This is my first foray into the blogosphere. So far I’ve goofed around with colors and fonts, and made several ugly blog templates before settling on this simple one. As the momentum builds with our adoption process, this is the place where I’ll post the latest news, important dates & milestones and create a record of this wild ride for ourselves and our kids. There is already a lot to share, so I will do my best to paint the picture of the last two plus years & retrace the path to this amazing point in our lives.
In fall of 2006, after being married for eight years, Sascha and I were sort of scratching our heads about starting a family. We both always wanted children, but never managed to get pregnant, though we never tried obsessively or sought fertility assistance. A few years earlier, I’d had some fairly difficult digestive problems, had a couple of surgeries & spent over a year feeling pretty lousy. Once I felt consistently good again, I wasn’t so interested in what the first trimester of a pregnancy might bring. Though I continued to want a family, I just felt there was another path for us. We'd built a great life together, both enjoyed our work, had wonderful friends and lived in a beautiful place. No complaints—life was good, but we were ready for more. We'd had many individual adventures, along with many good years of “couplehood,” and were ready to enter a bigger conversation. First we did some leadership courses together, for about a year, and that got the ball rolling. We started to experiment more with ideas about how we could live differently, what we might do… I guess we sort of poked our heads out of our box and took a look around. Along the way, we met some new friends who were doing humanitarian aid work in Uganda, and learned that our neighbors were in the process of adopting a baby from Ethiopia. I don’t remember anymore what it was that made the adoption idea click for us. It wasn’t a big “a-ha,” it came on slowly and quietly, until one day we had a long talk, and began to do a little research. First we considered China, because I’m an acupuncturist & Sascha is an industrial designer, with a job that requires quite a bit of travel to China and Hong Kong. We thought it made the most sense, for how we might best maintain a connection to an adopted child’s birth culture…but somehow it just didn’t feel right. We also looked into Nepal and Vietnam, but concerns about child trafficking and unstable adoption programs made us uneasy. After a few weeks of pondering, I began to think about Africa. Once when I was about 12 years old, my family shared Thanksgiving Dinner with some close family friends, Fred and Linda Cowan, their three daughters, and a man named Seleshi, from Ethiopia. Fred met Seleshi years before, while serving in the Peace Corps, and later helped him to come to the U.S. I’m not exactly sure of the back story, but based on the timeframe, I’m guessing he left his country to escape the unstable political situation, and sought safety & education in the United States. What I do remember, is the incredible kindness and warmth of that man, the intriguing stories he told, and the interest that was born in me to someday learn more about Ethiopia.
Fast forward 22 years. Our neighbors, Amanda and Josh Carlson, adopted a baby boy! We had so many questions, so we invited them over (baby in tow) and that was that. Sascha and I both felt it, a kind of alignment happening. We didn’t know how we were going to manage it, but we knew we wanted to adopt children from Ethiopia. Our hope was to adopt two young siblings. We spent the better part of that year getting our ducks in a row and wrapping our hearts & minds around our new dream. In the late summer there was a Seattle/Tacoma Ethiopian adoptive families group gathering that Josh & Amanda hosted at their house, so we went, and it was there that we met Wondimu Habtewoold and his two kids, Lydia and Michael, all from Ethiopia. Sascha and Wondimu talked quite a bit, and we kept in touch after that. When fall rolled around, we began to feel an itch to travel to Addis Ababa, to visit an orphanage there, explore the country, and get a deeper sense of the place we felt so drawn to… It just happened that Wondimu was traveling with his family to Ethiopia for a month over the holidays, so we were able to set up a trip that overlapped. Sascha & I met up with them in Addis & did quite a bit of in-country travel together. We fell in love with Ethiopia, and were blown away by the magnificent beauty & history of that remarkable part of the world. Soon I’ll organize a slideshow of our trip to post here, but in the meantime, the title block of this blog contains a photo Sascha took from a hike in the foothills of the Simien Mountains in Northern Ethiopia, near Gondar village.
Wondimu and his wife, Zebib, are wonderful people—warm, loving and fun. Right away, just being around them reminded me of that Thanksgiving with Seleshi. There’s something about Ethiopian people—a common gentleness and kind, gracious spirit. We had such a great time travelling together—it was easy and comfortable & we were able to see places and eat fantastic food in restaurants that Sascha and I never would have known to visit, if not for their knowledge and guidance.
After we returned from our travels, we got to work on our house. At that point, we were sure we eventually wanted to adopt a brother and sister, and felt the need to add a bathroom in our upstairs, to accommodate four. Our projects grew—we kept finding new ways to make the spaces in the kids’ rooms even better, and it became a little absurd after a while, how far we went with every last detail (the perils of perfectionism) but we love the outcome. We took our time, and it’s interesting now to look back because we both felt like we were running into a lot of problems and issues that slowed us down. The bathroom we thought we could finish by July, wasn’t done until the following February, thanks to all of the other things we changed along the way. We live in a 100 year old house and every time we open up a wall, we find things that need fixing… and so on. Physical labor aside, I see it a little bit differently now—perhaps things took so long because we were processing, preparing for something much bigger than we realized then, or maybe this outcome is just what taking that extra time allowed for us.
