Packed

Packing is such an ordeal.  Even with weeks to prepare, the final day is a lot of work.  Actually, it's not the act of putting items in a bag that is so hard. It's all the mind-racking and list checking to make sure you've got it all.  Amber actually did a lot of prep-work for the last several days, getting all the donations arranged into the 4 big bags, and making sure we have all the baby supplies.  I can't tell you how many times we've weighed each bag with one of those handy bag scales.  Each of our four bags is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50.3 lbs each.  We figure as long as we can round down to the nearest pound we should meet the 50 lb per bag limit, right?!  It's an ugly obsession.  

What's uglier is the tighter restrictions on baggage that all airlines have imposed.  Emirates (our airline) only allows ONE carry-on.  By carry-on they don't mean what most of us think of, one of those smallish suitcases that you can get enough stuff into for a weekend.  No, this is more like a messenger bag's worth.  Oh, and it can't weigh more that 15 lbs.  Let's see here, my notebook weighs about 7 lbs, so I'm halfway there just with that.  I initially figured that Emirates probably won't actually weigh my carry on, right?  Well, other travelers we've heard from say that they actually DO weigh it.  I will be that guy walking to the gate wearing extra clothing, jackets, electronics, headphones, neck pillow, etc. just to circumvent the carry-on weight restrictions.  It's all about getting as many donations to Ethiopia as possible!
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Bryan

Testing Testing 1-2-3

I've read numerous reports that it is rather difficult to post to Blogspot/Blogger from Ethiopia.  I figure if I can't actually log into our blog then I can at least post to it via email.  So this post is a test run of such a post.  If I can at least get to Gmail, I can still post to the blog.

Here's a test link to my SmugMug Site.

And hopefully this new picture of Ellie I just attached looks okay on this post, too. 

--
Bryan

Travel Dates are Here

Some skilled guys and gals will be piloting us to Ethiopia real soon from a cockpit like this.  We have an appointment at the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on 6/21/2010.  This is huge.

Amber has been on the phone for 2 days with numerous travel agents, trying to find the best and cheapest itinerary possible.  Unfortunately, we're traveling in probably one of the biggest vacation months there is.  The rainy season is just getting started, and those who can are getting out of the country for a few months.  The quotes we have so far are pushing $3k per person.  We're also learning that additional baggage charges are prohibitively expensive, especially if you're originating a flight out of most of Europe for some reason.  I think we're probably looking at leaving on the 17th, returning on the 25th.  Please pray for a good flight itinerary on a good airline for an unbelievably cheap price to come together for us.

Donations for the orphanage and transition home are starting to collect, which is really great.  We fully intend to pack as light as possible for ourselves so we can bring as much as we possibly can to Ethiopia with us.  There's a donation-collection-party being organized by Amber's sister Brittany this week.  That's so cool.

We got to share a little at church this morning.  We were interviewed for about 10 minutes, while an Eleora slide show rolled on the screens.  I hope it was encouraging to somebody today.  Amber did a great job expressing all the important things about our adoption story and how God has really stretched us through it all.

Burden Me

The past couple weeks have seen more than their share of drama.  In a nutshell, we learned that our fingerprint paperwork for our Chinese adoption ended up at the US Embassy in Ethiopia.  It took almost two weeks of constant emails and phone calls to the USCIS, the NVC, Senator Boxer, Senator Feinstein, and Congressman Campbell, but the issue finally got resolved.  Of course, Amber did nearly all of the legwork.  She even had to drive to the USCIS office in LA and spend a day giving stone-cold office workers the guilt-trip showing them pictures of our little girl who can come home to us if only they would DO THEIR JOB.  It worked.  The right paperwork reached Ethiopia days later.  Awesome!

