The Final Trip

Like I said before, we made it to the plane and everything went as planned. We had lots of time in the planes and airport to think about everything that had happened in the past 2 years. I remembered the day that we went with my parents to Amarillo to the seminar about Little Miracles. I thought about how sick I had been the day before the seminar and Jason tried to get us to cancel the trip. Evidently I had some kind of stomach bug, but between me and my parents, we encouraged Jason and convinced him that we needed to go. That is where we met Joanna. We thought Joanna, the lady assigned to help us through our adoption, was just perfect. We loved her and thought everything was going great. After a few months she quit returning emails and phone calls. Next thing we knew her mother was very ill and she was going to be out of the office for an extended amount of time. During this time our homestudy was finished and we had read it and approved it for submission. We thought that Joanna had submitted it to the INS and we just waited and waited and waited for an appointment to get our fingerprints done at the Department of Homeland Security. We finally found out that Joanna was moving to Illinois, but she would have an office and continue handling our adoption. We were fine with that because we really liked her. Another month or two went by and I started sending emails to her with a CC to Lori because we weren't getting any responses from Joanna. After a month or so more went by, Lori called to see how our process was going. It was then that we found out that not only was Joanna not going to work for them anymore, but she never sent our homestudy to INS so that is why we never received an appointment for fingerprints. This put us behind about 5 months. At first we were very angry, but we believe that God had it planned that way or we probably wouldn't have ended up with our Karter! Fingerprints were finally done in December and just a month later is when I received the call from Lori that a little boy in Guatemala named Abner Josue Velasquez Alvarado was available for us to adopt and we should go meet him! See, this process had started in January of 2005 and it was already January of 2006 before we had a little boy referred to us. At first we believed that we could be home with a baby in less than a year and it was already over a year before all of the foreign government mess got started! (When I say mess, that is exactly what it was!) You see, if the process had gone as planned, Karter would not have been born when we supposed to bring a baby home. The next 12 months was full of waiting and heartache, but also growth. I won't go into detail about it now because it is long, but I will eventually!

By the way, here is our first family picture taken February 2006 when we first held our baby boy! If I remember correctly, Karter was just 3 weeks old and it was even Jason's birthday! What a great gift!! The other picture is one taken of us this past fall as we visited Washington DC.