I am not so good at this blogging thing, I have decided. And I have figured out why! I read too many blogs. That is the reason. The blogs I read are so awesome and impressive. They are beautiful to look at and very up to date and some are written by the most amazingly gifted women. I am intimidated. But then I remember why we started this blog and the reasons are twofold...
1) To keep our friends and family up to date on our adoption, as it happens.
2) To have something to show Zoey someday about her adoption process, since I am not a journaler.
All that being said...here is our update: We leave Thursday for Ethiopia! Matt's mom comes over here early Thursday morning to stay with our four kids. Matt and I hop in the packed up Expedition and drive over to my parent's house so they can drive us to the airport. We depart from OHare in Chicago at 1pm. We fly to Dulles in Washington DC where we catch another plane to JFK in New York. We are in New York (in the airport only, BOO) for six hours and then we get on Emirates Air to fly to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This is a 13 hour flight. We have a mandatory grounding in Dubai for 12 hours and they put us up in a hotel. Our hope right now is that we can sleep a full night and take a shower before we fly to Addis Ababa the next morning. This way we will be on Ethiopia time and hopefully won't have jet lag too bad.
After that, the only things we know for sure is that we meet Zoey on Monday! Our court date is Wednesday August 4th. We are so excited for this trip and can't wait to hold our daughter for the first time.
We will do our best to keep all this up to date, so keep reading!
Ethiopia, Here we come!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Court Date!!!
We got a court date!! Actually, we have had a court date for 8 days, and this is the first chance I am getting to blog about it. AND, this is my first time blogging with a silent house. Lily is sleeping and all three boys are swimming with cousins! Weird, we shall see how this goes....
Okay, so last Tuesday I was going through the morning routine of feeding and dressing 5 people. (For the record, I do not need to dress 10 year old Jake or 8 year old Luke, but I do need to tell them to GET dressed!!) I was getting ready for a much anticipated play date. And my man calls and calmly says...
Matt-"We got an email from Ben (our case manager) this morning"
I am very distracted so I just reply with an equally calm "Ooookay...." thinking Must not be a big email or my passionate, emotional hubby would be much more excited. Must just be a standard Ethiopia update....
Matt-"We got a court date." (Still calm)
Carissa-"Wait, WHAT!!?? Before the rainy season?!?!? SOON!?!? WHENWHENWHENWHEN?!?!?" ( I have never professed to be a calm person)
Matt-"Um....yeah. August 4th." (Incidentally, this is 2 DAYS before the courts close for the rainy season)
Carissa- *Snif* "Really? We are going to Ethiopia for real to meet Zoey?" then my practical, slightly pessimistic self showed up and asked "Okay, what can still go wrong?"
SO....here is the new situation in a nut shell. Zoey has a court date on July 19th. Our case manager will call us that morning and let us know if we passed that first court date and if our August 4th date is a for sure. We have been hearing for months that we have a 50/50 chance of passing any court date (btw, I have decided that those are the worst odds EVER). BUT, Case Manager Ben said that they had an "overwhelmingly positive experience" with the group that just went through court. In fact, most passed and those that didn't just had to fix little things! Which is beyond awesome!
Matt and I now have plane tickets to Ethiopia (through D.C., New York and Dubai) leaving on July 29th. We will meet our baby girl on August 2nd. We will go to court on August 4th and tell the judge that YES we want to adopt this baby and YES we have met her! Then we fly out of Ethiopia on August 6th and come home on the 7th (without Zoey :(, that is another trip) just in time to celebrate Luke's 9th birthday.
We are bursting with excitement over here. Our to do list seems to be getting longer and longer even though Matt and I knock things off of it every day. We are both fully vaccinated, our plane tickets are bought, we have been trained on traveling to Ethiopia (DO NOT drink the water!!!), Our pup is booked at the kennel, and we kinda know where our kids will be for 10 days! We also have a lovely packing list that makes my head swim. To top all that off, I have the "nesting instinct" that I had so strongly when I was pregnant. So, my house is all torn apart. Dumb.
