Daddy & his kids!

I just got off the webcam with Daron and the kids! It was surreal to see them all together. I think that Mefia and Kwame were a bit confused to see their mommy on the computer, but after awhile, they figured it out and were showing me the toys that they were holding and trying to get me to eat food. The kids and I were so excited to see them, but the conversation was hard with the couple second delays. Hearing them say our names was also so cute. They had the sweetest little voices and accents. Oh, I just wanted to eat them up! When we were talking, other kids wanted to come in the room and Mefia put them in their place that she was with her daddy - I think I now officially have three spunky, strong-willed girls! LOL! We'll see.... Daron said he will try and blog more about it, but I will just update that when he saw them, they ran to him and yelled, Daddy! He was thrilled! I know that he went to church with them and he said it was so special and he just loved it. As we were ending the conversations, Kwame really wanted to go and play with him so he was going to go and play more ball with them; we sent along a couple of footballs.















(picture of church)

I am sure we will get more updates, but that is the news of the day! Please keep praying that the passports are ready and that the filing of the 1-600 goes well this week with a speedy turnaround!

223348855499003#@#%$%#$@$#

That is the number that was just on my caller i.d. a few minutes ago. The kids and I realized it was probably Daron, so we started jumping up and down and shushing everyone before we answered! Luckily it was him, or it would have been a real downer!;) Anyway, Daron borrowed a phone, so it was real quick, but he let us know he was safe and sound and at his room. He is staying at a bed & breakfast very close to Eban House(the adoption center where the kids are), so first thing in the morning, he is going to head over to meet the kids(WOW!!!!) and spend the day with them going to church and hanging out. They are eight hours ahead of us, so he was heading to bed right now and hopefully I will hear from him in the middle of the night!

P.S. that wasn't the real number, so don't call it and ask for Daron! :)

Weekend Plans

Tomorrow is our last day together as a family of 5 before Daron leaves!(The rest of us head to Ghana after Thanksgiving). I can't believe the time has come. I am in awe and I am scared to death! :) Wow- next time we are all together, we will have two more beautiful faces added into our family. I can hardly wrap my head around it. My heart continues to beat at a fast pace as the days get closer to Daron leaving. We have been staring at these two little faces in pictures for a few months now and we feel like we know them; yet we haven't met them. It is amazing how God weaves your hearts together this way through adoption. My fear though is that I am going to run to them and they will run the other way. Whether or not they do, I know it will take time. I am just so thankful that we only have a few more weeks until I am their mom forever and only a few days until Daron is their dad forever. How wonderful! Daron will be meeting them on Sat., how is that for weekend plans?!!

Happy Birthday Daron!

Yep, today marks the last birthday in our family of the fall season; (I am wiping the sweat off my brow)! Daron got to have breakfast in bed today with some good ole' Wheaties, a latte, and a piece of cake. Then he was lucky enough to have Greta's whole second grade class sing an underwater rendition of "Happy Birthday" to him??!! I guess they sung to him while making the underwater noise with your finger and mouth? Interesting..... It might be a new tradition, I am getting sick of the "cha cha cha" version. Daron also gets to celebrate his birthday with Election Day, in case some of you weren't aware ;) so soon we will go and vote, then continue getting ready for his flight on Friday, then we get to go on a dinner date to celebrate!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARON!!! I LOVE YOU!

Happy 8th Birthday Greta!

Have you noticed a theme here yet? We seem to like to have all the birthdays in our family within a couple of weeks......stay tuned, there is still one more on Election Day!

Today is Greta's birthday and if you happened to run into her, she probably told you that. ;) She loves her birthdays and has been planning out all the details for it the last 6 months-literally! We first surprised Greta after her soccer game yesterday with getting her ears pierced. She was SO excited and it was fun to give her something that she really wanted. After that we celebrated a day early by having 4 of her friends come over for a sleepover. Another first to have a birthday party sleepover. She had so much fun with her friends, cousin, and siblings making pizzas, watching Kit-American Girl movie, playing with dolls, eating cake, drinking root beer floats, etc. etc. until the wee hours! :) So much fun, besides being a bit tired this morning-I did find myself telling a parent Good Night at 9AM!

