Africa then and Africa now

Its been confirmed. we are traveling on friday april 16th for an Embassy date on April 21! This is the last final hurdle in bringing our son home.  He will get his visa and we can leave on sat to come home with him.  Now, he won't be an American citizen until we re-adopt him here in the US. (which, thank goodness for Andy's best friend, the family law attorney, who is doing this all for us) We went ahead and bought our plane tickets and planned for this trip without this confirmation so having it means a lot to us.  With some of the new laws forcing the Ethiopian government to inspect certain cases more in depth than usual, do to unfortunate cases of child trafficking type issues, our embassy date confirmations took longer than usual. Since we are with a morally sound agency (thank god for that one too) the orphanage that Belay has been with is not in question, so while we were not 100% sure, we knew chances were good to get the go ahead.

I have to say this one little email we got with this news really and truly has put this all into place. Now, it really is happening.  So much like the reality of your first child being born. All the unknowns, uncertainties, what ifs that go along with first born, but not so much with second born. Well first adoptions must be the same, so many what ifs to think about that wouldn't be there if he was the second born.

Tonight Andy and I got to go on a date. We seem to go out once a season (spring, fall, summer, winter) and it couldn't have come on a better night. We received the confirmation hours earlier so we were still gitty and ready to celebrate.  And, instead of talking about the adoption process or school or work we talked about how exciting it would be to return to Africa.  We talked about all our wild adventures as youth traveling through Africa, Europe and Asia.  And confirmed with each other that you needed to be either naive or extremely educated in certain areas to successfully do what we had done, and we were, without a doubt, naive.   This trip will be different that any of those for so many reasons. This trip isn't about Africa, or what we will see and experience, this trip is about family. It is about growing our family the way we see it needs to be. Its about seeing the room our boy has been living in and bringing home to hos new room. And we are already talking about when we will return on our terms.