HE IS OURS!

COURT APPROVED!!!!!

 This was my favorite email that was sent to me from our caseworker. So grateful for our agency and the courts for working so hard to clear up the issue with our documents.

So with no further ado, may I proudly introduce to the world the newest member of the Michael family, 

MOSES BAYISA MICHAEL.

Moses is 13 months old and is such a sweet and happy baby. We will keep his Ethiopian name, Bayisa, as his middle name, and give him the name Moses when he comes home to us. I can't wait for our friends and family to finally meet him in person. He has no clue how loved he already is! It feels AMAZING to be a momma to 3 kids finally! We still have a lot to do in preparing for our second trip and preparing for Moses to come home!

So, what is the next step in our adoption journey?

Our agency in Ethiopia will now obtain Moses' birth certificate and passport and start applying for all of the paperwork needed for our Embassy appointment that we will attend during our second trip. The US Embassy will do another round of medicals on him and look over our HUGE stack of paperwork. Once they look over that they will notify us that we are clear to travel and attend our Embassy appointment to obtain his visa to come home! This process currently has been taking around 6-8 weeks. Currently, I am up to my ears in paperwork (yes, again) and trying to do everything I can in my power to make the rest of our process go as fast as possible. We are still in a very important (and stressful) stage of the process, and are praying for everything to go smoothly and in a timely manner.

To all of our friends and family, we still need your support!

-Please pray for the agency in Ethiopia getting together all of our documents on our behalf. Pray that all the documents are filled out correctly and in a timely manner.
-Pray that the US Embassy looks over our documents and everything is approved without any hold-ups along the way.
-Pray for our family. Pray that we get through this wait time peacefully and joyfully. Pray that God continues to watch over us during this INCREDIBLY hard time of transition of being thousands of miles away from our son and that we don't go crazy with our busy schedule for the next 2 months.
-Pray for my health. The past month I have been having some health issues, whichhave been causing me pain and lots of doctor visits. Pray for my healing.
-Pray for baby Moses. Pray that he stays healthy and that he remembers us from our last visit with him.
-Pray over our finances and God's provision. We know that Satan is working hard right now, and he doesn't want to see God's will come into fruition. He can try to tie up our finances by breaking our washing machines, cars, and giving us some health problems to pay for, but HE DOESN'T WIN IN THE END!

ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU TO SUPPORT OUR JOURNEY....

Please go and visit a fellow adoptive momma's online store and buy some really cool jewelry! 45% of the proceeds for the month of June will go directly to our travel/legal expenses for our next Ethiopia trip. Isn't that cool, she picked our family to partner with for the month of June. God is good!! Share the website with your friends, family, Facebook, coworkers, whoever you pass by.

The blog post is: http://www.hannahjamesblog.com/2012/06/meet-michael-family.html. You will find an icon for her store on the right side of this blog post.

Can't find it???.......You can also just click here. Or type in http://hannahjames.storenvy.com/

Where We Are Now...

We have received a court update over the weekend on our status. Unfortunately, the courts had to close down a couple of days last week, postponing our date, yet again. A lot of people have been asking about when we get to travel again to go and pick up our son. The answer is, until we get court approval It is still unknown. We are basically at a stand still until court approval. Once we get court approval, the wait between court approval to second travel for Embassy has been about 6-8 weeks recently. Adoption is one of those things that the timing and the process is constantly changing, so you have to just roll with the punches. We are now readjourned for June 11. Please join with us in praying for our new court date, and if God's will, we get court clearance to call our son OURS! Pray for our judge that she looks at our case and she is satisfied with all of our documents and that the courts stay open and on schedule. pray for our agency in Ethiopia as they will be standing in on our behalf. Also, if you could please pray for Jordan and I right now and our hearts. We knew that this wait was going to be hard. I didn't know it was going to be to this degree. I am a big time reader, and have read SO many book about adoption and the process to educate myself about what to expect, but it doesn't matter how much you read, nothing can prepare you for the real thing. I know that one day this will all pass and he will be home, but I just wish my head could tell my heart. The gravity of everything is really setting in, and to tell you simply, I extremely miss my little boy and I am very sad and grieving over our separation right now. I feel like I live everyday right now, waking up and first thing checking my phone or email to hear news from our agency, and when I don't hear anything, I want to just crawl back in bed and wake up the next day to check again. Every day that passes is another day that I cant be with him and its another day that we are missing out on attaching and bonding with him. We are trying really hard to go back to normal life in Austin, but nothing is the same. I find myself looking through a different perspective now, and the transition between Ethiopia back to the US has been emotionally overwhelming for me, whether it is going grocery shopping or having a conversation. Part of me knows that eventually I will get use to everything again, but there is another part of me that doesn't want to. I don't want to get used to how complex we make our lives and how many stipulations we put on just simply loving each other. Something that I have noticed since my trip is how much personal cost and gain weighs in when it comes to our relationships with one another. We can't just simply love. Love is not complex, love doesn't have boundaries, love doesn't come with disclaimers. We are so quick to weigh in on if it's worth it to love someone as opposed to just jumping right in and loving your neighbor, no questions asked. That is the gospel, that is God, that is Jesus! One of the ways God used Ethiopia to teach me is by exposing the guilt in my own heart of how I have made loving others less about others and more about myself. One of my favorite quotes as a believer is, "we were called to love, not to be loved." Sometimes it is so much more satisfying in the here and now, to love someone and be loved in return, but I say there is so much more of a lasting joy to love somebody without caring what you will get out of it or how much you sacrifice from it. I pray that my life will reflect that for His glory, because this is what He does for me. There are no stipulations or disclaimers about His love. And isnt that the point, believers, to love like Jesus? I am at a place, right now, where I am trying to seek understanding about everything, and even though I don't feel it as strongly right now, I still know and believe that God is sovereign, this is part of our story, and He knows when and how our journey ends. He is faithful through and through and He will carry us through this difficult time. Praise God, even when we can't see it or it is very dim, his love and faithfulness is always there and it never changes based on the circumstances we are in. Thank you so much for your love and encouragement since we have been back. It is helping us get through this tough time of waiting. Please keep praying with us! "You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever." Psalm 30:11-12