We completed our adoption application and home study process in the summer of 2008 and began our adoption education, which included numerous essays and discussions about child development, transracial families, sibling relationships, culture & diversity, and we dove deep into our hopes and concerns about adoptive parenting. The social worker interviews were intimidating for me at first. I was anxious about sharing my difficult family history (including my Dad’s suicide when I was 11) but I was also totally committed to being open and honest about it which I feared might be a liability. Sascha was nervous too, about explaining the many, varied relationships in his family—namely, that each of his parents had children with three different people, with a total of 8 kids (full, half and step-siblings.) Thankfully, we discovered that our concerns were largely unfounded and our social worker was easy to talk to. She pointed out that the challenges we faced as children, along with the work we did to come through them, may offer us some insight and understanding of the losses & transitions that adopted children experience, and equip us to be more compassionate parents. (She also advised us to be careful not to project our own experiences onto our kids, which we have taken to heart & hope to be aware enough to avoid.) In the end, we were proud to “tell it like it is” and gain such an unexpected, positive frame around our own pasts. Sascha and I learned a lot about each other and our families during those talks, a lovely bonus and a wonderful gift to our marriage.
In the meantime, our neighbors had gone back (in the fall of 2007) to Ethiopia to adopt three sisters they met when they traveled the first time to bring their son home. The girls were older, ages 3,7 and 9, and had been waiting at the orphanage for quite some time. As a family of six, they were fully in the throes of chaotic family life. We had the opportunity to marinade a bit in their experience, and though we know there is much we didn’t actually see, we got a pretty clear idea of how intense their transition was… Now two years in, we are nothing but amazed at how well-adjusted they all seem—parents too! Amanda has been an unending resource as we navigate this experience, and I can no longer imagine my life without her in it.
By the time we had our financial plan figured out, the list of families who were waiting for child referrals from Ethiopia was getting very, very long. We completed our dossier and were officially “waiting” in April 2009. At that point, we were full of anticipation, but also okay with the wait, as it would allow us to save for our family time off once we bring the kids home, and give us some added security in a shaky economy. Well, we were okay waiting… for about four weeks. I don’t know what happened. (Hormones?!) We were beginning to participate in regular conference calls for the Ethiopia program “waiting families” with our adoption agency, and I started to feel really weird about the fact that so many of us were waiting for babies & very young children, while a list of kids who are mostly over the age of five, wait and wait and wait to be placed with families, often only because of age or because they are part of a larger sibling group. When I reflected on my motivation to adopt, a feeling bubbled up in me that I was totally missing the point. I recalled the agency newsletter I’d received a few months earlier that included photos and descriptions of several waiting sibling groups. There was a group of three that caught my attention then, but we weren’t even done with our dossier yet. I didn’t bother to bring it up with Sascha—three just seemed out of the question, and I had my own sensible list of reasons why…but the night after one of those conference calls, I had a dream about those kids. Nothing prophetic... (at least not in any way I could perceive at the time.) In the dream I was just sitting at our computer, staring at their pictures (in that newsletter I mentioned.) It seemed weird that it hadn't felt all that impactful when I woke up in the morning, because the dream experience just wouldn’t leave me. Instead, it began to uncontrollably seep into my waking life. I did a little sleuthing and found out that those children were still waiting for placement—two girls and a boy in the middle, ages 5,6 and almost 10, and then came the bee in my bonnet. I called Sascha at work and emailed him the kids’ photos. I asked him how he’d feel about inquiring, just to get more information… we did, that day, and by the end of the week, we had the referral file.
Reviewing the kids’ file was a complicated experience. I was toiling with some lingering attachments I had to parenting a toddler, and we began to fixate on things that “could be wrong” with the children. Suffice it to say we entered into a phobic state of affairs—exploring our capacity to accept those children as our own (and wondering if they would ever fully accept/bond with us) all the while, feeling completely nuts about going from 0-3 kids overnight… and I had spent all of my mental wandering on subjects like preschool and potty training, not bra shopping and menses training! Our social workers were very helpful and gave us an unlimited amount of time to make our decision, with zero pressure. We were fortunate that two of them just happened to be traveling to the orphanage in Nazret, Ethiopia the following week and were able to get answers to many questions we had, spend time with the kids, take a bunch of new photographs (the only ones we had were about nine months old) and correspond with us via email to fill in the blanks. Sascha and I stayed up late talking most nights that month, and would call each other several times a day from work, saying “I’m a yes, let’s go for it” or “I’m a no, because…” Weeks passed and we couldn’t shake it—those children had an amazing presence about them, a clarity in their eyes, and even under such difficult circumstances, they seemed to share a soft receptivity and a tender connection to each other that moved us deeply. We talked exhaustively with family & friends (most of them, especially family, were incredibly supportive and gave thoughtful feedback) and we pondered how saying yes or saying no would impact us for the rest of our lives. I remember waking up one night from a restless sleep to tell Sascha, firmly, “no—this is crazy. I don’t want to do this.” He muttered, “okay, okay,” and I went back to sleep, rested well & woke up a “yes” in the morning. There was no turning back, these kids were already a part of our story. If we said no, we would wonder about them forever. If we said yes, our lives would never be the same…and what an adventure that would be! We sent the kids’ file to the Center for Adoption Medicine at the University of Washington, had a two and a half hour consult with Julian Davies (our adoption pediatrician) and with that reassurance, we were both a resounding yes, yes, yes!
