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...

The Plan that wasn't mine...

A year ago...

Same place, same time one year later.

I took both of these pictures as the kids walked in to their swim banquet. I remember last year how Selina needed help walking as she was still unsteady on her feet and how she was a little nervous with all the people and how our children were still getting to know each other. I look at them now and my heart is happy. Things are going better than I could have ever expected and with the addition of Kwame... things will only get better...


First off- I wanted to send a huge thank you to all of you that voted for Batman. He did not win but had a very respectable showing according to the radio station.

I think more than anything, TR and I were humbled by all of you that took the time to vote and pass the link on for us. I felt kind of goofy asking people to do so and admitting that winning would really help us out with our airfare but once we did, we received such a warm response. I can't tell you how much it means to us. Thank you so much.

We continue to work on getting Kwame closer to coming home. We have filed the packet of paperwork (I600) that needs to be processed in order to be able to bring him into the country. I am hopeful that it will be approved and sent on to the National Visa Center next week.

We also received word today that Kwame's passport could be completed in the next few days. If it is, that would be the best news yet! These passports have been really unpredictable as I mentioned before so to get the passport would be a huge relief. It would be a blessing.

Summer is wrapping up for our family. It has not been the summer we hoped for as I had pictured having Kwame home by now. I also let the wait get to me more than I would have liked at times. I am grateful to God and to my friends and family for helping me through the last few months. You called me, emailed me and checked in with me when I needed it most and it meant a world of difference to me. I think back to some really tough days and now that I am past them, when I look back, I will remember the way so many of you reached out to me. Thank you.

I do have faith that God has a plan for our family and the timing in which our son is supposed to come home. As it turns out, my plan was not the same as his but I am starting to see the purpose in his plan. While this plan is not what my heart wanted, God is showing me that in so many ways, it makes perfect sense.

Recently, I have had moments of silence now that the sadness and pain I felt earlier this summer are gone. Usually my head runs a thousand miles a minutes with my thoughts and my plans and my wants and my needs. But in those moments with a clear head and an open heart, I have listened. I have started to find the beauty in this new plan that was not mine and I am running with it and I am celebrating it.

We have already been given the greatest gift of all. Kwame is our son. Getting him home will be worked out and from that moment on, we will have a lifetime together. Who could ask for more?

Adoption Update and Superhero in finals!

Hello,

I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer. We have a few more weeks although some schools here started back today! I am not quite ready so a few more weeks are good for us!!

My new favorite pic of Kwame I edited after taking a free online photo editing class!!


After consulting with our local USCIS office and adoption agency, we have decided to file our I600 here in Arizona. For Ghana adoptions, most people choose to take a trip to Ghana to file it there because it usually goes faster. Due to a recent change in that the approval can now be sent via email instead of snail mail, processing times are going faster and families are now considering filing stateside instead of traveling.

I am very hopeful that our timeline will be very similar to if we had traveled to Ghana. I plan to file it this week in our local office. I am just waiting to get the scanned copy or our adoption decree and to hear back from the office letting me know when I can come in.

I have mixed feelings about filing stateside. I really was looking forward to going back to Ghana. I wanted to see our son and I also wanted to get to be in Ghana for a week. I miss Ghana. I really do and if I had needed to go back, I was excited to go. Getting to be in Ghana with our son would have been wonderful. I know I will always miss that I did not have the opportunity to know him and interact with him in Ghana- to see how he was and to experience his birth country with him.

It will be easier financially to file here as a trip to Ghana to file would have cost about $2500 and would have been very hard on Selina and Cater to have me leave. Especially Selina. We think she would have a setback in her attaching if I left her for a week. She is really a mommy's girl and we are so happy with how she is doing in her attachment that it would be hard to risk hurting that at this point.

Instead, our plan is to have TR and Kman go to pick Kwame up and bring him home when his paperwork is all done. TR has not been to Ghana and we feel it is important he experience being in his children's birth country. If we can work it out, we plan to have Kman go.

Since the day he found out last year that we were adopting a girl first and planned to go back for his brother, Kman has wanted to go along to get him. I think it will be such a wonderful experience for these brothers to be together from the beginning and for Kman to know what Kwame's life was like in Ghana. I think it is important for them to travel here together and for them to walk off the plane as Kwame enters his new life with his brother by his side to encourage him and be there for him. Kman is the kind of boy that will be a great support and friend to his brother.

Right now the "wild card" in the adoption is the passport. Ghana passports are coming our really slow right now and are really unpredictable. They don't come out in the order they go in and seem to get lost along the way. His passport was submitted and came out in May but was missing a signature so it had to be turned back in. From that point, it went into an abyss and was never to be heard from again so it was filed all over again in June. So basically this passport could come in tomorrow or in months.

So for our timeline- I will file the I600 here this week, hopefully it will be approved and sent off to the National Visa Center within one week. It will be processed there and hopefully sent off to Ghana a week or so after that. I would feel blessed if we had I600 approval and the paperwork was back in Ghana in one month. That is about how long it would have taken for me to go to Ghana and file and get the approval.

Once we have that approval AND the passport, we can plan to go to Ghana about three weeks to a month later to bring Kwame home. So I think a best case scenerio if I try to protect my heart is to hope to have Kwame home by sometime in October at the latest. If it is before then, I am happy and thankful.

I never thought when starting this process, that I would be thankful for him to come home in October. I thought he would have been home by now but it is what it is and I am focused on how blessed we are to have him as our son.

At this time, we are working on saving for our airfare. With two adoptions in two years and looking at traveling at the most expensive time of the year to fly to Ghana, we find ourselves short on travel funds. For those that have not traveled to Africa, we are looking at ticket prices of between $2000 and $2500 per ticket for TR and Kman and about $1500 for Kwame to come home one way.


