Hey Guys, we finally got power back when we got home last night. Wednesday was a great day. We went to the Bethany Office and met with our social worker about Journey, his case/background and then the court process. We didn't really learn anything we didn't already know, but it was nice to know that they are caring for him. After our social worker meetings they took us to an Ethiopian Informational meeting. Very interesting and informative, but VERY LONG and hard to understand the English at times. It was very hard to sit there while just wanting to go and hold Muite. About his name...I have tried multiple hours a day to say his name correctly. I have failed miserably. When I call his name across the courtyard at the orphanage he doesn't even respond. When the other kids hear me trying to say his name they giggle and say it correctly and he comes running. EVERY single person here pronounces his name differently and EVERY single person tries to help correct me. Coty and I always laugh at the long pause right before I attempt to say his name each time.
After lunch and and the informational meeting we went to the orphanage. We spent about 2.5/3 hours there just playing and loving on the kids. There were 2 other families meeting their kids for the first time. It is really special being with them because they understand all that we are going through and feeling. Muite was awesome today. We just runs and plays and laughs the entire time. We kicked the soccer ball, played with balloons and blew bubbles. I was excited that he had on boy clothes today and shoes that fit. We will see tomorrow what color his shoes are and if they even fit. At one point today he came over and wanted me to tie his shoe. Tying a shoe may seem very insignificant to most, but to me it was huge. He actually came to me for help.:):) You can tell he is beginning recognize me and Coty. After the orphanage we went to Kaldi Coffee. They are the knock-off Starbucks. Best machiatto I have ever had. From there we went to an authentic Ethiopian restaurant. They food was good, but until you have actually eaten authentic Ethiopian, you would not totally understand. (Lauren...it is pretty much the same as the restaurant we went to in Atlanta.) The best part was they had authentic dancing, music and a coffee ceremony. They performed the different tribal music from each of the different regions of Ethiopia. These people can dance and move!!!!! I have never seen anyone dance and move their body like these performers. It was definitely a highlight experience for us. After dinner they dropped us back of at our guest house. So happy to have power back on. Thursday/today is court day. We are supposed to be there at 9am. After today, if all goes as planned, he will be legally our son. We are not expecting anything to go wrong, but you never know here. I will keep you posted tonight or as soon as we can get through to you guys to let you know how court went. I have limited text messaging/cell service so if you get a text from me, spread the word.
We love you guys. We are soaking up our time with him and the country, but we are really missing the girls. I can't wait to have them all together.
We are going to try and recap a couple of days at a time. Power is not always a guarantee. Please excuse the typos we are exhausted.
Sunday-we arrived in ethiopia at 7am and our tour guide/family coordinator, Abel, was there to greet us at the airport. He took us to our Morning Coffee guest house where we saw our room, (nothing like an american hotel). We are the only family with a private bathroom. The other six families have to share. Praise God because there has been a lot of sickness going on here. The other six families are also the ones who are getting to take their children home this trip. it has been heartbreaking to see them with their children while ours has to stay at the orphanage, but also such a blessing to watch how the system goes.
We went to an international church sunday morning which was surprisingly all in english and very baptist. who would have thought?! We went to a fairly new restaurant after church where we all ordered the "southern fried chicken" because it was the only thing that looked familiar. it was NOT like our chicken at all. i will just say it had not been fully plucked. gross. we are laughing our heads off as i write this. that afternoon we returned to our guest house where the majority of the families were arriving. We then found out that a few of the families had been vomiting for 2 days. and we all know how if a stomach virus is around, i will get it. that night we slept pretty well until yet another man on our trip caught the virus. our room is next to the shared bathroom, we listened to him being sick all night. i shook most of the night with fever and chills and stomach pains, thinking i was dying. i just kept praying and singing hoping the full blown virus would not come. thankfully it didn't.
monday-this was probably the most emotional day of jeffrey's life. i have been so nervous and anxious, but jeff has carried almost all of the tears. :) he still hasn't really stopped crying.
we started the day with french toast. i however was still reeling from the night, but thankfully there is a doctor adopting here at our guest house and she has provided medicines for almost everyone. she has given me a patch i wear behind my ear for 3 days to stop the nausea which is miraculous. i wish i had more.
