Sorry, again, for the silence

I had expected to regain energy as i said in my last post, however, that has not been the Lord's will for us apparently :) We have been hit yet again with health issues that have reduced us down to the bare essentials of family life. Food, laundry, hugs and kisses. Due to unexpected health concerns I have yet to be cleared physically for the adoption and will be having some more tests done next week. This has been a unique season for me to see where my trust in the Lord really resides. Sometimes it pleases Him to remind us of the fact that we are just a vapor and that He is all that we cannot be in regards to comfort, health, and life. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I am dying...it is just that when we are brought to a season of discomfort it causes us to think on what we know to be true and whether our lives reflect it. Also, Juliana has been hit hard this week with a stomach virus that is still going strong after 5 days. There are small signs that she is perking up, but she is still not feeling well. I have been thinking on the words to "Be still my soul" as I catch myself dwelling on circumstances rather than who my amazing God is.

Be still my soul, the Lord is on my side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
in every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still my soul, thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still my soul; thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still my soul: the waves and wind still know
His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below.

We're home : )

So, we are trying to regain energy for the week ahead after a busy trip to Omaha. We were able to help my sister and her family get mostly moved and we are able to check one more step off our adoption process checklist! Yay! I have to say that the classes were really REALLY good and caused us to think about many things we had not thought about before. I hope to help all you blog readers out there to become more well-versed in international adoption as well J We met one family from Iowa that also will be adopting from Ethiopia and is just a small jump ahead of us in the process. They seem like a really neat family and we have some things in common. The mom is an RN and stays at home with their five children who range in age from 15 to 5. They live in a small town also and like us they feel the Lord has a vital part in this adoption journey. We are excited to get to know them better and there is a possibility that we would end up traveling together to Africa to bring home our children.

Off to Omaha

We leave this evening for Omaha to attend our first set of adoption classes. They will be held all day Friday and Saturday. I have a sister who lives with her family full of boys (3 under the age of 5!) in Omaha so we will be able to stay with them and enjoy a visit during our time there :) The classes will cover the following topics:

• Adoption triad and lifelong issues of adoption
• How to talk to your child about adoption
• attachment and bonding
• effects of institutionalization
• transracial/transcultural adoption
• learning to be a multicultural family
• adoption losses and gains
• life books
• seven core issues of adoption
• stereotypes of birth parents, adoptive parents, adoptees
• child's background and history
• child's behavior and adjustment to family
• family's strengths, resources, and limitations
• parenting skills and adaptation to child

I look forward to being able to blog and discuss these topics after this weekend. I probably won't be able to write another entry until Sunday so enjoy the rest of your week wherever you are!

Yikes!

On our date night last night Craig and I were talking about how fun it will be to travel to go pick up our child. I am fully confidant that the only reason I would be brave enough to travel to Africa would be for this reason. I so admire people that are totally comfortable going to foreign countries. I wish I was brave like that! It is not that I don't appreciate different places and cultures, I just feel like I wouldn't know what to do in a foreign country so I would just stand there and hope that I didn't get hungry. I so look forward to traveling because it will be a new opportunity to be totally depending on my trust in the Lord :) The agency provides a guide that will be with us most of the time (except for in the hotel) so we will surely not go hungry or homeless. Maybe my feelings about international travel will change after our trip! Just for fun I looked online at airfare information from Omaha to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It looks as though it will take about 3 flights over 24 hours time to get us there with the longest flight being 8-10 hours. The "Yikes!" came in when I realized that the tickets for the both of us will be around $5,000 - $6,000 dollars. That is double what we thought it was! My fervency for prayer for financial provision has gotten a boost!

Naming babies

We have been working on paperwork for some time now and every now and then I get a reminder that all this paperwork will actually end in us bringing home a baby to join our family! Some of you are probably thinking, "Umm...yeah did you forget that you are trying to adopt?" I don't purpose to forget, but seriously all the paperwork and formality of everything easily overshadows the bigness of what is really going to happen. I chuckled this morning as I watched Juliana and thought about the fact that we will eventually be choosing a name for this new little Merrihew. This is how the scene went: Our neighbor will be having a baby in a few months and Juliana was deep in one of her imaginary worlds pretending to be our pregnant neighbor with a baby stuffed under her shirt. I rubbed her "baby belly" and complemented her on such a nice tummy which pleased her greatly. After she informed me that her baby was born and she came back out of her "house" (her bedroom) to show off her new baby I asked her what she named her new little baby girl. She thought only for a moment to recall her current most favorite name...Tree-head. Yes, she invented it and thinks that it is a beautiful name. Who am I to argue.

