Melissa turns 35, again.

Today was Melissa’s 35th birthday. Not really but she stopped counting around 6 years ago so do the math. I told Melissa that she better not expect to many of these exotic far away vacation destinations like she had this year. I think that comment cost me a trip to Hawaii in the future. That’s okay with me because I could go for one of those Hawaii burgers that we had on Kauai.

For some reason when we visited Sophia at the baby house today she seemed to know that we are legally her parents now. She was really happy and a joy to be with today. Tomorrow we will have to say our goodbyes when we visit. We know this is going to be a really hard thing to do and the tears will be flowing. We keep telling ourselves that she has great caretakers who have promised to take really good care of her in our absence.

We went to dinner last night with our coordinator, Oleysa and the lady who works for the Ministry of Education (sorry we don‘t know her name). She is one of the key players in the children’s welfare and spoke highly of us at court. It seems like she goes to dinner with the couples after court and we think this keeps good relations between her and Oleysa for future families. We are so glad that we invited her to dinner now. She turn out to be such a sweat lady. On our first day in country we picked her at her office before we headed to the baby house to met Sophia. When we were riding in the car with her she had a file folder. There was a passport size picture of Sophia attached to it. This was the first time I knew what our baby would look like. Since that day we have been trying to get a copy of that photo and asked dozens of times and even said we would be happy with just being able to take a close up photo of it. When we were heading to the restaurant yesterday Oleysa gave us a black and white Xerox copy of the photo. It wasn’t very good but we figured at least we would have some sort of baby photo of her. The lady seen this and took the photo off her file and gave it to us and took the copy. We are so thankful for this. The photo was taken when Sophia arrived at the baby house in December of 2008. Between July 21 and this date she was in a hospital with pneumonia. This is the only known baby photo of Sophia. We love it.

We started to pack our bags already and we will be out of her tomorrow. We are unsure what we will have for internet connection the next few days so forgive us if we don’t keep up. We’ll do our best.<



Some of Sophia's caretakers. These women are amazing.


Us at dinner with Oleysa and the "lady" from the Ministry of Education.