3 Months

It is hard to believe it but we are coming up on three months home with Zoe. I was gathering pictures to give to our Social Worker for our three months visit and thought I should probably update here as well. Quite obviously I am not very good at updating but I am going to use the "homeschooling-mom-of-four" excuse (yes, I am aware there are homeschooling moms who have many more children then I do who blog quite regularly but I am just going to ignore that). If you want more frequent updates we should probably become Facebook friends but you need to know that that is more frequent in relation to here and that, truth be told, I am only slightly better at updating there.

Our daughter turns 1!

Dutifully eating her cake...at that point she wasn't a fan of sweets.

The Birthday Girl!

Zoe is doing great. She is growing like crazy and has gained over four pounds in the 2 1/2 months she has been home. We are super excited about that as she was in the zero percentile on the (American) weight charts when she came home (I'm not certain but I think that may have put her on the charts!). She has also been hitting milestones like crazy. She was just barely sitting up when I picked her up and we have watched her learn to get to a sitting potion on her own, army crawl, regular crawl, pull herself on to her knees and now she can pull herself up to a standing position. I think she will be cruising along the furniture pretty soon here and I imagine shortly after that we'll have a walker!

Because her smile is super cute...

 

But so is her pout!

Not a fan of the cold

Attachment has been going very well. We are now done cocooning but I really think that was a huge part of it. She is now giving us unsolicited kisses and will crawl up into our laps whenever we sit down on the floor next to her. She is letting us cuddle her for longer and longer periods of time and I can now feel her sink into me when I hold her. I don't if that makes sense but that is the best way I think to describe it. She has definitely decided that we are who she wants holding her and won't let anyone else hold her...much to the dismay of my mother-in-law...but she understands how huge that is.

She is still the sweet, happy, joyful, easygoing little girl we began to see shortly after she came home but we are also starting to see she knows what she wants and has a definite opinion on things. She is super playful and her favorite games are peek-a-boo and the "This is the way the ladies ride..." game. She also loves books and being read too. A daughter after my own heart!

"How big is Zoe??? So big! (or Zo big as the boys like to say)"

 She has learned quite a few words already. She has Mama, Dada, Jaden, Ethan, and Landon (all three sound a lot like dada), no, ya, and more (which has recently evolved to more-more...because apparently a single more just wasn't more enough). We have worked on" all done" but as she never feels the need to use that one we don't know if she has it or not. She also has a lot of "phrases" that aren't so much words as they are a noise using the same inflection in her voice as we use in ours when saying it i.e. "There she is!" in peek-a-boo. She can't say the words but will uh-uh-uh in the same tone and using the same inflection we use when saying it.

All clean and sweet...

and ready for bed.

Zoe loves music and will clap and sing and do this little shoulder shrug whenever there is music playing. It is crazy similar to the way the Oromo people (of which she is one) in ET do in one of their traditional dances. She already loves shoes and will kiss the pages in her little words board book whenever we get to the page with the shoes on it. That coupled with the fact that she seems to have an affinity for sparky things (as in jewelry) already has Eric a little scared since she already has him wrapped around her little finger and he's pretty sure he can't say no to her...ever. ;) She is definitely a daddy's girl.

She also LOVES food. That girl can put food away! Her first love, though, is and has been since first coming home, her bottle. I'm pretty sure the longest 30 seconds in her life are the 30 seconds it takes to heat her bottle up in the microwave. We try and hide it when we are making her bottle because, based on her reaction to the 30 second wait, you would think we were dangling it in front of her, just out of her reach, purely to taunt her. She. Freaks. Out.

The boys have been LOVING having a little sister, Everything she does is beyond cute to them. I knew my boys would be great big brothers after watching them with their cousins but they have blown me away. They are so sweet with her and it just melts my heart. There is this side of them that I just didn't get to see a whole lot of when they were just the rough-and-tumble, crazy, loud, lets-wrestle-again, Mom-we-figured-out-how-to-literally-climb-up-the-walls, Nurmi Boys. They are still all that but there are a lot more sweet and tender moments in our house than there were before. They are constantly telling her how cute she is and looks, giving her kisses and cuddles, and playing with her. About a week ago I caught Landon (our youngest boy and the one who had a little breakdown right before I got home with Zoe) singing a song to Zoe that he had made up. I didn't catch all of it but I did hear a couple of off-key lines that went "You are the winner, You are the cutest girl in the world, You are my sweet angel and I love you". My heart melted right then and there. How much we would have missed and our family would have been lacking had we not followed God's call to adopt!

