Adoption Advocates International Reunion

We just got to have a fantastic experience by being able to reunite Fia and Kwame with some of their good friends from Ghana! Our agency, AAI, holds a bi-annual reunion for all the families that have adopted from their agency. Most of the families were from Ethiopia, but our new Ghana program had 7 families in different parts of the adoption process come to the reunion! Most of the children had spent time together at Eban House, so it was so exciting to have the kids see each other again and reunite! Their eyes literally lit up when they understood that these were their friends that they had gotten to know as family for a part of their life. I am not sure how much Kwame actually remembered, but he went along with Fia and acted excited! ;) It was also real fun for our older three kids too since they got to see friends again that they had also met when we traveled to Ghana last winter.

What I thought was cool is that we actually had two families come from CA! It was really neat to meet one of the families since their son was actually one of the first kids to be adopted in this program and I had followed their story from beginning to end. Another family came from Oregon and they are still waiting for the dreaded passport to bring their son home (remember our saga?-Please PRAY for them to get their son's passport soon!) I thought that they were such good sports to come without kids and meet all of us with our Ghanaian kiddos. I think it would have been hard for me to do that, so extra kuddos to them!

What I loved was to chill with the families as much as we could, get to know the parents more, watch the kids play with each other, and also do some Ghanaian drumming. Next time we do this, more families will be settled and hopefully we can get an even larger group of us together again. As I look back and reflect on the weekend, we are really fortunate to have these opportunities for our kids to stay connected to their Ghanaian heritage and their 'familiy'. It was absolutely priceless!!

On the Jag side of things, our family had a good time camping for the first time with 7 in a tent! The car trip up was a bit overcrowded with all our our bedding and such; I think we need to get one of those roof storage containers! But overall, we just fit and we were comfortable in the tent.... until Fia got sick from dehydration in the middle of the night, the last night, on THREE sleeping bags! Nothing better than sleeping in a tent that smells of throw up! Ugh! Not the best way to end a camping trip, but just another memory I guess! As the kids said, at least a bear didn't break into our car again! :)