One small official detail

The adoption process is so much a conglomeration of tiny little steps - fill out this big application and this small form - pay $10 for these fingerprints and $900 for this home study - run to get these five forms notarized...now here's another one to get done...

Today we got confirmation of one of those little steps completed on the international side - the Ministry of Justice has approved our commitment documents for T and B (the ones we submitted on New Year's Eve), which truly is just a small thing - it only means that they will be "held" for us for a period of six months during which time we need to get our home study completed and submit that with our dossier back to the Minister of Justice to get our official invitation to go visit the girls.

But still, one small step is still one step, and right now, our girls are being officially "held" for us. Hooray!


(The home study is well underway, timing out beautifully with Gloria's birth. We are in the waiting stage with a variety of background checks - both the basic MN ones, but also ones from all of the states that Matt's mom has lived in since she turned 18. So since we're waiting on that, there's nothing that *we* have to be doing in these early weeks with Gloria!)

Rinnah's **and Leah's** world

 "So our girls know what a nice family we are."

We have a varied collection of magnets that are either the kids' faces, or full bodies printed on magnetic paper. What a delight to come into the kitchen one afternoon and find that Rinnah (age 4.5) had arranged everyone around our photos of B and T so they would know "what a nice family we are."

It is good to be part of a family.

[Leah just saw this post, and pointed out that she and Rinnah did this together - they're both looking forward to their sisters coming home!]

some more specifics

Of the 50% increase to the number of children in our family over the next year, we have confirmed that they are all girls!

This morning at 1:11 AM, we welcomed a beautiful baby girl into our family.  She was 8 lbs., 14 oz. and 21 inches long.  The other thing that all three of these girls have in common is that we don't know for sure what their names are going to be.  For T & B who we are hoping to bring home from Bulgaria before the end of this year, we know their current names, but we are unable to share them, and we are not sure if their current names will remain their names when they come home.  We will know more about that after we visit them the first time.  As far as our newborn, we decided we were going to wait to see who it was before trying to figure out names...and now that there are 6 other kids around the house, Andrea and I have not even had a chance to talk one on one, so it might be a few days before we have a name for this little girl.

I will let Andrea write the details of how it all happened when she is up to it, but in the meantime, I will share some photos and a few words.

This is the second home birth at which Leah has been a huge helper.

 

And as such, it is only appropriate that she get to be the second one to hold our newcomer.

Owen said this time he wanted to meet the baby before Baby was "hours" old, so within about 15 minutes as soon as Andrea was comfortable having Owen in the room, he was ready.

And soon enough it was his turn.

A view of the "celebration party" that took place in our living room.  Andrea, Matt, Baby, Owen, Leah, two midwives and their apprentice.

As morning rolled around, the next round of kids came down to meet their new sister.  Reuben took a quick peek at baby and then he was more interested in snuggling with Mom and playing his iPad.

Next was Rinnah with two older supervisors giving her pointers.

Then Evania and Krassi got their turn to say hello.  As well as Dad.

Last but not least, Grandma came down and got to give her 9th grandchild a good snuggle.

Evania warmed up a bit more as the day went on.

Rinnah having another turn.

And Owen pretty excited at how he could walk with her and gently bounce her and get her to calm down.

The post with too many titles

I've had many thoughts for what to title this post.

"Room for More"

"A 50% Increase"

"New Year's Resolutions"

And there were many others that aren't worth listing.


Matt's had thoughts, too, he says. Here's one of his.

"So, what are you going to do?"




I'll start by saying I've been joking a lot lately that I'm making a New Year's Resolution (which I never do) to lose 45 pounds. ;) The next two or three weeks should show the first fruits of that as we welcome our new little Glewwe, and it should just keep going from there if this is anything like my past pregnancies. But that's rather tongue-in-cheek and rather light, and doesn't really capture everything that's going on (besides the fact that there's nothing like a sense of humor to make life a more pleasant thing! Krassi is still very tuned into that, and will laugh readily when he hears anyone else doing so, even if he's not in the same room - apparently he's quite susceptible to the contagious nature of laughter!)

On a slightly more serious note, we have started walking down the road to do something that shouldn't seem all that crazy because we've done it twice before - and yet at the same time, is something that's only going to make sense when you consider that we're heading this way under the growing confidence over the last two months that this is exactly where God is directing us to go. If all goes as we foresee, we will once again have the opportunity to increase the number of children in our family by 50% over the course of a year.

We've done this twice before - first, when we went from two to three children when Reuben was born in 2009...then a few years later we did it again when we went from four to six with the arrival of Krassi and birth of Evania within a six month period. Well, on New Year's Eve we made a different sort of "resolution" as we sent in adoption commitment documents for two girls from Krassi's birth country, which including our new little one due any time now, will bring us from six to nine.

If I keep sitting on this post and trying to figure out the best way to write it, it may not get published before our littlest family member joins us! So for the meantime, now it's out there and either Matt or I will get back to filling in other details as the next few weeks come.

For now, we're very excited to introduce you to two precious girls that will hopefully become our daughters before 2016 is over!

The first is "T" (just like with Krassi, we can't share names before they are legally our children):

And the second is "B":

 We are so excited about the changes this year will bring for our family, and will hopefully get a chance to include a few more details soon.