 All and all we are doing really well. We are definitely looking forward to spring (have I mentioned I am a homeschooling mom of four? Oh, I have? Okay.) and being able to be outside more. The older two boys both joined club soccer teams this year and so with two practices a week (luckily they are both on the same nights) plus a game a week with a few tournaments thrown in there we are looking to have a pretty busy spring just with that. But, they are having a great time and burning off some energy and that really is all that matters-I'll let you guess which one of the two I am referring to. ;)

Home

We have been home with Z for about three weeks now and things really couldn't be going better. According to Sister L at the transition home in ET Zoe is a very humble baby. Humble and polite she told me. I don't know how she was able to tell that in a 11 month old baby but who am I to argue? :) She definitely is a very happy, content, and sweet little girl and we feel so blessed to be her parents.

At the Guest House in ET

We are in the middle of "cocooning" right now. We haven't taken Z out other than to the doctor and we haven't had anyone over. We are trying to make all the change as "easy" as possible by trying to limit any other change (as in new people and environments) until she has gotten used to us first (that's the very short very abbreviated version). I think it has helped make her transition go amazingly well. Really the only hard thing we've had to deal with so far is her sleep. She fights all sleep but I can get her to go down for one nap, just one, without to much of a fight. But, getting her to bed at night is a huge ordeal. Most nights it takes us between 1-2 hours to get her to go to sleep. We've had a few nights that it has been 3. Based on all our research there is no way that we are going to let her cry it out as we are trying to establish ourselves as her permanent caregivers and need meeters but it is hard.  That is pretty much the whole evening. However, she is doing so well in everything else, and attachment is going so well, and with all the other issues we could be facing at this point, we'll take this. It has also been hard to be "in" so much (who knew I would ever eagerly anticipate a trip to the grocery store? But I do! I get to be child free and out of the house!) but for her sake we feel it has been totally worth it. I know it's not for everybody but as hard as it has been we really feel like it has worked for us. Eric has taken the boys out a number of times so they don't go too stir crazy and has been great about understanding my need to "get out" every now and then after he comes home from work. He even gave me an entire Saturday afternoon off! Coffee. Barns and Noble. Shopping. Bliss!

As hard as it was to be in Ethiopia without Eric I was very glad for that time once we got home. We returned home on Christmas Eve, Eric spent most of Christmas Day playing with Z, and by the 26th she had picked her favorite. It wasn't me. I was a definite second...and based on how crazy she is about him...I don't think it is even a close second. And Eric? He is totally smitten too. He got into bed last night and told me, "I never thought any of my children could wrap me around their finger but I can already tell I am in trouble with her!" She makes him melt. The baby of the family and the only girl? Yep, we're in trouble.

Her brothers have loved being big brothers to their baby sister. We spent a lot of time before Z came home talking them through what this could be like and they have handled it all like champs. Eric did ask our youngest son if he was excited for his sister to be coming home a few days before we got back and he burst into tears. Even though he was adamant up until that point that he did NOT want to be the baby of the family, I think he was a little overwhelmed at his loss of position. It seems, though, that the unknown of what it would be like when he wasn't the youngest anymore was far worse than the actual event. I think he realized pretty quickly that his life didn't change a whole lot and he was still special and loved and getting plenty of cuddles and kisses. He adores his little sister, as do his brothers, and he is constantly covering her in kisses.

Now with Z it was a different story. It took her a little bit to get used to them. At first I was a little surprised. She had spent the first 11 months of her life in an orphanage surrounded by lots of other kids and therefore noise and business. But then I realized that at the orphanage she probably didn't have 3 very loud and busy boys in her face constantly. Now, whatever you just pictured in your mind when I said constantly, triple it. "Zoe look at this! Zoe do that! Zerbert! Hahaha! ZOE! How big is Zoe? Look what I made Zoe do! Tickle! Tickle! Hi, Zoe! Peek-a-boo! Zoooooooeeeeeeeeeee!" It was a little much. But, she has either learned to love it or given up and accepted her loss of all peace, calm and personal space because now she is all about them. She gets super excited whenever they are around and my middle son is actually the only one who has gotten a kiss from her so far! With the rest of us when we ask for a kiss she just gives us her cheek!

