Happy Birthday, Stu.

Your actual name is Restu but we like to call you Stu. Restu was the first way we saw it. Since then we’ve also seen Ristu. One version we saw was Restu X.

Restu (we’ve been told) means blessing. Which is adorable because that’s what your nanny’s name is! I’ve never been able to find the meaning myself but someone told me it’s “blessing” and I’ll believe it until I go to Ethiopia for the first time and I can ask. Either way, you are a blessing.

So it was your birthday last week. Obviously we were very sad to not be with you. We’re sad about that most days. Since we found out about you we’ve wanted you to be with us all the time. Walking the dog, being with our friends and family, watch Netflix. We want you to be with us. When you do come home I’m thinking we’ll do more things that 1 year olds like- going to the park and laughing at repetitive games and taking naps and playing with colorful objects. But for now we mostly picture you doing things that we do. It’s just easier.

On your birthday our friends threw you a shower/birthday party.

I insisted on making your first birthday cake (one of the many things I will do for you that will have major significance to me and will probably not matter to you),

we played a shower game (when Tye beat me at being a parent), we made you a match game by painting wood pieces,

people wrote you messages in a book,

then we sang happy birthday and the kids blew out your candle. I think there’s a video somewhere that maybe someday you’ll want to watch.

When you’re young you won’t have a choice. I’ll make you watch it and tell you all about how we loved you and celebrated you before we met you. That we have amazing friends who were so excited to meet you they would sing “happy birthday” to you when you weren’t even there. That I redecorated the cake three times to try to make it perfect for a tiny stranger who will never see it in person (you will get to eat some of it because the mini part from the top is in our freezer and I think when you come home I’ll let you do whatever you want and eat all the sugar we have in the house because you’re so cute).

When you’re older, you can choose how often you want to read these few blog posts, look through our hundreds of emails in the folder labeled “Adoption”, hear the story of how we found you and traveled to meet you and bring you home, and watch your birthday video (Ashley, does that exist or no?? It’s just that I keep referencing it and maybe the video is irrelevant . . .). Maybe you won’t care much about it, but maybe it will help the tiniest bit for you to know that you are valued and wanted. We know we can’t do anything about your first few months on earth but we can give you a family now. Adopted or biological, young or old, we all need one.

I can’t wait for you to join our family and I can’t wait for you to meet everyone here who has been waiting for you! We will learn to be your parents no matter what you go through or how you handle what you’ve been dealt because we already love you more than we thought possible. And we won’t stop.

Happy birthday, Stu. Next year will be epic.

Oh and you get Roger’s room. He’s already moved out. He’s mad but he’ll get over it.

PS we’re finishing the PAIR process soon and are hoping for our first court date in Ethiopia to happen in the next couple of months. WE’RE COMING FOR YOU LITTLE MAN!!!!

PPS I made this for you with some of your party decorations.

And we’re pretty sure you have everything else you need so just . . . anytime now.

March Madness Begins : Click, click, play!

Family and Friends,

As you know, we are in the process of adopting a child(ren) from Ethiopia. At this point we are in the home study process, which we expect will be finished later this spring. After that, we complete more paperwork, wait for our referral, meet our child(ren) and come home. In the meantime, we are saving and raising money to cover the costs of the adoption (social worker, agency, court, paperwork, travel, etc). The total cost will be around $30,000 and we will need all the help we can get! We hope you can participate in our March Madness fundraiser. Maybe you’ll even win some money!

Here is what you can do to help

1.  Join our Tournament on Yahoo Sports

• Go to http://y.ahoo.it/arU6dbXr
• This will take you to Eckert Adoption Pool
• Click “Sign In” (If you don’t have a Yahoo! account you can sign in using your Facebook or Google account)
• Create a new bracket
• Title your bracket
• Once your first bracket is saved there will be an option for you to create more brackets (up to 10)

2.  Donate to our Adoption via PayPal

• Go to www.paypal.com
• Click “Send Money”
• Enter the donation amount
• Send donations to eckertadoption@gmail.com
• There is a $0.59 fee to use a credit/debit card, no fee if you have a PayPal account

 3. Suggested donations are:

• $10 for 1 bracket
• $20 for 2
• $25 for 3
• $30 for 4
• $35 for 5

3.  Get crazy and watch some basketball!

• 1st place will win 35% of the money raised up to $300
• 2nd place will win 15% of the money raised up to $100

Brackets are due Thursday, March 20th 9am EST

Pass the info on in case some people you know are feeling generous. Thank you for your participation in this fundraiser and for your support in our adoption! If you have any questions, just ask me or Tye or email eckertadoption@gmail.com

Go Buckeyes!

(please don’t let our Buckeyes loyalty deter you from participating)

Prayers for the Orphans

We received an email last week from our adoption agency with some news about foreign adoption in Ethiopia. Without knowing much about who wrote the article or how it all started, I’ll give you the basics with some quotes:

“The House of Peoples’ Representatives and the Ministry of Women, Children and Youth urged stakeholders and the public to undertake integrated work to totally stop adoption of Ethiopian children by foreign families.

In a press conference, House Speaker Abadula Gemeda and the Minister Zenebu Tadesse told journalists that stakeholders should work closely to end foreign adoption.