Now for the real topic of this post.  We want you to burden us.  Burden us down with donations to hand carry to Ethiopia.  Donations to meet real needs of real orphans.  We will hopefully be traveling to Ethiopia in a few weeks, and we plan to take as much cargo as we can handle with us.  It's way cheaper and way more reliable to be a "mule" and pay the extra luggage fees to get donations to the orphanages and transition home than it is to ship donations.  So this is a call for donations to take with us.  There are some specific needs that have been expressed by our agency:

• TOOTHPASTE (we already have over 150 toothbrushes)
• DEODORANT
• HAND SOAP
• CLOTHES PINS
• BOY'S UNDERWEAR (sizes 6 and under specifically)
• TODDLER-10 YEAR OLD UNDERWEAR (boys & girls)
• SIZE SMALL SCRUBS FOR NANNIES ("5 for 10" stores have deals)
• BABY WIPES
• SOCCER BALLS & PUMPS (for the street kids)
• BABY BOUNCER SEATS

It would be a great problem to have if we had more donations than we could possibly manage.  If you're interested in dropping off some donations, please drop me (Bryan) a line so we can work out the details.  

Introducing Eleora Marije Booy

Our adoption petition passed the court process in Ethiopia last night!  She is now legally our new daughter!  We've chosen the name Eleora Marije Booy.  Check out the little slideshow we put togheter last weekend.  I'll post more details later, but it looks like we might travel to get her sometime in July or August.


Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

THE CALL

Yes indeed.  Every parent that has already experienced the international adoption process knows what I'm talking about.  One of the biggest milestones in the entire adoption process is the day when you get that call from your agency to announce the details of your child referral.  Today was that day for us! 
Our coordinator called Amber first, then the two of them called me.  When I got the call, I was in the midst of another super-busy afternoon.  I hit the answer button on my phone, and initially thought, "D'oh!  I don't recognize that phone number.  I should have just let that go to voicemail. Oh well, I have to answer it now."  I was immediately hit with the significance of the call when I heard the lady's voice on the line congratulating me that this is my referral call.
Our coordinator gave us the essentials.  Amber had the presence of mind to ask a few good questions.  I mostly just listened and took notes.  Afterward, Amber and I chatted.  She was so blown away she had to stop baking the cookies she was working on.  She couldn't work the oven timer any more!  All my office mates were watching me take the call the whole time.  I felt like I was on stage.  Weird.  It was cool to share the moment with them though.  We're pretty tight.
Unfortunately (and this pains me to say) we can't divulge most of the details of the referral.  I know!  That stinks, right?!  Privacy laws are strict, and I don't want to do anything to endanger the adoption process for us or her by being stupid on the Internet.  I can share that she is a really healthy 2 month old baby Ethiopian girl.  We do have 2 pictures of her, and she is SUPER CUTE.  I'm being objective, and you'll have to trust me on this for now.  We have all kinds of medical reports that all say she has no health issues, which is awesome.  She's obviously being fed WELL. :D
I'm pretty floored that she is so young!  I was totally expecting a referral for a child near the older end of our requested age range since young babies are in higher demand.  We'll be getting her just at that baby sweet spot (from a dad's point of view), when they're beyond that boring infant stage when they just eat and sleep.  Sure infants are cute, but dad's like to INTERACT!  I can't wait to share more details about her, but I'll have to wait a few weeks.  Travel dates are dependent on a lot of variables still, but let's just say 2-4 more months for now.  Totally stoked!  Thank you, Jesus.

We are ON DECK!

This is a really good sign!  We received an email from our adoption agency last Friday, officially putting us "on-deck".  What that means is that our family "could receive a referral within the next one to three months".  Yes, they're giving themselves a lot of latitude, and we're trying not to get too excited, but we have had numerous friends who received their referrals within days of receiving an "on-deck" email.

We're noticing quite a few referrals for kids from our agency once again.  That's good to see, because it says that a lot of the weirdness we saw in the weeks following the Haiti earthquake seem to be behind us now.  Unfortunately we're almost definitely going to have to travel twice, but at least adoptions are moving forward.

Stuff is feeling even more real now.

-bryan