Since that time, we have received clearance from USCIS (Dept. of Immigrations) for three children, and have an assigned court date in Addis Ababa for October 9. After that, a letter of opinion will be issued by the judge and paperwork will be processed for birth certificates, Ethiopian passports, and a final medical evaluation with TB testing. As long as test results are negative, we will be cleared for travel and if there are no significant delays, we expect to bring the kids home sometime in December.
Until we are through court in Ethiopia, I am unable to post photographs of the children, or say much about them (specifically) at all… but come mid-October, you can bet you’ll see three glowing little faces plastered all over this blog!
There was a good reason why I didn’t manage to write a post for six weeks in between the kids’ birthdays: Oral surgery times two. Yeabsira’s was most urgent because one of her molars was crumbling apart in her mouth and every once in a while, she would spit another chunk of it into the sink (and because that one came out in the sink, it didn't make the photoshoot.) Fortunately, all of hers were baby teeth, so a new set will come in, but the dentist has explained that her abcesses (infections) were deep and the permanent teeth below the surface have been forming in a “sea of puss.” We can only hope they have managed to form well, in spite of the harsh conditions… Yahbi woke from the anesthesia terrified and disoriented. Our house looked like a crime scene the first night after she played with her sutures and broke them open with her tongue, but we all got through it and within a few weeks, she became a much happier and more energetic girl.
A couple of days ago, I was in the bathroom with Yeabsira (she likes to have me in there with her, even though she doesn't really need any help.) Usually we just talk about whatever's going on in the moment, with a lot of silly gesturing because the language barrier is ever-present. She teaches me things like how to ask "are you gassy?" in Amharic! It was just after dinner and Sascha was in the kitchen with Etsegenet and Kaleab. We could hear them all laughing and we had been giggling about something too, though I no longer remember what. She looked up at me and said, "Mommy, you, me, hee-hee-hee." Then she pointed toward the kitchen and added, "Daddy, Etsegenet, Kaleab, hee-hee-hee." After that, she paused for a moment, smiling her huge, beautiful, gushing smile and in a gentle voice, she said, "Happy."
The morning after our first REALLY good night's sleep 
True Pioneers
All Aboard?! 
Sascha and I with Etsegenet ("Et-SAH-ganette")
Kaleab ("Caleb") 
Yeabsira ("Yahbi")
Ready to go! (Leaving the CHSFS guesthouse in Addis)
Washington D.C. (heading for Immigrations processing)
For our first Sunday Breakfast, we enjoyed (Thanks to Deb Llewellyn) hard boiled eggs with "Berberaise" (mayo with loads of Ethiopian berbere spice mixed in) toast and bananas in OJ. It was a hit! 
We've heard many horror stories about internationally adopted kids' struggles to adapt to American food, so we were prepared for some hard times at the table, but our kids are adventurous eaters. So far, we haven't had any challenges at all...except for Kaleab's resistance to lentil soup. He had a minor meltdown and missed most of lunch one day, but ate a full dinner that night (WITH lentils!) Etsegenet is a wonderful helper in the kitchen and all three seem to enjoy our mealtimes together just as much as we do..jpg)
When I seek a calming influence, I look at this picture. They are so incredible to me—three little people, three huge spirits, who have endured enormous losses and somehow manage to find the clear path to joy. What amazing teachers we have the opportunity to experience life with.
We passed court! It finally happened—earlier today, our case was heard and our adoption was granted by a judge in Ethiopia. We are (at least on paper) a family. It feels both weird and amazing that far away, a document has been written, in a language I don't understand... It is sitting on a desk somewhere in Addis Ababa and it says that I am a mother and Sascha is a father...of these three awesome, beautiful children.
This is my first foray into the blogosphere. So far I’ve goofed around with colors and fonts, and made several ugly blog templates before settling on this simple one. As the momentum builds with our adoption process, this is the place where I’ll post the latest news, important dates & milestones and create a record of this wild ride for ourselves and our kids. There is already a lot to share, so I will do my best to paint the picture of the last two plus years & retrace the path to this amazing point in our lives.