we then departed for the orphanage. i can't even explain what it felt like to pull up, get out of the bus and walk the 50 feet towards Shalom Orphanage. it felt like an eternity with our hearts racing and tears looming. They opened the big steel doors for us and the kids just went ballistic. on this day there were 27 children there, some of them outside waiting for us and they could not get enough of us. we walked through the courtyard towards the house and inside, there he was. we were not supposed to make it obvious that he is our chosen child, so we had to play with all of the kids while trying to fight through them to Journey. I pulled out cars and bubbles to play with and they went nuts over the bubbles. i was soaking wet by the time we finished. then came the soccer ball. boy does that kid have skills. that is really the only thing journey wants to play with. now we know the way to his heart. :) we were only allowed an hour with him, so it went by so very quickly.
then we went to lunch at a "golf club". ha! didn't expect that, although it really isn't much like our golf courses. we ate lunch there, spaghetti with meat sauce. found out the meat is actually sheep. we just close our eyes and scoop it in. we didn't think of this earlier, but we are basically on the equator here, so just 15 mins in the sun and we are burned. kind of nice we will come home with a tan in february though.
that night, we were allowed to go to the farewell ceremonies at two orphanages to witness each of 12 families receive their children to take home for good. can i just say wow? we helped video and photograph for each of the families. so incredibly special. the children are given to the families in traditional african outfits, they are so cute! (that also meant we got to spend another hour with journey-yay!) From then on, the children are theirs and they take them back to the guest homes. we were very prepared to be up all night listening to screaming, scared and confused children, but not a peep was heard. these children are so well trained and scheduled. they all slept like rocks.
tuesday-We started our day with pancake breakfast at 8:30am, they even put peanut butter on them like jeff and i do! We seem to wake up at 4am though every morning. Each day the time change is getting a little easier. After breakfast we went to the national museum and learned a LOT about ethiopia. it was pretty fascinating. we now have a lot of culture and info to share with journey as he gets older. We went to a beautiful outdoor restaurant to drink coffee machiattos. delicious. best coffee in the world. After lunch (more sheep meat) we got to go the orphanage again. today was during his nap, but they woke him for us. that was awesome because he was one of only a handful of kids awake, so we had so much more one on one time with him. i gave him a balloon and stickers. i think i have him hooked now. :) he honestly looks at jeffrey like he knows. he likes me, but he REALLY likes jeff. so awesome to see them bond. we just finished our dinner of more sheep meat and now we are sitting in the dark as the power just went out. we have our flashlights-thank you laurie :) guess i won't be sending this email til we get some power back..
While it seems we are just taking off on our adventure, this feels like we are coming up on the end of it. We are flooded with emotions as we sit in the airport waiting to go meet Journey for the first time. We are humbly grateful for the love and support of so many people over the past year and a half, and especially this week. As we fly and adjust, we have been thanking God for the people He has put in Journey's life up until this point. Last night as we had some friends over praying with us, Andrea VanB, prayed for the people who have been caring for him. My heart broke. How had I never thought to pray for those people or thank God for them? I, along with everyone else, tends to view him as alone, but he is not. He has amazing women caring for him at the orphanage, the Bethany Staff looking out for his best interest and up until a few months ago, his uncle. His uncle was there for him when his tiny little world fell apart. His uncle took him in and then had to make the heart wrenching decision to turn him over to the orphanage. Today we are praying for his uncle, whom we will never meet, and all of the people who have cared for our son over the past year.
We are almost there. 3 more flights to go!!!!
Well, it is 2:00am on Wednesday, February 2, 2011. We are planning on heading to Ethiopia Friday morning. It has been a whirlwind of a week. We have been on a highly emotional journey over the past week. We have been packing, preparing and trying to remain focused on the best part of this entire process and not the process itself. We constantly laugh at each other when we find ourselves crying over commercials and or even while watching The Bachelor. I underestimated how much this would affect me this week. The Bible is very clear about the value God places on adoption. In the past we would come across the word adoption in the Bible and think of how amazing it would be to be a part of changing a child's life, but we have discovered that God uses adoption to draw people to Him. It is the perfect picture of God's love for us. I cannot fathom the amount of love and passion God has for us. We have spent the past year fighting and pursuing our son with our whole heart. This has been the purpose and focus of our life for an entire year. We love him with all of our heart and long to be with him, but he has no idea who we even are. (Sound like our relationships with God and how He pursues us?) Someone mentioned how it is an example of how God loves us from afar, but I disagree. God is not far from us and my son is not far from me. He is as close as you can ever imagine. He may not be close in proximity, but he is as close to us as ever. I am grateful for how our son has changed our view of God and how God has revealed to us through this journey.
We wanted to connect with everybody one last time before we leave on Friday. We will be leaving on February 4th and returning the evening of February 13th. While we are in Ethiopia we will have a chance to spend a lot of time with our son and learn as much as we can about Ethiopian culture. Our court date is scheduled for Thursday, February 10, 2011. We will be keeping you updated on Facebook as much as possible. We are not guaranteed internet access, but we will try our hardest to keep you updated.