So on that note...


What started out as a fun thing for the kids to do this summer has kind of blossomed into an opportunity for us to win some money in a radio station contest.

A local rock radio station is having a Top Pet contest and we entered our guinea pig Batman. We found out today that he is in the finals. The contest started off with 900 pets entered and Batman is now in the final 50 pets. If he wins, we get $1500 which would basically cover our ticket to get Kwame home or a good portion of TR or Kman's airfare. It would relieve some pressure on us financially.

In order to win, Batman must have the most votes. You can vote one time per computer and email a day. So each computer can place a vote each day as long as the email entered is different for each computer.

Please click here and vote for Batman. Once on the page, Click on the link below Batman that says "Vote For Me" and then enter your email. It takes less than one minute. If you can do that everyday this week (Contest ends August 3) it would be awesome. If you would pass this on to your contacts and ask them to vote, it would be appreciated. You never know who will hear about Batman and run with this. I had a friend of my neighbor hear about Batman and read our story and she has passed this on a few times on her FB and Twitter accounts. She has been so sweet and she doesn't even know us!

Here is the http addy: http://www.mix969.com/pages/arizonas-top-pet/vote-entrants.php

It seems kind of silly to me that there is a company out there willing to give away $1500 for having a "Top Pet" but hey, if they are willing to do it and I just have to pass on the word and click to win- I figure that I have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. I never would have thought in a million years that our little black piggie with the wild hair could possibly help us raise adoption funds. I think it is pretty cool that he has the chance to help bring a family member home. What an awesome accomplishment for a guinea pig!! :-) Thank you for all those that have voted, I have received some really thoughtful emails and comments and it is so appreciated.

I have several updates to post but my laptop harddrive has died and I am waiting for a new one (thankfully it was under warrenty). I look forward to catching up on that as I have a few cool pictures I have taken recently that I look foward to sharing!

I hope you all are enjoying your summer and get to have some more fun before it is over!!

Help Batman make a difference...

You may think he is just a guinea pig and he does nothing but sit in his cage and eat veggies but not Batman. Batman is a superhero and he is on a mission to be the Mix 96.9 Top Pet...

Ok, my adoption fundraising has gotten a little creative here lately. We recently entered our guinea pig Batman in a local radio station contest to be named the "Top Pet"

I am not really sure what a "TOP PET" is but if he wins, we get $1500. There were originally over 900 applicants and Batman has made the first cut to the top 200.

Please consider voting for Batman. You can vote for him once a day. Just click here and then click the Vote for Me under his name and enter your email. They only allow one vote per email and computer each day. It is really very simple. So if you could do this everyday until the 27th, that would be awesome!!

If we win, the money will help pay for our airfare which we are still short on funds for.

BTW- Batman has been promised upgraded veggies and fruits and new sleeping quarters if he wins. He already lives a pretty charmed life as we have redone his cage and done a few things to help him live more comfortably since getting him in March. He is actually very happy although unfortunately his little buddy/roomie Cookie had to be euthanized (yes they have guinea pig vets) a few weeks ago as he had a tumor and was getting really sick quickly.

TIA for taking a moment to vote for Batman. The kids begged me to enter him in the contest so I figured, it would be fun to do. We enjoyed making his cage sign and taking pics of him. When you click on the link, you will see the scrapbooking page I created to show of his "TOP PETiness"!! I did not think with 900 entries, he would make it this far but since he did, I thought I would ask for your vote! LOL

Feel free to pass this on... The link straight to his page is here if you need it.

http://www.mix969.com/pages/arizonas-top-pet/vote-entrants.php?gid=1&id=8

Batman eating an orange- his favorite fruit.


Kman with his superhero...

The Attack of the Pizookie...

I have to laugh as the girl's consuming this pizookie is similar to a baby bird or a newborn baby opening and closing it's mouth to indicate hunger. They grab their spoons and attack so desperately only coming up for air when given a cue to breath and relax for a moment. I couldn't help myself, I had to grab my camera!

A pizookie (also known by many other names) is a yummy fresh from the oven kinda raw cookie with ice cream on it. While we usually never get dessert when we go out, if they have a pizookie, we often can't help ourselves. They are great for sharing so we get one and all dig in.

So the other day, we had only the girls and took them out to BJ's for lunch and splurged on a Pizookie. It was slightly more civilized without Kman present as there was less competition for every last bite. No one got hurt and their headbands stayed in place. Gotta love the Pizookie!

A little summer baseball...

We love going to DBacks games. We have not gone to as many this year but the entire family got to one last week as it was a bobblehead giveaway night and Kman loves to collect them.

We had a blast at the game.

The girls dancing in their seats prior to the game.



The girls posing with cardboard Chris Snyder.



Kman in his element. I can't express enough how into baseball he is. I had to laugh as the other day he printed up a list of DBack free agents from last year to look into where each of them ended up and to plan for who will be free agents this year. Who does that? I guess my son does!LOL



The girls were more into the food and entertainment during the game. During the 4th inning, grandma and I took them to get an autograph and picture with Baxter. Selina was actually okay with him which was better than her response to Santa and the Red Robin. Maybe she is over her fear of costumed characters which would be great as we are headed to Disneyland ASAP once Kwame is settled in and we can swing it!



I couldn't help but think back to a year ago when our entire family went to the game and Selina had just come home. She stayed attached to me in her carrier and did not walk around at all. She would not have been able to walk that much physically and would have been very scared and overwhelmed with all the people. Cater was having a tough time getting used to having a new sister and getting over the fact that her mom had just been gone a month in Africa to bring Selina home. Oh how needy both girls were for attention as they got to know each other and figure out their place in the family...

Now here we are a year later. Everyone is doing so well and we are getting ready to welcome a new brother and Selina loves ice cream- alot! Life is good!