Fun With Cousins

Javen has gotten to spend lots of time with his five cousins over the last few weeks - it is so fun having all of his cousins living within a couple of hours of us.

He loves playing with older kids (especially boys!), and his rough and tough older cousins Hayden and Logan are so sweet to play with him and share their toys.




Overcome with excitement at meeting his newest cousin Piper for the first time last month


Playing with his sweet little cousin Finley



We love our cousins - and are so excited to have two more on the way before the end of the year! Scott's sister Becky is due with a little girl in August, and my sister-in-law Paige is due at the end of December. We look forward to making many more memories with cousins in the years to come!

Updates

A few quick family updates . . .

Javen is doing great. He is into EVERYTHING these days now that he is mobile and is keeping us on our toes - and constantly laughing - with his curiosity and his attempts to mimic everything we do.


Like unloading the dishwasher . . .


Climbing the stairs . . .



Flushing the potty (he is not using it yet, though!) . . .


Reorganizing (or rather "disorganizing") my kitchen cabinets . . .


And just being silly (what you see in the following pictures is NOT something he has seen us do!)





Other Updates:

Adoption - no updates, just waiting to hear back from the USCIS (it's taking a long time!), at which point we are ready to send our paperwork to Tallahassee . . . and then to Washington D.C., and then to Rwanda. We are trying to be patient with all the delays we have had and are still hoping to have our dossier in Rwanda by the end of the summer.

Foster baby - We thought our home study was submitted 4 weeks ago, but we just learned from our social worker this week that there has been a problem with their new online paperwork submission process and that our paperwork didn't go through and had to be re-submitted (hard copies submitted by hand this time!) yesterday. So now we know why we haven't heard anything yet - it's because our "you will have a baby within 2-3 weeks" started yesterday instead of 4 weeks ago. We are glad for an update and are confident that God already knows which child he will place in our home and will time everything accordingly!

Water Baby

Despite the heat of a Florida summer, this has always been my favorite part of the year. I think it is Javen's favorite, too - we have found lots of fun ways and places to cool off!

Collecting School Supplies for Orphans in Kenya

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. ~James 1:27


Tumaini Miles of Smiles is a school and orphanage in a very rural and extremely impoverished part of Kenya. We learned about Tumaini through a from college friend who spent several months volunteering and teaching there in 2008. After hearing about this great ministry/school/orphanage, Scott and I became supporters of this orphanage and began to sponsor Clifford, a little boy there who is now 9 years old.

This cute little guy is Clifford.


This past October, Rose Bugusu, the amazing woman whose vision and faithfulness started Tumaini several years ago, was in the United States along with the oldest orphan from her orphanage, 12-year-old Vivian. During their stay in Tampa, we had the privilege and honor of having Rose and Vivian stay in our home.
Her wisdom in spiritual and earthly matters and her love for the Lord are so evident in every conversation, and I wish I had recorded on video the story of her vision and struggles and God’s provision and faithfulness as her vision became a reality. Through Tumaini Miles of Smiles, Rose literally gives orphans physical life through meeting their basic needs for protection, shelter, food, and medical attention while also pointing them toward Eternal Life by teaching them how much Jesus loves them. In a country with so much darkness and hopelessness, Rose is raising up a little army of children who are receiving an excellent education, who love God and desire to serve Him, and who will have the opportunity to be bringers of Light and agents of change in their country.

So anyway . . . why am I going on and on about Rose and Tumaini?

Well, there is a group going over there to serve this summer (I wish I was saying that I was going, but I’m not), and we are collecting school supplies for them to take for the children - pencils, paper, markers, crayons, rulers, etc. It may not sound like much to send a few school supplies, but such items are rare in such an impoverished and rural part of the world, and these small things we take for granted like markers and paper are priceless treasures to these children and their teachers.

If you or your church group, school group, friend group, etc. would like to collect and/or contribute school supplies for the Tumaini children, please leave a comment or get in touch with me via phone or e-mail, and I will arrange a time to pick them up from you! We will be collecting these items until July 1st.

This is Vivian. She is at the head of her class and wants to be a doctor.

If you are interested in learning more about other ways to support Rose in caring for Clifford, Vivian, and the other children at Tumaini, you can get in touch with me or look at the Tumaini website.

The staff and children of Tumaini Miles of Smiles

Since our adoption will require us to spend about 7-10 days in Kenya (the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda doesn’t provide the visas we need to bring our kids home), we will hopefully get to see Rose again and meet our little Clifford next year!!!

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!