One last note, Case Manager Ben said something SO COOL yesterday during our webinar (web seminar for traveling to Ethiopia) He said that he had been blessed recently to have been in Ethiopia when some of the families he had handled got to meet their children for the first time. He had prefaced this by saying "Try very hard not to have any expectations on how your child will react to you. There is no way to predict it. The reactions run anywhere from smiling and running to their new parents to losing it completely and clinging to the orphanage worker."
And then he said something awesome....
He said that he was so overwhelmed by this scene of adoptive parents meeting their children for the first time and how it represents the love our Father has for us. No matter what the reaction of these children were, the parents were there for them, to adopt them and bring them home where they belong. I just picture our Heavenly Father anxiously waiting to wrap his arms around us and bring us into his family. No matter what our reaction is. Whether we are running to him with a smile, or indifferent, or fighting him tooth and nail. God wants us in His family SO BADLY. He puts up with a lot of our "stuff" and still waits for us.....That kind of love takes my breath away!
Okay, so last Tuesday I was going through the morning routine of feeding and dressing 5 people. (For the record, I do not need to dress 10 year old Jake or 8 year old Luke, but I do need to tell them to GET dressed!!) I was getting ready for a much anticipated play date. And my man calls and calmly says...
Matt-"We got an email from Ben (our case manager) this morning"
I am very distracted so I just reply with an equally calm "Ooookay...." thinking Must not be a big email or my passionate, emotional hubby would be much more excited. Must just be a standard Ethiopia update....
Matt-"We got a court date." (Still calm)
Carissa-"Wait, WHAT!!?? Before the rainy season?!?!? SOON!?!? WHENWHENWHENWHEN?!?!?" ( I have never professed to be a calm person)
Matt-"Um....yeah. August 4th." (Incidentally, this is 2 DAYS before the courts close for the rainy season)
Carissa- *Snif* "Really? We are going to Ethiopia for real to meet Zoey?" then my practical, slightly pessimistic self showed up and asked "Okay, what can still go wrong?"
SO....here is the new situation in a nut shell. Zoey has a court date on July 19th. Our case manager will call us that morning and let us know if we passed that first court date and if our August 4th date is a for sure. We have been hearing for months that we have a 50/50 chance of passing any court date (btw, I have decided that those are the worst odds EVER). BUT, Case Manager Ben said that they had an "overwhelmingly positive experience" with the group that just went through court. In fact, most passed and those that didn't just had to fix little things! Which is beyond awesome!
Matt and I now have plane tickets to Ethiopia (through D.C., New York and Dubai) leaving on July 29th. We will meet our baby girl on August 2nd. We will go to court on August 4th and tell the judge that YES we want to adopt this baby and YES we have met her! Then we fly out of Ethiopia on August 6th and come home on the 7th (without Zoey :(, that is another trip) just in time to celebrate Luke's 9th birthday.
We are bursting with excitement over here. Our to do list seems to be getting longer and longer even though Matt and I knock things off of it every day. We are both fully vaccinated, our plane tickets are bought, we have been trained on traveling to Ethiopia (DO NOT drink the water!!!), Our pup is booked at the kennel, and we kinda know where our kids will be for 10 days! We also have a lovely packing list that makes my head swim. To top all that off, I have the "nesting instinct" that I had so strongly when I was pregnant. So, my house is all torn apart. Dumb.
One last note, Case Manager Ben said something SO COOL yesterday during our webinar (web seminar for traveling to Ethiopia) He said that he had been blessed recently to have been in Ethiopia when some of the families he had handled got to meet their children for the first time. He had prefaced this by saying "Try very hard not to have any expectations on how your child will react to you. There is no way to predict it. The reactions run anywhere from smiling and running to their new parents to losing it completely and clinging to the orphanage worker."
And then he said something awesome....
