In Our Arms at Last

We had several flight delays but made it to our flights just in time. We ended up arriving in Addis Ababa at around 9:30 and then waiting in immigration for an hour. Two other families were on flights that landed after ours so we waited an additional 30 minutes for them to get through customs and then took the trip to the hotel.

The hotel is very nice and comfortable and we got to bed around 1:30 in the morning exhausted from our trip.















Today was a very long day beginning at 5 am when the Muslim call to prayer woke us from our 4 hour slumber. John rolled over and went back to sleep, I could not so I just layed there thinking about meeting our baby boy. We went to breakfast and then just killed time in the hotel room until we were ready to eat lunch and meet Almaz the orphanage director to go over paperwork. The paperwork took almost three hours and then we were off to the orphanage.




We opted to walk instead of have the van come pick us back up so we got to see some of the surrounding city on our way.

When we arrived at the orphanage we got to meet him right away. He was very happy and had no problem coming to us. He has so much hair and is adorable. His special mothers kept stealing him back from us to make him giggle and cuddle him. We could tell they were very attached to him and will miss having him as one of the babies in the boys room. The children are taken such good care of and loved on at Hannah's Hope. Almaz knows them all by name and the special mothers love on each child and know their likes and dislikes. You can tell from the minute that you walk in that they are taken good care of.













We were at the orphanage for about an hour and then got in the van to ride back to the hotel. This is when our little man looked around and started screaming. Big crocodile tears streamed down his face as he looked around at his unfamiliar surroundings. We got back to the hotel and tried every trick we knew to get him to stop crying. He cried for about an hour then John finally got him to fall asleep. He slept for 45 minutes and was up for a half hour playing, took a bottle and fell back to sleep pretty easily. He is sleeping very soundly now so we will see how the rest of the night goes.







He is everything we imaged and more! Gotta go get some sleep! Long day at the Embassy tomorrow.......

(The internet works in our room so we are able to email and everything seems to work except for the blog site..Alisa is updating this for me through emails I send her....Thanks Alisa!)