We're Home!!

Truthfully, we've been home for almost a week, but man, life is busy with a new baby in the house! No one told me how much more work a third child would be...I'm pretty sure that's a secret moms of three or more keep to themselves to fool unsuspecting moms of two who are contemplating expansion of the family.

I don't have more than a minute (because I'm exhausted, and sleep outweighs pretty much everything right now!) but I wanted to tell you how amazing our sweet girl is. She is doing WONDERFULLY! She's adjusting even better than we'd hoped for so far. She seems to realize already that Chad and I are special people in her world, and prefers us to everyone else...this is all we had hoped for by this point. She loves her big brothers. Griffin can make her smile and laugh all the time, and he has been an amazing helper. Cooper says he likes her, and plays with her a little, but has been mostly indifferent-it's been a big adjustment to give up being the baby!

The things we're working on right now are eating and sleeping. Given the huge changes she's undergone over the past week, she is doing great at sleeping. She wakes up anywhere from 1-5 times a night, but seems to be getting a little more consistent at only waking once or twice. Naps have been harder, and very inconsistent. We are trying not to let her cry, so we've been rocking her to sleep, but a lot of times she wakes up when we try to transfer her to the bed. In the long term, we'd love to get away from that, but for right now, we just want her to feel loved and secure. She loves her bottle, but we're having a hard time with solids. Although she ate them at the transition home, we've had trouble finding foods she likes, and a way to feed them to her. For right now we're relying mostly on the bottle, and continuing to offer solids to her. I figure as we settle in and she gets more comfortable, she'll eat them more.

Other things we've learned about our Gabbers: she LOVES bath time, HATES having her diaper and/or clothes changed, hates the car seat, loves being tickled, loves the Exersaucer, loves to be held, and is smiley pretty much all of the time (seriously), unless she is tired or hungry. We are so blessed!

She is coming HOME!!!

Finally, the words I have longed to write for 7 long months, since the moment we first saw her face! Our baby girl is coming home. We had a scary few days over the weekend when I realized that we in fact never did have a newspaper ad run, and I worried that the document we did submit was not going to be enough. And of course it was the holiday weekend, so we had an extra long time to wait! I had to take a little sleep "help" Monday night, because I knew I would be up every hour checking my e-mail for a message from the Embassy. I'm so glad I did take it though, because I slept for a solid eight hours and woke up to an e-mail bearing the much hoped for, prayed for, cried over subject line "Hennessy Family, Cleared Case"!! My birthday was the next day, and I can say without a doubt that is the best present I have ever gotten.

Our Embassy appointment is scheduled for September 19th. On top of finding out that we cleared, we got two other great pieces of news. First was that my good friend Jessica cleared as well, and her appointment is the same day. We have been chatting back and forth since January, and I am so, so excited that we get to bring our girls home together. We've even arranged to travel from DC to Addis and back together. The other piece of great news, the icing on the cake, is that because of how our embassy date fell, we were able to get in on a sale Ethiopian Airlines is having for BOGO tickets!! I can't believe it. Chad was very nervous about how much our tickets might cost for this trip, since we didn't have very much notice. He had prepped me for the idea that if they were too expensive, I'd have to go alone, which I was dreading. So now not only did we clear, but we are paying WAY less than we did less trip, and traveling with a good friend...God is in the details!

We booked our tickets this morning! We'll be in Ethiopia for 5 days, and I'm excited to see our daughter's homeland again. Even more important, I can't believe I will be holding her in my arms FOR GOOD in about 200 hours!! (I have to say, calculating that has brought on new, greater panic as I work on 4 different to do lists, plan for the boys to be taken care of while we are gone, and get us ready to leave!)

Even as we celebrate and run around like chickens with our heads cut off getting ready, my heart breaks for my friend Ashley. They keep hitting delay after delay in their efforts to clear the Embassy. They live only two hours from us, and our girls were born 6 days apart, and Ashley might be one of the sweetest people I have ever met. It's not fair. So please, if I haven't exhausted my prayer requests, would you keep the Baker family and their daughter Zoe in your prayers?