We got to celebrate her birthday some more with my parents and Brad & Ingrid's family at our favorite coffee shop, complete with donuts from our favorite bakery. Daron and I got to have a special lunch just with Greta and then the she got to have the whole church sing to her and the rest of the November birthdays. Greta is such a special girl and we are so thankful to have her joy and her love of life in our family. I love to see how much she loves people and how determined she can be. Greta is great(as I keep typing by accident) and I look forward to see how she continues to grow and bless others with her life!

Happy Birthday Greta!!!

Happy Halloween

We had a great time with our family going downtown and trick-or-treating at the local businesses. They close off the street the and kids just have a blast, so do the parents! We met up with my parents, as well as some friends, grabbed some coffee, and just wandered and chatted as the kids gained a sugar high. Afterwards, we joined another gathering of treating and enjoyed a fun time with friends. Justus was dressed as a bandit (he said he was a good one though, like Robin Hood), Greta was St. Lucia, and Ella was a fairy(she just wanted to wear wings and her favorite dress-what ever works?!).

Itineray. Got it!

Well, we have our itinerary now and Daron is headed out next Friday to go and meet our children! I am so excited and also a bit jealous that it isn't me! I know my time will come soon, so I am more just thrilled for our family that Daron gets to be with them and they get to start to know their dad. He is going to be over there for about four weeks filing paperwork with the US Embassy, waiting for it to be completed, and then filing for their visas. During that time, he is going to be working on finding a possible non-profit or organization that Alive can team up with in the future. We will definitely keep you up to speed on his trip-maybe he will even be a guest blogger! ;)

The kids and I will head over to meet him at the end of the month. We are all super excited! We weighed the pros and cons of bringing the kids, but just see this as such an experience that is once in a lifetime! They get to go and meet their brother and sister and really get a sense of where they are coming from and what their culture is like. We are so thrilled and it is a huge leap of faith! Our three oldest always impress me with their huge hearts and I can't wait to see them share their love with their siblings and the other kids in the adoption center. How special. I am also so excited to see how this trip impresses upon their lives and what they learn from it. I think this will be huge for them! I know I will come back changed.

So.....needless to say, the last couple of days have been full of excitement and stress at the same time. Just trying to figure out the logistics of everything from one ticket to seven tickets became stressful. We also seem to be having a bunch of things breakdown right now and could just use some prayer to not get discouraged. Within the last two months, this is what has happened......broken faucet(water literally squirting everywhere), broken lock on front door(okay, so it broke a while ago, but it got really bad and we had to get a new one), new brakes for our van, new transmission (covered luckily), broken refrigerator, 11 out of 13 heating vents needed to be replaced b/c they were recalled a decade ago and our inspector didn't catch it, dead video camera, broken digital camera, and then this week Daron's computer crashed and it isn't looking pretty last I heard. Am I done yet, you ask? Hopefully! I am to the point that I start laughing when things stop working, but it is a scary laugh, not funny ha-ha. Daron and I are either on the same team or butting heads the last couple of days. Prayer would be great. Just when we think we have things worked out for our adoption costs, our savings dwindles because of these unforeseen emergencies. I realize a camera isn't an emergency, but when you are headed over to Ghana to meet your children for the first time, it has become an emergency to me. Thankfully, if I can't get a new one in time, my mom has offered Daron hers to take with him, so I am SO appreciative of that. Our 'emergencies' are not all that big individually and I know it is relative, but I think since they happened back to back to back, we have let ourselves get a bit more down than we would wish for. Along the same lines, we are still waiting on hearing from some grants we applied for, for the adoption, that we could really use- so hopefully we will hear something positive soon!

No matter what though, we are just so thrilled that our time has come to go and meet our little ones!

Answers to Prayer!

