow when she doesn't get all of mom's attention or watch all the Dora she wants!

I have to say that I think that Selina was truly happy to have her hair done. Tonight we laid down together as she went to bed and she was just beaming and she kept saying, "I love you mommy" "Thank you mommmy!" "We did it!"

I hope this is a new beginning for us...and hair time will be less hairy in the future!

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!