Gotcha Day

We've tried emailing pictures and that didn't work very well, so we're trying the blog. We'll send out more detailed updates later. For now, pictures..

It's time...

This is Eric... I remember during the pregnancies of our other children that after we hit the 37 week mark, I would always secretly hope that Laura would wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me “It’s time.” She of course would say it in a really calm voice and no matter how much I had rehearsed it in my head, I would jump out of bed like a madman and start running around the house trying to find suitcases that were already packed and ready by the foot of our bed. As you all know, we are in month 30 of our adoption process or “paper pregnancy” and are currently waiting on approval from US immigration office. A US immigration team from Nairobi, Rome, and the US has been in Ethiopia since Monday processing cases like ours. Based on the timing of events related to our adoption I did not expect to hear anything this week so I have not been checking my email in the middle of the night or even first thing in the morning. But this morning I woke at 5 which was an hour before my alarm was going to go off. After laying wide awake for a few minutes I felt as if God was telling me “I woke you up for a reason. Go check your email.” So I did. After checking it, I nudged Laura while she slept and in a very calm voice said “We got an email.” At which point Laura jumped out of bed like a madwoman and ran around the room. The excitement quickly mixed with fear because the email could contain bad news as easily as it could contain good news. The letter itself was in a zipfile that I couldn’t open on my phone, so we went downstairs together to find out whether or not we were days/weeks away from bringing our daughter home or months away… I then couldn’t open the zipfile on my Mac and the tension mounted while I rebooted into Windows. After what seemed like hours of waiting and Laura repeating “LORD, no matter what happens we know You are with us.”, we got to read the following words… “The visa petition you have filed has been approved.” We haven’t gotten any good news related to the adoption since early August so we of course had to keep reading to make sure there wasn’t a “but” anywhere in there. And there wasn’t!!! Then there was more jumping, laughing, crying, etc. :-) We are now waiting for a final decision from the US Embassy and a date for when we can go bring sweet Sarah home. We could hear from the Embassy as early as Monday and travel within the next few weeks. God was good before we got this email and He is still good now, but we are so thankful to Him that we’ve made this big step towards bringing Sarah home.