Seek The Substantial

We haven’t done the best of jobs keeping everyone up to date on our second adoption. We have been a little more hesitant this time around because we are more aware of all that can go wrong in any international adoption.

Our dossier (paperwork that goes to DR Congo) was finalized on September 20, 2013. On September 27th, the DGM (Direction Generale de Migration) in the DR Congo suspended the issuance of exit letters for children being adopted internationally and this shutdown is expected to last for 12 months. This exit letter is necessary in order to carry adopted children out of the DR Congo so even families who have completed all other parts of the adoption process cannot bring their children home from the DR Congo. Even if the children have been legally adopted according to Congolese law. All other adoption agencies in the DR Congo and in the US are working as usual so despite the shutdown, we continued to pursue an adoption from the DR Congo.

On January 24, 2014, we received a referral for a beautiful 2 year old boy! We cannot share a picture or his name so we will call him Y. I cannot explain how it feels to look at a picture of a child and hope and pray that someday he will be yours. It is heartbreaking to know of the circumstances as to which this child has been born and to know that his biological family, for some reason, cannot take care of him. It is also heartbreaking to know that if this adoption is not approved for some reason or another, Y will spend the rest of his childhood in an orphanage. How can this be better than him having a loving family, even if that family lives a continent away. I love him already and I am hopeful. We know that our agency is working in the DR Congo to collect the documents needed for court. So, we wait. We wait for a court date and then we wait to pick up our son. As of now, we will only travel to DR Congo one time. I am hopeful that all of this will occur before Christmas, 2014 but I know that all will happen in God’s perfect timing.

Today, it is Mother’s Day and I think this is what inspired me to write this post. Mother’s Day is a bittersweet day for an adoptive mom. I pray for the biological moms of both of my sons. Yes, I already feel as if Y is my son. I hope and pray that if they are living, they have peace over their decision to place their child in an orphanage so that they could be adopted. I cannot, in any way, express how thankful I am to have received the opportunity to adopt and to be the mom to a child that was born to someone else. Someone that is more brave and strong than I am. While at times parenting a child from a hard place can be extremely hard, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

I was awful at taking photos this Christmas. We started with Christmas at our house on Christmas Eve morning. We did round up the kids for the photos, while at our house. That is Ashley’s fingers at the bottom of the photo.

Waiting.

I did not take any pictures at my house on Christmas Eve evening, except for the moment before my little brother asked his girlfriend of six years to marry him (he is holding the ring in his hand). It was a beautiful moment. Congrats TJ & Mia!

The next morning, we had Christmas at our house with just the three of us (five of us if you include the puppy dogs). Fitsum got a bike that he’s not real interested in just yet.

He is very much interested in Lego’s and trains.

Sweet Sweet got a new sweatshirt and I am a lucky guy.

I received lots of nice things, but my Mom got every one of us duct tape and I made a card holder out of mine.

Every year, we go to my father-in-law’s cabin out in East Texas. There is no cell service, or very little service, and almost zero internet service. It’s really quite great and I get to do things that I normally wouldn’t do, you know, like not be constantly connected to my phone or computer or tablet. This year I re-focused on reading East of Eden. I started it last year, but then life and those gadgets got in the way.

My father-in-law does have satellite.

The toy that Fitsum is playing with an old toy car that has the stars and bars on it. That car as been there forever and I know that Fitsum’s ancestors never experienced that, but it’s still odd. I tended to the fire quite a bit. I pretty much consider this my job.

We went to the deer stand to watch deer.

I got all artsy.

Bambino hung out with like a good puppy dog.

I am getting old.

Randy also has a zip line and Fitsum loves it.

It is a tradition like no other, taking Christmas photographs in November. We went to a park in Canton, that was actually pretty cool. A park that had a real deal Frisbee golf course that looked pretty legitimate and an incredibly nice play area for the kids. It was a castle and it was really well done. Anyway, you won’t see any of that, but you will see the family posing for photographs. One of these photos looks like my brain has been sucked from my head.

When Fitsum hugs the both of us, he squeezes us really tightly. This is what’s happening here.

Awww.

I’m a pretty lucky guy.

This is the one that looks like I have an empty brain.

This is what was on our Christmas card.

Here, I am praying that Fitsum doesn’t kick me in the face.

I am always amazed as to how pretty Fitsum is. I won’t be able to use the word “pretty” much longer, but he really does have a beautiful face.  These are his school pictures from the fall of 2013.

The many faces of Fitsum and they’re all totally accurate.