Family road trip

Yay! A big step was completed today. Not that it was all that hard to do, we just had to find time to do it. We took the fam to North Platte for a little visit to the State Patrol. We were fingerprinted for our background checks today and we will need to send those fingerprints in with our authorizations forms for the check. Just in case you haven't been booked recently you may not know that they no longer use the old roll your fingers in ink method. They actually use a really cool scanner that is able to take a much more accurate picture. Apparently the secretary informed Craig that he has "nice" fingerprints and he let me hear all about it this afternoon. If you ask me they look a bit boorish...no squiggles at all, just waves. Mine, on the other hand, have cute little curly-cues in the middle. She said mine were "unique" b/c the pattern is not in the middle of my fingerprint, but up high near the tips of my fingers. Craig says that is why i am not good at basketbal. Hardy har har! real funny. As I looked at our fingerprints and was surprised to see such detail that I have never really been aware of I was reminded that the Lord is not surprised one bit. He knows us down to the numbers of hairs on our head - because He put them there. He is the one who sculpted every tiny line on my fingers and thought up every little curly-cue. Even more amazing is that though He knows everything about us - our frame, our thoughts, our motives - He still loves us! CRAZY! Thank you Lord for your kindness that leads us to know you and the salvation that you offer.

Good old Nebraska weather

We soaked up the sun on a beautiful 70 degree Saturday and watched the snow fall on Sunday! I think those of us who have been in Nebraska for some time forget just how wierd that is to have the weather change so abruptly. Hmmm...I wonder how the Ethiopian government feels about sending one of their precious babies to cold old Nebraska ( ha ha!) ?

The week ahead will be spent hunting down addresses and hopefully getting fingerprinted by the State Patrol to start our background checks. Both Craig and I have to list all of our previous addresses in the last twenty years. That goes back to when I was seven years old! I am pretty sure that I have had eleven different addresses that I will need to find. This is mostly due to going to college in several different cities. The only ones I will really have to dig for are my college dorm addresses. If nothing else I will hopefully learn from this process that record keeping is a lost art...and one I should try to brush up a bit on :)

A beautiful Saturday

What a beautiful day it was today! We spent the morning unpacking...yes I said unpacking. We moved to our current house three weeks before Evan was born so we are just getting around to unpacking about half of our stuff. We really made progress this morning and were able to get some fresh air outside this afternoon. Our adoption agency, believe it or not, had an informational meeting in little old McCook today. We packed up the family in the double stroller and walked to the library for the meeting and spent some time at the swings afterwards. Though we didn't have a lot of questions as we have done a lot of research so far, we were able to meet the social worker who will be doing our homestudy. She seems really friendly and meeting her has definitely eased my mind in regards to looking ahead to the homestudy. The family I spoke of earlier from McCook (the electrician who came to our home) was there and it was great to meet them and hear their adoption experience. It may be quite a different road for us since we are going with Ethiopia, however, there are a lot of things that we would have in common. It was neat to see her referral pictures of her son and also to be able to see her little boy and remind myself that in time the little one that we are hoping for will actually be (Lord willing) here in our arms and will know me as mommy! That is the wildest thing I have thought about in a while :)

Sorry for the silence :)

I really didn't intend to invite a bunch of people to our blog and then not post anything! Sorry for the lack of news for those of you checking in lately. It hasn't been due to a lack of news, but rather to some health issues that have come up recently for me (Erin). I wasn't feeling well again this week and the doctor finally figured out what was wrong with me (Yay!). Though it is nothing life-threatening by any means, it is something that will probably require minor surgery and thus may delay adoption stuff hopefully only a month or two. With that to say I am still sure that I will have plenty of adoption related stuff to post so please stick with us!