From Ashes to Africa

 From Ashes to Africa by Josh and Amy Bottomly

So my brother Erik had told me about this book a couple of months ago (by the way, he and his wife are also adopting from Ethiopia! Check out their blog too!).  I finally ordered a copy on Amazon last week, and got it in the mail a few days later.

On Thursday we travelled down to South Carolina for a photo shoot and also to visit my parents.  I thought the 7 hours on the road would be a perfect time to read this book.  I decided to read it aloud so Wes could experience it with me.  First of all, let me emphasize how much I dislike reading out loud.  I DO NOT LIKE IT.  Your mouth gets all dry, you have to cough because of the dryness, and it's simply exhausting.  But I REALLY wanted Wes to enjoy it with me, so I manned up and read aloud anyways.

As I read through the pages, I felt like I was reading our own story.  It is about a couple who experience a dreadful first year of marriage.  That was Wes and I. (Really, it was more like two years of dreadfulness, but for the first year, I didn't really realize it.)  After their first difficult year, they decided that they would work on strengthening their marriage before they had children.  Once things were healthy in their marriage they got on the "trying" track for children.  After a year of trying they were still not pregnant, and then they went on to fertility testing.  After a lot of emotional trauma, they eventually decided to adopt from Ethiopia.  

Their story of adoption is beautiful, and I read the entire book in just a few hours.  As I read through the pages, there were times when I couldn't even get words out, because I was crying.  From reading about Amy's heartache of not being able to have children, to meeting their little boy for the first time, to meeting his birth mother....it was all so overwhelming.  But as I read, my excitement grew.  I am letting myself feel more and more as each day passes.  I feel excited and I'm actually saying, "I can't wait!" when it comes to our adoption of a baby from Ethiopia.  Everything is seeming more and more real.

I highly recommend you read this book.  For many of us, it reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles.  It reminds us that no matter what we go through, God has got us.

Norwegian Nostalgia...

 *The view from the mountain where Wes proposed to me nearly 7 years ago.  Overlooking downtown Bergen, Norway.

So my mother is from Bergen, Norway.   My two brothers and I spent most of our childhood summers there visiting with our Bestemor and Bestefar (Grandmother and Grandfather in Norwegian).  I don't think I ever realized how special this was when I was a little girl.  I knew that I loved our times there, and my grandparents were probably the best you could get.  Our days were always filled with playing out in the streets (it's a VERY safe place to live), eating piles of shrimp, getting bags filled with salty, black licorice, playing cards, and visiting the fish market in downtown Bergen.  We loved it.  We grew up with Norwegian traditions, like joining hands and circling the Christmas tree as we sang Norwegian Christmas carols.  As children, my mother (we call her Mamma...not Mom....not Mama....Mamma) would read us stories from Norwegian children's books (all in Norwegian, of course).  It was all normal for us.

It was not a very diverse culture, though.  Most people have a certain image that comes to mind when they think of your typical Norwegian.  It usually involves someone rather tall, white, blond, and blue eyes (please don't say we are like the Swedish Chef!  We are not Swedish! haha).  Well, that is pretty typical, but there are also brown eyes and brown hair too (such as my grandparents....who knows how my mom turned out with blond hair???).  But as for any other mixture of ethnicities, you just didn't see it that much when I was growing up.  I have one distinct memory from my childhood when we went grocery shopping one time, and I saw a woman with dark skin, completely covered from head to toe with a burka.  She stood out to me, because you just didn't see that too often around there.  But she was not the norm, and more than likely, not Norwegian.