Pretty awesome and one day, when Fitsum in old, he’s going to laugh at the next picture.  He won’t be between the ages of 10 and 18, but after that. Long after that, he’ll laugh and think it’s funny how his old man took this picture of him.

Seriously though. I love this kid and he’s just the best thing ever.

A while back, one of the people that I follow on Twitter, Sports Illustrated Richard Dietsch had been asking people for their best singular moment captured in a photograph. So I tweeted to him this photograph of Miranda and Fitsum kissing for the very fist time in Ethiopia:

It really was a magical moment and it is a moment in time that I’ll never forget.

The next thing that I know, I’m being contacted by Dietsch to ask me to email some folks at CBS News so that they can ask me if I could give them permission to use that photograph. Then this happened at the 1:58 mark on the CBS Evening News:

It was a very cool moment and now, before the age of four years, Fitsum can say he’s been on national television with his mom in an incredibly special moment.

I’m on a roll. Catching up with two posts in one day. Towards the end of May, Justin organized a guys weekend where we had Justin and Elam, Eric and Cole, Matt and Miles and myself and Fitsum together for a guys weekend at their farm near Bogata, Texas.

It really was good times and it was the first time that I was totally in charge of Fitsum and not at home. Scary stuff. Everything went well and Fitsum and I had a great time.

This first one is a bit blurry, but it is what happens when you ride a golf cart:

The next day, the kids played on the zip line and everyone else tried to fish, except for us. Fitsum wasn’t real keen on trying to fish and I wasn’t too keen on trying to make him fish if he didn’t want to. Fitsum wanted to play with his Thomas the Train the birdbath:

I got no problem with that. The results of playing so hard left him thirsty:

Fits loved riding the golfcart and he just loved sitting there and driving. For whatever reason that weekend, there were butterflies everywhere. Literally, they were just all over the place and there were hundreds that would surround you at any given time. They would land on you too and that was something that Fitsum liked. For weeks after the trip, he would ask me if I saw that butterfly land on him. Adorable.

Back to my story. Playing in the birdbath left Fitsum thirsty and dirty:

It is sorta funny that Fitsum and Elam don’t like to smile. Fitsum hates photos for some reason, he hates posing for photos. Obviously:

I love this kid.

I had an issue with trying to figure out where I was going to store photos online.  I started to dislike paying for the Flickr stuff because so much stuff is free and then Flickr became free.  So here we go.

Earlier this summer we took Fitsum to see Thomas the Train in Grapevine in April of this year.  Grapevine has a train station and a 20 minute train ride that you can take and they have a ton of booths around where you can see lots of Thomas the Train things. Fitsum is obsessed with Thomas the Train, or at least he was for a really long time.

So yes, when we first arrived, Sweet Sweet and I saw that incredible amazement in his eyes when he saw the train. A real live train. It is silly, but it was magical and it was a wonderful day. Let’s start with a hand-sticker:

Here’s Sweet Sweet and Fitsum looking happy:

Here is Fitsum and I where Fitsum refuses to look in the camera:

Pretty cool downtown in Grapevine:

We’re on the train. Wooo! Wooo!

Family photo:

I think Fitsum officially understands Halloween.  I remember last year and he didn’t have a clue what was going on.  He had on a costume, last year it was Elmo, and he walked up to people’s doors and we went back and did it again.  It is amazing how much he’s learned in a year and how I didn’t have a clue what he thought about us or anything we do.

So this year he was Max, from the book, Where the Wild Things Are.  These are just a couple of photos, but he was incredibly cute.

Then we went to the zoo and that was also pretty awesome.  Last year we went to the Dallas Zoo in January and he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on.  We always thought that he was disinterested in things, but that’s not true at all.  There was just this barrier as to who we were, how we were communicating and trying to figure out what we thought.  We could have been better parents.

Because I am crazy, we got to the zoo as soon as it opened, I think at 9:00 am.  We were worried because Fitsum woke up at 4:30 that morning and we weren’t sure if he was going to make it through the day.  We should never doubt Fitsum’s ability to make it.

He wanted to ride in the stroller. This never happens, so we took advantage of that.

This was merely a second that he wanted to be on the elephants. He had no interest in being on these bronzed animals for very long as you can tell he’s contemplating how he’s going to get down.

Elephants!

Giraffes!

Cheetahs!

Gorillas!

Rhinoceros!

And even though it has been two weeks, he can’t stop talking about how he got to ride the cheetah on the carousel. Fitsum misses the zoo.