Meeting Our Son

Signing our Act of Adoption - starting the legal process!

Max signing.

After our long 3 days of travel to get here we drove to the orphanage! I still am not suppose to say any identifying comments about our son. We have to wait until we have our court decree and he is legally ours- hopefully later this week we can flood you with pictures! Today we signed the Act of Adoption, which gets the legal process going. Tomorrow we are going to go ask for a court date. The court date can happen either later tomorrow (Tuesday), Wednesday or Thursday. Please pray we make it in tomorrow. There is a larger group from another agency, 6 families, so we hope to get in before them.

Bonita (our Gladney in country contact), the Pizzutelli's and us at lunch.

Our meetings with our son.
It's strange to meet a stranger and think of him as your son. My love for him has already been growing but now it truly begins. I wanted to cry the second day (Tuesday) we met when he skipped back down to the kids area with the nuns. We had a good time with him and I can't wait to have him home! He's so smart. This transition of short visits each day (2 hours in the afternoon) is good for us both. Just the right amount of time to play and connect and get use to each other. Soon we will get to visit in the mornings as well- right now we have had stuff to do in the mornings and therefore miss the morning visitation hours that end at 11am. It works out well to have the visiting length of time gradually increasing.

He was so sweet the first day. I was prepared for the worst- crying, not wanting to engage. But he didn't do that! He engaged with us for about half of the visit and wandered around to other families and kids the other half. It was good. It's hard with 8 families and their new kids all in  one small court yard area. But it is also a good transition for the kids. The kids get to see each other doing the same thing they are doing- meeting their new parents and being adopted. Yesterday, we played some soccer. Our son would yell at Max and say "papa" when he wanted to kick the ball to him. He calls us mama and papa but he doesn't really know what that means. It still melts our hearts. When we show him pictures he points us out and says mama, papa. Love it!

He loved the short video of our friend and her daughter singing a kid's song in kinyarwanda. He sang with them and we joined in. It was fun. We watched it several times together. We will have to connect with our friends and their Rwanda born kiddos as soon as we've mellowed out at home for a while.