He said that he was so overwhelmed by this scene of adoptive parents meeting their children for the first time and how it represents the love our Father has for us. No matter what the reaction of these children were, the parents were there for them, to adopt them and bring them home where they belong. I just picture our Heavenly Father anxiously waiting to wrap his arms around us and bring us into his family. No matter what our reaction is. Whether we are running to him with a smile, or indifferent, or fighting him tooth and nail. God wants us in His family SO BADLY. He puts up with a lot of our "stuff" and still waits for us.....That kind of love takes my breath away!
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Our Holding Pattern
Holding Pattern (def) 1. A traffic pattern for aircraft at a specified location where they are ordered to remain until permitted to land or proceed. 2. a state or period in which no progress or change is made or planned.
YES. This is where we are. The aircraft known as The VanDyke Adoption (and subsequently, our lives) is in a definite holding pattern. My mother in law said this to us months ago while we were waiting for our referral and I just now looked it up. Wow. That does hit the nail on the head!
But, it's all good. God is already there. He is there at our court date, he knows when it will happen and the outcome. BTW, we did get submitted for a court date, last Friday June 25th. (Yeah, baby!) So, now we keep waiting and praying and requesting prayers.
It is not that we are bored and empty. Summer is a great time to wait when you are looking for distractions. In one week's time, we went to Lake Geneva to boat for the day, a wedding reception, church, a graduation party, the library, the zoo, a friends house to swim, the beach, the boat again, a park and a Fourth of July party! Whew! Nope, not much room there to mope around! But lately SO many of those things seem to have an empty place as we think "Next year, Zoey will be at this party with us!". Thoughts like those abound as we wait for our little Ethiopian doll.
Soooo....it is a holding pattern, but we get to have a lot of fun in our aircraft!
YES. This is where we are. The aircraft known as The VanDyke Adoption (and subsequently, our lives) is in a definite holding pattern. My mother in law said this to us months ago while we were waiting for our referral and I just now looked it up. Wow. That does hit the nail on the head!
But, it's all good. God is already there. He is there at our court date, he knows when it will happen and the outcome. BTW, we did get submitted for a court date, last Friday June 25th. (Yeah, baby!) So, now we keep waiting and praying and requesting prayers.
It is not that we are bored and empty. Summer is a great time to wait when you are looking for distractions. In one week's time, we went to Lake Geneva to boat for the day, a wedding reception, church, a graduation party, the library, the zoo, a friends house to swim, the beach, the boat again, a park and a Fourth of July party! Whew! Nope, not much room there to mope around! But lately SO many of those things seem to have an empty place as we think "Next year, Zoey will be at this party with us!". Thoughts like those abound as we wait for our little Ethiopian doll.
Soooo....it is a holding pattern, but we get to have a lot of fun in our aircraft!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Patience, Trust.....or EXPLODE!!!
Well, we still are not submitted for a court date yet. There was already a little snafoo that needs to be remedied before that happens. Okay. Fine. Deep breaths. I spend too much time online reading other people's blogs. Specifically Ethiopian adoption blogs. I find their referral date, then I find their court date. And THEN I add up the days and try to do the same formula with our referral date, to try to find a possible court date for us. It is a little form of personal torture that I cannot stop! I keep coming back to the same result. We could possibly travel to Ethiopia next month to meet and adopt Zoey Faith. Or we quite possibly will not get a court date until early October. And yet I still keep trying to control something, figure something out for myself.
The amazing thing about all of this is that God already knows our court date, he is already there! And yet he is here with us now, holding us as we wait with bated breath to see if we may be....MAYBE traveling.....
The amazing thing about all of this is that God already knows our court date, he is already there! And yet he is here with us now, holding us as we wait with bated breath to see if we may be....MAYBE traveling.....