And me? Well, I am in heaven. Zoe is just so fun and I love having a daughter! I now have a pink room in my house. Sometimes I'll go in there and just sit even when Z isn't in there. That is how happy it makes me. I am thoroughly enjoying playing "dress up" with her and all her cute little outfits and shoes and bows (girl clothes are WAY more fun than boy clothes!). I am looking forward to my future full of painting nails and doing hair and telling my daughter how completely gorgeous she looks after she puts on some ridiculous outfit that in her eyes is nothing short of amazing (I still cringe when I think back to some of the "amazing" outfits my mom let me go out in public with!). Life is good. We are blessed. And we are so beyond thankful that God called us to adoption and allowed us to become the parents of such a sweet little girl. We would have missed out on so much if we hadn't. It wasn't easy. In fact, it was hard. Really, really hard. But beyond question it was worth it. Oh so worth it. We are so blessed.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places: surely I have a delightful inheritance. ~ Psalm 16:6

Cleared Embassy!

We have been cleared to bring Zoe home! Yesterday morning at 5:30am I received the best email I have gotten all year! It was the US Embassy in Addis emailing to say that they had cleared Z's case and we could choose a date for her Visa appointment and then we could bring her home!

Eric will be staying home with the boys for this trip and I will be traveling with his mom to pick Z up. So at o' dark thirty I called her and we started looking at tickets trying to decide when it would be best to go so I could email the Embassy back about dates. Two hours later I received another email from the embassy confirming our visa appointment for December 19. My mother-in-law and I leave this Saturday and will be getting back home on...wait for it...Christmas Eve! Our daughter will be home for Christmas! What!?! That had seemed like such an impossibility that we hadn't even hoped or dreamed it. But she will.

So this year as we remember and celebrate the gift and coming of a long awaited child, the Messiah, we will also be celebrating the gift and the coming of our long awaited child! Love it!

Also, please keep us in your prayers if you think of us. We have about 30 hours of travel bringing Z home and it could just be a long 30 or it could be a LOOOOONNNNGGGG 30 hours. We are praying that she handles all the change and the flight well and that it is just regular old long. And please pray for her adjustment once we are home and her bonding and attachment. Her whole world is about to be ROCKED. And as much as we love her, want her and are so excited that we get to have her in our family she may not be feeling the same at first as EVERYTHING in her little life and everything she has ever known is about to drastically change. Will you pray for that too?

I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him. ~ 1 Samuel 1:26-28

Submitted!!!

Dear Nurmi  family :

Congratulations!  Your adoption case has been submitted to the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

At 2:45 am I heard my phone *ding* letting me know I had a new email. Hopeing to hear our case had been submitted, and knowing that because of the time difference families usually receieve those emails in the wee hours of the morning, I was hopeful as I groggily rolled over that I would find an email from the US Embassy in Addis informing us that our case had been submitted and accepted. And I was not disappointed! We're in! Yay!!! We are now in our final step before we can bring Z home!

So what are we looking at now? Well, most likely one of three things. We could be cleared after they look over our case (not likely), we could hear that they want to interview the finder or police and then clear us (most likely), or we could receive an RFE - request for evidence- if they don't feel that the evidence submitted is sufficient to prove that Z is a true orphan by the standards of US Immigration (which I am currently ignoring as a possibility because it will add quite a bit of time to our wait). Our agency has said that it has been taking between 2-6 weeks to be cleared but we are praying to be on the 2 week end of things because even 2 weeks is 2 weeks too long!

Please pray that our case will be cleared quickly as we anxiously await the news that we can bring our sweet daughter home!

Meeting Z - Part 2

Before we knew it, and way too soon, it was time for us to head back to Addis. We had been told that we would have 2 hours with our daughter and then we would have to leave her there and head back to the capitol without her, unable to see her again until the U.S. Embassy passed her case and approve her for a visa to bring her into the United States. However, on the drive to Adama we were given a little surprise; we would be able to stay 3-4 hours! But, God didn't stop there. Before we left, the orphanage director called us into her office and asked if we'd like to take our kids back to Addis with us and drop them off at the Thomas Center (the transition home she would be moved to a week or so after we passed court and Z officially became our child). Um, YES!!! That meant that we'd get to spend an extra 2-3 hours with her on the drive back. One of the most heart-breaking and yet heart-warming moments was watching the nannies say goodby to our kids. It was very evident that they LOVED our kids. What a blessing to know that while my heart ached to be holding and loving on my daughter those months and months we waited for her, the nannies were doing it for me.