Fast forward about 13 years...my grandmother had just passed away, and my whole family traveled to Bergen for the funeral.  We went to a little grocery store, and the young girl at the check out counter looked Asian.  As I asked her a question, she responded in a beautifully pure, Bergen accent.  I tried not to look too surprised as she handed me my change, but on the inside I was blown away.  It blew my cultural contextualization out of the water!  In the States, we are such a melting pot of culture and race, that nothing is surprising.  But to the little girl within, whose version of Norway was filled with white faces, standing there at that check out counter left me mesmerized.  I wanted to stand there longer, and here her speak more, because I was fascinated by the words coming out of this girl's mouth.  It reminded me of the time I was in Mexico, and this little boy from a remote village asked me if there was sun where I lived.  He asked this because my skin was so pale.  It was beautifully innocent and made me smile.  And in that little grocery store, I was a little girl again, in awe of this person who didn't look Norwegian to me, but sounded Norwegian. 

I'm sure this girl's parents could have been Korean, and moved to Norway when she was quite young or before she was born, and she grew up speaking Norwegian.  But I also know that much of Scandinavia has been adopting internationally for quite some time, and it is not unlikely that this young girl was part of this.  And now Norway is becoming more than just tall, blond vikings....It is becoming it's own mixture of a beautifully diverse people.  Probably not quite to the extent of the United States, but significant none-the-less.

So perhaps this post is not really about adoption, and maybe it's just a shout-out to my Norwegian peeps across the ocean who are going through the same bumpy adoption ride.  But I was feeling a bit nostalgic today, remembering beautiful Norway and childhood summers.  Heija Norge!

Beautiful World...

Okay, so this is not an adoption update.  I was actually checking out a fellow blogger's most recent post, and saw this insanely cute trailer for a movie called, "Babies".  I LOVE IT!!!  It follows the lives of four babies from four different countries, from "first breath to first steps."  The cinematography looks breathtaking.  I am very excited to see this one.  Enjoy!


BABIES:Movie Trailer - Funny video clips are a click away

*Oh, and just because I can, here's an update.  I am working on our Ethiopia Dossier, and not too far off (a week or two) from completing it.  Yes!

Starting All Over Again...

So today I received our new instruction booklet for our Ethiopian Dossier.  Yay (she says sarcastically and unenthusiastically, with a sigh).  Yeah, I have to order new birth certificates (I had ordered extras for our Nepal dossier, but apparently those decided to disappear), get new blood tests, new references, and a new burst of energy (among other things).  I thought I might be overwhelmed by all this, but I think I'm okay.  Somehow, this dossier doesn't seem nearly as daunting as I thought it would be.  Yes, it can get a little annoying at times.  For instance, I can't tell you how flustered some notaries get when I tell them that they have to write out the entire date (i.e. March 15, 2010 instead of 3/15/10), or that I need their commission expiration to be at least 14-18 months out.  And now I'm going to have to tell everyone that everything has to be written in BLUE ink.  So now I will have to go through the explanations all over again, and inevitably, someone will write something incorrectly, or use the wrong ink color, and then I will have to have it redone.  But so goes the international adoption train.  Everyone says that this ride is really hard, but when you first start, you hope that you might be the exception to the rule.  It's kind of like when you are a freshman in college.  You feel like you know everything, but after a couple of years, you realize you know very little.  Now that we've been on this bumpy ride for a while, we realize that is is really really hard.  Not much easy about it.  But everyone says it's worth it, so I'm going to focus on that.

The picture I attached to this post makes me chuckle.  I mean, do they really have to put a picture of a guy stressed out by paperwork on the front cover of our dossier guidelines?  We already know it's stressful.  Couldn't they have just put a nice restful beach scene on there?  Something that will increase our serenity and not our stress.  Ah, the irony of it all....

I also wanted to say thank you to all of you who commented on last Friday's blog.
It was really encouraging to have people support our decision, because it was such a difficult decision to make.  I struggled with a little bit of guilt as we made the switch, but now I am truly getting more and more excited to bring little Liam or Eliana home (those are some of the names we are working on right now....well, those are names we've had for a long time...we'll see if we use them).  Thank you all for your continual love and support.  It truly means SO much.

(And for those of you who have gone private on your blogs, would you mind sending me an invitation?  I would LOVE to keep up with everyone on Nepal route also. )