Friday, June 18, 2010
Racing the Clock
This was a huge week for us. We got everything needed from both ends so that we could submit for our court date! WOOHOO!!!! This is a huge deal as we are racing the clock to get a court date before the Ethiopian rainy season starts. Ethiopian courts shut down for the rainy season and no cases are heard during the months of August and September. It could literally go either way for us right now. It has me in a bit of a panic at this point. FERVENT prayers are being lifted up that we will get a court date before August 6th, which we are told is the beginning of the court recess.
Two months doesn't sound like that long in certain respects. Two months until Jake goes to middle school orientation. WHAT!?!? That will come up quickly, I am sure. Two months until I put my little boy on the bus every day after lunch and let him go be a kindergartener all afternoon. That makes my heart ache with its nearness. But two months will absolutely drag if we need to wait until early October to go adopt Zoey. D.R.A.G. Those two months will become the most meaningless months ever because they seem completely unnecessary to me. At this point of the process there is nothing more Matt and I can do to speed this along. We can only wait for our court date and pray. AND pray.
We have said from the get go that we know that God is in charge of this adoption. That he had our daughter chosen to be ours. That he had knit her together in her mother's womb to be our child forever. Now that we have pictures of her and some information, it has made all the waiting okay. Because it was all for HER. Zoey Faith. Our second daughter, our fifth child. Matt and I look at her pictures all the time. We smile, we tear up, we notice something new in her precious face that we had not noticed before. She is already a gift and a blessing to us and we haven't even met her yet!
SO, all this to say that we are praying specific prayers to travel to Ethiopia before the court recess to meet and adopt Zoey Faith and get to bring her home in early September. Praying that prayer with faith that God could totally make this happen. But also having faith in him that if we do not make it to Ethiopia in July, that God has his purposes even if they are hidden from us.
Join us in our prayers, won't you?
Two months doesn't sound like that long in certain respects. Two months until Jake goes to middle school orientation. WHAT!?!? That will come up quickly, I am sure. Two months until I put my little boy on the bus every day after lunch and let him go be a kindergartener all afternoon. That makes my heart ache with its nearness. But two months will absolutely drag if we need to wait until early October to go adopt Zoey. D.R.A.G. Those two months will become the most meaningless months ever because they seem completely unnecessary to me. At this point of the process there is nothing more Matt and I can do to speed this along. We can only wait for our court date and pray. AND pray.
We have said from the get go that we know that God is in charge of this adoption. That he had our daughter chosen to be ours. That he had knit her together in her mother's womb to be our child forever. Now that we have pictures of her and some information, it has made all the waiting okay. Because it was all for HER. Zoey Faith. Our second daughter, our fifth child. Matt and I look at her pictures all the time. We smile, we tear up, we notice something new in her precious face that we had not noticed before. She is already a gift and a blessing to us and we haven't even met her yet!
SO, all this to say that we are praying specific prayers to travel to Ethiopia before the court recess to meet and adopt Zoey Faith and get to bring her home in early September. Praying that prayer with faith that God could totally make this happen. But also having faith in him that if we do not make it to Ethiopia in July, that God has his purposes even if they are hidden from us.
Join us in our prayers, won't you?
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Our First Blog Post!
This first blog post will be a quick one to introduce you to us. We are Matt and Carissa VanDyke. We live in Homer Glen, Illinois. We have four kids...Jake (10), Luke (8), Jonah (5) and Lily (2). We have been married for 13 years and we are starting this blog to document our adoption journey from referral on.
We are adopting our next child from Ethiopia. We got our referral last week on June 1st. Our daughter is Zoey Faith and her first birthday is Saturday, June 12th. We are so excited we can hardly stand it! Hopefully this blog will be a fun way for us to share our process.
Stay tuned for more to come....
We are adopting our next child from Ethiopia. We got our referral last week on June 1st. Our daughter is Zoey Faith and her first birthday is Saturday, June 12th. We are so excited we can hardly stand it! Hopefully this blog will be a fun way for us to share our process.
Stay tuned for more to come....
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