Please keep praying for us. We are excited and honored to be a part of this journey. Our relationship with God has been forever changed. Our prayer for ourselves is we never return to our old way of viewing and approaching God. Pray that we have an amazing time connecting with our son and that he will supernaturally begin to understand how much we love him. Pray for us while we are traveling. Pray for our girls while they are staying with Coty's mom. They are excited to stay with her, but I am sure after 5-6 days they will miss us. (I hope!) Finally, pray for our son. He is about to experience a life-changing moment and he has no idea about what is happening.
We love each one of you and are so grateful for the impact you have made on our lives. Thank you for investing in our family. We have been overwhelmed with the outpouring of love and support.
Jeffrey and Coty
After a little over two months of waiting for information we got a call from Lawanda, our Social Worker, letting us know that we received a court date for February 10, 2010. We can't wait to get there and meet our little guy and legally make him our son. We are excited with the overwhelming feeling of "we have so much to do" all at the same time.
I wish you could have been in the office today when I got the call. Laurie, Shelley and I were in the conference room finishing up the Christmas ornaments talking about how the adoption agency will be closing at noon on the 23rd. I told them if we do not hear anything by noon tomorrow then it will be after Christmas before we know anything. I walked out of the conference to go to my office and before I got to the end of the hallway Laurie handed me my phone and told me the agency was calling. God's timing is so perfect. The timing of all of it made the two months of waiting worth it. I immediately hung up and called Coty, who is very sick, woke her up and started jumping up and down telling her the awesome news.
So what's next?
It looks like we will leave the states on Sunday, February 6th and arrive in Ethiopia on the 7th or 8th. We will be able to spend a couple hours each day with him and then also have a chance to tour Ethiopia and learn as much as we can about their culture, food and where Journey was born. We go to court on the 10th and then head home, without him, on the 11th. Once we are home we will PATIENTLY wait for him to receive a passport, visa and other travel documents before we can go back and bring him home. They said it should take about 4 weeks before we can go back and get him.
Be praying as we make our travel arrangements (THANKS UNCLE LAMAR and AUNT PATRICIA), finish gathering all the necessary paperwork and while we are traveling. We will be without our girls for a little over a week. I am sure they will be fine, but daddy and mommy will really miss them. Also pray for Journey. He is going to have a lot of major transitions coming up in his life. I can't begin to imagine what he will be processing. I told someone in my family this week that I am longing for the day that he says, "Hey Dad." I have been praying for him and loving him from a distance for so long now and I can't wait for him to call me dad. It is coming...very soon.
Thanks for loving us and praying for us. We hope you all have the best Christmas possible.
Love,
The Melvins
Just wanted to update you on where we are in the process. We are officially still waiting. We are still waiting to be assigned our court date to make the whole thing official. Every time the phone rings or I get an email I hope it is from Lawanda, our case worker, letting us know of our court date or an update on his condition. Keep praying for "M" and for us. We are so ready to bring him home. God has provided in some huge ways this weekend and we are honored and blown away by God's goodness. One thing is for certain, God loves this little guy and you can tell by the way he is providing ways for him to be a part of our family. I will keep you posted if we hear any new information.
Jeffrey
Well we are now one week post referral and our minds are still spinning. We were and still are overwhelmed by the love and support so many people have given us and "M". Lisa Easton was in the office this am and told me she had been praying for him everyday since she heard the news. She is not the only one praying for "M" and for us and we wanted to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts. I am sitting here looking at his picture on my desk and my heart melts and longs to hold him, tickle him and just hold him close. Coty's mind is running like crazy planning the design of the nursery and all of the fun "mommy" things she gets to do. Ri and Ro say hi to his picture when they pass it in the kitchen and know him by name. It is the little things that make him feel like he is already a Melvin. It really is the strangest feeling to know that our son is out there and we can't get to him, but we know that God has him in the palm of His hand. When we close our eyes we imagine what that first moment will be like when we see him. He will probably be scared and cry, but as long as he is in our presence we will be complete.
Where are we now and what is next? We have signed and submitted all of our acceptance documents. They were sent to Ethiopia last week. We are now waiting to be assigned our court date. We are hoping and praying it comes quickly. It could come as soon as the end of the year or into the first of January. We are also hoping for picture updates in a few weeks. It would be so exciting to see additional pictures of "M" and hear how he is developing. We will keep you updated as we receive a court date and our first travel trip.
WE ARE GETTING CLOSE!!!!