Z on the ride to Addis

It had been arranged that the lawyer who represented us in Ethiopia would pick the kids up from our guest house about a half and hour after we arrived back into Addis.

Z kicks her leg up like this whenever she is drinking a bottle or just kickin' back. It is ridiculously cute!

Look at those tiny little legs. They were like doll legs!

Before we knew it, the lawyer and his wife were there to pick up the babies, and I thought my heart would break into a million pieces. But then we got the biggest and best surprise of all. We could visit our kids whenever we wanted while we were still in Addis!!! And so, the next morning before we had to arrive at court (for which all the paperwork was there and we were passed while there! Yay!), we got to spend another few hours loving on our daughter.

Z loved playing peek-a-boo with her big brother!

The best place to sleep? On a daddy's shoulder!

Trying to get a family picture but dad can't resist getting a kiss!

And so of course I had to get one (or one million!) too!

So now we wait until we get the email from the US Embassy that tells us Z's case has passed and we are cleared to bring her home. And even though I am only a couple weeks in, I can tell you this wait is TORTUROUS! The first week I was feeling pretty good and thinking "I've got this. I can do this." By the second week I can tell you that feeling was completely gone and I began trying to convince my husband that I should go back to ET now and stay with Z until she clears (that baby needs her mama!) and that he could totally work and watch the boys at the same time...have I mentioned we homeschool? And just today I may have asked my mother-in-law (who will be making this second trip with me) if she wanted to go after Thanksgiving and spend a month or so in Ethiopia. I think she thought I was joking. I wasn't.

We have Z's new birth certificate with Eric and I named as her parents and her passport is supposed to be ready on Thanksgiving Day. After that, the only step left before we can be submitted is her Visa physical (which has a ridiculous number of steps in order to complete!). I am hoping that we can be submitted on the first Tuesday in Dec. (our agency can only submit files to the Embassy on Tuesdays) and that we can be cleared a couple of weeks after that...but it could also take a couple of months so while I am hoping I am also guarding my heart.

Z's birth certificate photo

Meeting Zoe - Day 5 "The Day We Have Been Waiting For"

Okay, so my plan to do a series in the order of the days we were in Ethiopia hasn't been going very well! We have been crazy busy since we got back from ET so I am going to skip ahead to the day we got to meet our daughter. I'm afraid if I don't, she'll be home before I finally introduce her. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce...

Zoe Hawii Nurmi

She is so sweet and so tiny and oh-so-adorable. She stole our hearts in the first few moments we spent with her and are head-over-heels in love!

Zoe spent the first few months of her life in a town way out in the western part of Ethiopia called Dembidollo. Shortly before we received our referral for Zoe, she was moved to another YWAM orphanage in a town a couple hours out of Addis Ababa called Adama. And that is where we went to meet her.

The drive to Adama was beautiful but it was hard to concentrate on the view...we were on the way to meet our daughter. We made the trip with another couple who were meeting their son. We hit it off immediately and are so thankful that God planned for us to travel with them. We also traveled with one of the pastors the YWAM Adoption Ministry sponsors. He was amazing! The quality of people involved in the YWAM Adoption Ministry is incredible. 

Finally, after what seemed like an endless drive (in reality it was only 2 1/2 to 3 hours away but it felt like the time was going about as fast as it does when you are in labor...with no meds!) we got our first glimpse of the building that our daughter had called home for the last 2 months.

And then the daughter we had waited for and prayed over for 7 long years was finally in my arms and finally exactly where she belongs!

And while we were ABSOLUTELY sure about her...she wasn't so sure about us!

But, pretty soon, she was warming up to us.

One of the first things we learned about our daughter is that she doesn't want to miss any action (boy, is she in luck! If there is one thing we have it is action!). If she heard anything going on but couldn't see it she would throw her head back in order to get a better look!

We also got to meet some very important people in our daughter's life. We met Betty who was one of the first people to meet our daughter and gave her her name (Hawii (Ha wee) -which means my wish or my desire- which we are keeping as Z's middle name)

And the nannies who quite obviously have loved on her a lot and who she quite obviously loved. The YWAM nannies are AMAZING!

Z started getting a little tired

but we were still able to get a few smiles out of her.

Whether you went through hours of physical labor or months and years of paperwork/waiting labor, there is no feeling like the feeling of holding your child in your arms for the very first time.