Christmas Greetings 2012

My favorite part of Christmas (besides the whole part where it celebrates how much our God loves us) is getting updated pictures and stories from friends and families.  I’ve attempted to be creative with our cards for the last 10 years, but alas it’s time consuming and expensive!  With 4 adoptions in less than that many years under our belts and the debt to prove it, the executive decision has been made to only mail cards to family and anyone for whom I don’t have an email address.  That may seem like sad news, but the wonders of technology allow everyone else to get our Christmas Greetings delivered straight to their inbox for FREE!

 Photo credit: Nicole Renee

While you’re invited to poke around the archives to see what 2012 has been like for our family, I’ll hit some highlights for you with our adoption as the backdrop.

By January, we were hitting our groove in homeschooling and knee-deep in adoption paperwork.  PJ also started playing ice hockey and all 5 of us started Tae Kwon Do.

On February 24th, our dossier (stack of paperwork that represented our family to the Ethiopian government) was on its way to Ethiopia.  Meanwhile we were earning our first Tae Kwon Do belts and hiring a friend to help us start a coffee shop that would make our orphan care non-profit self-sustainable.  We also celebrated with friends who welcomed home one of the girls from last spring’s Ethoipian host program who is now Mia’s BFF.

A few short weeks later, in March, we accepted referrals for two unrelated teens. This was the month we travelled to Texas to be trained as trainers for Empowered to Connect’s PREPARE and CONNECT courses and hosted our good friends the Polks (who are now living in Ethiopia).

Life went into high gear in early April when we found out we needed to be in Ethiopia by April 30th for our court date.  Thanks to all your support, we raised over $4000 toward our adoption and hundreds of pounds of donations.  On April 28th, all five of us plus Patrick’s father left for a rather eventful trip to Ethiopia.

After spending the first half of May in Ethiopia, we settled in to wait for John to pass court.  Meanwhile, we caught up on gardening, and Ty finished his preschool year ending our 6-year RCCS era.

By the end of June, Kayla was almost cleared for travel but John still hadn’t passed court.  Stateside, Mia turned 7, Patrick and I celebrated being married for 10 years.  I also spent a lot of time pre-planning our school year.  We spent the entire summer making “tentative” plans since we never knew when we could get a call to travel.

July finally showed some movement as Kayla was cleared for travel and John finally passed court.  I went into nesting mode, organizing and rearranging everything in sight.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you nesting is due to pregnancy hormones.

August was another whirlwind month as John was cleared for travel, and we completed paperwork to accept at THIRD REFERRAL (John’s cousin). This started a race to get a court date before seasonal closures (and to avoid an additional trip to Ethiopia).  At first we planned to travel on Saturday 8/18.  Instead we received a phone call Monday 8/13 that we needed to appear in court on Friday 8/17 so we (just Patrick and I this time) jumped on a plane 48 hours later on Wednesday 8/15.  We took custody of John and Kayla when we arrived in Ethiopia Thursday.  This started my quest to take one photo a day for the next 365 days to visually chronicle our adjustment from a family of 5 to a family of 8.

I’m not quite sure how to describe September. It’s a unique situation when you are celebrating and adjusting adding 2 new family members but life is still on hold as you wait for yet another travel call.  We jumped into school with both feet and managed to sneak in a trip to Connecticut to see Patrick’s family.  God was gracious enough to grant us a honeymoon period, and well fell into a comfortable routine that included school, soccer, and Tae Kwon Do.

We made our third trip to Ethiopia on October 16. By this trip, we had spent so much time in country, the locals were calling us “Half-besha” (Habesha means “Ethiopian” in Amharic).  Just before we left, Ty reached a huge milestone when he was released from speech therapy after almost 3 1/2 years.

Just when we thought all the paperwork was finished, we filed our first post-placement report (totalling more than 14 pages) in November. November also marked the end of our honeymoon period so let the sibling spats begin! There are 15 different relationships just between the kids. We’ve had to be creative in helping the everyone focus on the positives of each other.

December has been abuzz with advent activities and Christmas preparations.  To make gift giving more manageable, the kids are doing a secret santa exchange.  The biggest news is that Patrick finishes his Masters in Theology Program this month after 5 1/2 long years!

We’d love to hear from you so please leave a comment or drop us an email. There’s also a chance to win a great “year-in-review” calendar until tomorrow. Just click here to see it.

Click here to see all the photos and captions from the {365} The First Year Home project or just enjoy the slideshow (sorry, no captions) below.