A Year Ago

A year ago today, Crew officially became our son!  We celebrated Gottcha Day with ice cream and sprinkles.

a year ago

today

teeth and a haircut

Here is the big sister:

Crew has sprouted 4 teeth since we have come home. Since they have poked through, we have had a more restful sleep!

We finally decided to give Crew a haircut!

Here is the before:

During the cut:

This is the 1st look:

After a touch up:

home 1 month

Well, we have been home with Crew for over 1 month now! I truly feel as though we are adjusting well. Crew has turned me into an early riser (6:37 am) and still will wake up some during the night - but is easy to lay back down - it is just hard getting out of bed. Both Sadie and Crew had birthdays, so now we have a 4 and 1 year old. We are enjoying summer learning to be a family of 4!

More pics :)

more photos

photo shoot

We got to visit with our good friends who also adopted from Rwanda this year. One is a photographer and here is a sneak peek!

home

So good to be home! Crew really does adore Sadie right now. He can't take his eyes off her and she can make him laugh more than anyone else. Sadie wants to help him to everything and is a great diaper changing helper and is getting pretty good at feeding him his cereal.

Crew is getting pretty good at crawling, has velco hands- especially when my hair is close by, makes lots of funny faces and sounds with his lips, and right now is really into the legs on his high chair.

We are still recovering from the flights, our house looks like it exploded, but we are so happy to be home.

the past week or more

So sorry that we haven't posted in a while. We did get our kids passports on thursday (5/12)! The on Friday we headed to the US Embassy in Kigali for appointments there. The consulate was very surprised to see so many adoption appointments that day and told us she had never processed more than 5 in a day. There were 13 that day. At 6:00 pm, all 13 were finished! Thank you Consulate! The rest of Friday consisted of packing and frantically getting paperwork translated. We headed to the airport at 10:30 pm for our 1:30 am flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. If you are wondering if a 1:30 am flight for 9 families with 11 children is a good idea, the answer is probably no - no rest for the parents :) We did sit next to a Ugandan young man whose name was Elvis! (That is Crew's name at the orphanage)

We arrived in Addis Ababa early on Saturday morning and dropped our things off at Yebsabi Guest House and then took the kids to a clinic to have their medical examinations needed in order to get a visa. After that, most families napped, but I had to scan some of our original documents that needed to be translated.

Here is the official business that happened the rest of the week:

Monday- filled out I-600 and sent with AWAA staff

Tuesday - filled out some other form - 230 or something like that and went to the embassy to turn it in and got appointments for wednesday.

Wednesday - 9:00 appointments at the embassy that went well - the AWAA staff was to pick up our travel packets that afternoon! We had finished everything we needed to! We received our packets and some families were even able to fly out wednesday night.

Thursday - tour of coffee factory. Ethiopia is where coffee was discovered - some guy named Kaldi.

Friday - packing and headed to the airport at 5:30 so we could request a bassinet. They told us all the bassinets were reserved. Boarded the flight around 10:00 pm. Saw people sitting in the bassinet row that didn't have kids and they switched seats with us so we could have a bassinet! The next 17 hours was VERY LONG - not much sleep for Sten and I, but we arrived in DC at 8:30 am on Saturday!

Saturday- Long lines at immigration, a starbucks coffee, more lines at security, then we boarded a 12:30 flight to Chicago. When we arrived in Chicago we found out our 4:00 flight to Nashville had be cancelled. Our customer service lady worked some magic and got us on another airline to nashville at 3:15. We were greeted in Nashville by a sweet little gal in a princess dress who captured her new brother's attention right away!