Well, we have been waiting for two things to be completed in Ghana before Daron can travel over there. The first one is the adoption decree and the second is their passports. The adoption decree usually takes two-three weeks from the court case, which was Oct. 17. Recently, all the decrees have been interim orders instead of full and final decrees. Our agency was told that they were not going to be issuing full decrees any longer and that in two years we would most likely have to go back to court in Ghana(maybe not physically) and all should be fine. Just the unknown has scared me, but at the same time I trusted that all would work out. I secretly prayed with Daron that somehow ours would still be issued a full adoption-as crazy as it sounded. The Ghanaian passports have been up in the air for a variety of reasons and they have been trickling out at no rhyme or reason. We were hoping and praying that they would be ready when the decree was, but fully aware that they may take longer.

Last night I wrote an email to our adoption coordinator asking her if there was anything new in our case. I told her in the email not to respond until the morning because I knew that since I didn't already hear from her that day, there was no news. I was hoping maybe the next day(today) that there would be some news. So...........I sent that off, went to bed, and prayed!

When I woke up this morning, Daron was using my computer, since his crashed last night, and I couldn't check for news. Then I noticed there was a call on my cell phone from Anita, our coordinator. I told him to give me my computer ASAP! (lovingly of course) and noticed there were two emails from her. The first one said that there was nothing new in our case. The second one, an hour later, said that our adoption decree was ready today!!!! She also said that our coordinator in Ghana was very hopeful that we would get the passports this week!!! Ahhhh- two new, wonderful pieces of info. that I could hardly believe! We were overjoyed and I then called Anita to get the scoop. You know what she told me? That not only did she now have our adoption decree in her inbox, it is a FINAL AND FULL ADOPTION ORDER(not interim as we were told)!!! I couldn't believe it??!!And at the same time, I could! My heart kept telling me to believe that it could happen and I know this was God's doing. Thank you God!! Not sure why it happened to our case and not others (feeling a bit guilty about that), but so thankful for our family. It seems like we have waited so long(it's all relative-I know) to add to our family and it is finally time for us to travel to go and meet and bring our children home.

We are working out all the details of travel, but will let you know as soon as we do!

Happy 6th Birthday Ella!

Ella turned 6 yesterday and she was just so excited! We have a tradition of making breakfast in bed for the birthdays in our family, so she got some Mickey Mouse shaped chocolate pancakes made by her dad. After that, she was lucky enough to go and watch back to back games of her brother and sister playing soccer(she actually did like it since her friends were there). Then we went over to Grandma Bev's to set up for her birthday party. She first asked me if we could have her party at My Gym(I said no), then Chuck E. Cheese(I said no), then Grandma's(SURE!). We decided to have a 'Tea Party & Bring your Favorite Doll Theme' and it was so much fun! My mom set up her table downstairs just beautifully with real china tea cups(seriously). The tea was complete with finger sandwiches, cookies, cake, and of course tea! (Thanks for everything Mom) The girls all had a ball. Ella was even more excited because both her grandmas went in with us on getting her her first American Girl doll, Julie. Now of course, she wants outfits! ; ) At the party Ella got to have some of her best little girl friends and four of her cousins there. Her cousin, Kaia, even got to stay for a sleepover!

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Ella is such a light in our life. When she walks in a room, she brightens it up. I am so thankful that I have this little girl in my life and can't believe that she is already 6!

Fia's 4th Birthday

Happy Birthday to our wonderful, beautiful new daughter! Fia is 4 today! I can't believe that she is already four and I haven't met her. I wonder what she will choose for her birthday dinner next year and who will be her little friends that she invites to her party? When we first heard about Fia, they weren't quite sure if she was 2 or 3, so now that she is 4??!! Wow- she ages quick! I am actually a bit sad that I have missed so much of her life already, but so thankful that we get to be her family for the years to come. Hmm......I sure wish I could give her a hug and kiss and wish her a happy birthday in person today. I mentioned that yesterday to Ella and her friend, Alyssa, and Alyssa said, "but that's okay, because you can celebrate together when she is 5!" She is so right and I can't wait to share all our birthday traditions with our little girl and start new ones just for her!