Our New Baby Niece Has Arrived!

Scott's sister Cindy and her husband Jason had their baby girl, Piper Zoey Zapp, last week. We went to Orlando the day after she was born to see them (well, sorry Jason and Cindy, but it was mostly to see Piper:). As you can see from the pictures, our little niece is absolutely precious and is one of the most beautiful babies we've ever seen! Welcome to the world, sweet Piper! We love you!

Adoption and Family Udate

The adoption paperwork is taking much longer than anticipated, and things on the Rwandan side of adoptions are also starting to take more time. Thus, our time frame is getting longer and longer, and at this point, we are anticipating/hoping to bring our sons home some time in the middle of next year. We hope to have our dossier in Rwanda by the end of the summer, and then we begin the wait that will most likely last somewhere between 9-12 months until we can bring our boys home.

Something we haven’t shared with many people yet is that over the past few months we have been going through the process and training to become licensed foster parents.

It became clear to both of us at different times that in a city with thousands of children and babies needing a loving home and a safe place to lay their heads, this next year does not need to be and should not be one in which we sit around idly waiting for our Rwandan babies to come fill our empty room, that we can and ought to allow it to be filled now. We finished 10 weeks of training classes a couple weeks ago and were expecting the remainder of the licensing work to take a couple more months, but our process has gone unusually fast (mostly because we had already gone through many of the steps required for fostering during our adoption home study), and we just learned that we should be officially licensed and have a baby placed in our home within the next two to three weeks.

Psalm 68:6 ~ God places the lonely in families.
Crib #2 waiting to be filled

Oops We Did It

Before having a baby, I always swore I would never be one of those parents who let their babies sleep in bed with them. Parenthood is humbling . . . there are plenty of times when, as my friend Lindsey puts it, certain things go from the "never going to do that" list to the "oops I did it" list.

Javen slept with us quite a bit in the early months when he was waking up several times a night to nurse, then for a few more months he just slept with us from about 5am-7am every morning. There is nothing sweeter than having your little one snuggling between you and cuddling up against you throughout the night, and we are both so glad that we took that one off the "never going to do that" list, as we would have missed out on some of our sweetest and most treasured family moments and memories.

However . . . we learned last week that sleeping with a baby doesn't work quite as well as they get older. We were in a new place and Javen was having a hard time sleeping in his pack 'n' play in a room that was not very dark, so we decided that we would go ahead and let him spend the night with us in our bed. Sure enough, he fell asleep quickly, but we soon discovered that sleeping with our little son is no longer as comfortable as it once was and that Javen has become quite an active little sleeper . . .


Sad to say it, but I think Javen's days of sleeping with Mommy and Daddy are over!