Flying Solo

Last week Pete was on a business trip and this week he has had to go to a training class all week. Even though he's technically not travelling, when he gets home at 10:30 pm and leaves at 6:30 am, he might as well be. So it's safe to say that the quality of meals in our house has definitely gone downhill the last two weeks. Last night were going to have Boboli pizzas. The kids almost always just want cheese so I hadn't bought any toppings. They were determined to have toppings and this is what they came up with. Yum! Needless to say we are looking forward to returning to our normal routine with dad working from home.

Orphanage

We are counting down the days until our first trip to Ethiopia! There are so many emotions that I won't even try to describe them all.

Our first trip is very short, we are actually only in Ethiopia for 51 hours! We land Sunday night and Monday we meet our daughter and spend the day with her. Then on Tuesday we go to court where, hopefully, the judge will say those magic words "she's yours!" Then Tuesday night we catch a red eye home. If all goes well then hopefully we will be returning about a month later for a seven day trip to process her visa and bring her home. For the second trip we will mostly be in Addis but we will also journey to the town where our daughter's orphanage is. Another family that we will be traveling with has some pictures of the orphanage on their blog.

New Friends

After we received our referral in June, I started networking to meet other families of adopted children in our area. So far I have met two wonderful families that live near us and I met up with the two moms and our younger children for coffee last week. We all have older biological children and have chosen to extend our families through Ethiopian adoption. The mom above holding the baby boy also adopted a three year old but he was running around when I took this picture ... right before my camera died :(

As the mom in the top picture said, her three year old daughter is at an age where she is starting to notice people who have skin like hers or hair similar to hers. I am so thankful to meet these families and to hopefully create friends for our daughter to grow up with. And how beautiful are those children!?