Abadula urged the importance to give priority to use local means to raise orphaned children rather than giving them away to foreign families.

He suggested the importance to establish and support local NGOs which raise orphaned children with the close collaboration of the public.

Our agency told us about this as a heads up. Ethiopian adoptions are not closing today, but by the sounds of it people are pretty anxious to make it happen.

Our reaction:

Terrific!

Communities should be taking care of orphans. Countries should have facilities and programs in place that will allow orphaned children to not only survive, but to thrive.  We think facilities and programs that will allow children to feel loved as a family will love them and cared for as a family would care for them, to grow up in the country and culture in which they were born, is the best option.

Until these things can be established, we will pray for the children who are waiting. Waiting for parents who love them, for a safe place to grow and develop, to have dreams and live them out, to know that they are valued and have a purpose on this earth. We know the authorities making these decisions have the orphans in their best interest. Therefore, we pray foreign adoptions do not close until there is a plan for orphan care.

We aren’t worried about what this will mean for us. We know God has plans for us to adopt some child, somewhere. If He didn’t, this wouldn’t be on our hearts. Whether the child comes from Ethiopia, we don’t know.

We will continue the adoption process knowing one day we will have the kid in our home who was waiting for us as we were waiting for them.

Our update on the process:

First meeting with our social worker for the home study is this week!

Meanwhile, here is a super cute picture of Uncle Roger with his new puppy cousin, Cauliflower. Jan and I like to call her La Fleur.

Domestic v. Internacionale

This is where you start.

When you decide to adopt and are trying to get the process going, this is what you have to decide first. By the way, I’ll be wrong about a lot of statements like this because I am NOT an expert on adoption. Tye is really smart, but he isn’t either. Not yet.

When we were faced with this question, our response was “which kid needs a family most?”

That’s like asking which baby penguin is cuter?

Which cake is more delicious?

Or which newfie is more slobbery? Except that answer is Uncle Roger.

It’s all the same. Every child needs a home. It doesn’t matter where they are now, how old they are, what they look like. Every child needs a home. My friend Sara was instrumental in my realization of this. By “my realization” I mean she flat out told me that and then I agreed.

When you realize every kid needs someone to love them, I think it makes the decision more difficult. Now we’re back to the beginning. We don’t have anything to base our decision on. One day I prayed I would come home and find a baby on our doorstep (I still do sometimes). That would make these decisions so easy!

So now where to start? We’re facts people so we started here. Wikipedia.

This website called American Adoptions really does a great job of outlining domestic versus international adoptions.

With domestic adoption you have to think about relationships with the child’s birth-mother, your involvement in the pregnancy, open versus closed adoption, the age of the child, will you be involved in foster care or potentially adoption from a foster care program, etc.

With international adoption you have to think about your ability to travel, the availability (usually lack of availability) of a child’s medical records, re-adoption in the US, specific program requirements, etc.

And with both you have to think about waiting for paperwork and signatures, the possibility of your child spending some of his/her life being raised by other people, the difficulty the child may have adjusting into your home, the difficulty you may have adjusting to being a parent, and the possibility of something changing along the way and delaying the process.

Scary!

Me too, kid. Me too.

We have decided to adopt internationally. We based that decision on many things; the hold on domestic adoptions from the agency we initially were working with, the availability of foster care in the United States as well as services provided to underprivileged in our country, and the general assumption that our country is more wealthy than others. We felt that if we have the option to adopt internationally we should take it. Other families may not be able to do the traveling involved with international adoptions and other families may choose to be foster families for domestic children. Which, by the way, is awesome. Again, EVERY child needs a family. Temporary included.

We decided on international adoption because we think that is best for us. It is not the only way or the better way or the right way. Again, every child needs a home.

After that decision is made, the question of which country is next.

It’s super overwhelming. There are so many countries. 196 of them. Well, that is the “best” answer, apparently no one knows for sure (why don’t they know that?!).

Which country did we pick? I’ll tell you next time.

And Counting

This is the story of how we decided to adopt.

Adoption had been in the back of my mind as soon as I started to listen to friends describe delivering a baby. We all know there are many many children who do not have a home and what a great alternative to child birth!

When the time came to talk together about how to start a family, adoption was an option for both of us. We have good friends who were blazing the trail and able to answer many of our questions. There was an Adoption Sunday at our church where 5 couples who have or are in the process of adopting told their stories. After that day we felt a strong pull to consider adoption for our family. In an effort to not act spontaneously or act for the wrong reasons, we decided we wouldn’t talk about it for 4 months- not until after Christmas.

In the meantime we both prayed and did some research. When we came back to talk about what we thought, the answer was obvious and simple.

Why not? Why wouldn’t we bring a child into our home? Why wouldn’t we start our family by adopting a child, the same way we are adopted by Christ? Why not? We know we want to have kids, why not choose adoption to grow our family?

There are always reasons to doubt something like this can be possible. But really, compared to many things that happen every day, this is VERY possible.

We don’t have an awesome story about why we are choosing to adopt. It’s super normal and doesn’t need a flashy explanation. We hope that sharing this journey will make adoption more normal/common/usual/ordinary and even popular.

Let’s put orphanages out of business! In a good way.

Here’s a video of a really cool family that has inspired us.

I Like Adoption