Update

Hello everyone! We are still alive over here, just adjusting to being new parents. I think we're getting pretty close to some sort of schedule. We are LOVING parenthood. It's AMAZING!! Jaxson is doing really well. He is attaching & bonding and we couldn't ask for anything more. Tonight he laid on me and just looked in my eyes and smiled at me for about 45 minutes. Nothing feels better than that.

I'm still playing catch up on emails and haven't had time for the blogs, but I'm trying. My days consist of feeding Jaxson, burping Jaxson, wiping Jaxson's butt, playing with Jaxson, staring at Jaxson, rocking Jaxson, bathing Jaxson, etc...etc. He consumes my day, but I love every minute of it.

I want to post about our trip soon, so stay tuned for that because it's coming. But, I'll leave you with a few pictures of my beautiful boy.

Introducing... Jaxson Kyin

Day 3 of Being a MOMMY

We are doing GREAT!! Jaxson is bonding with us really well and he is just a very happy baby. He seems to think that 4am is the time to wake up for the day, so we need to work on that but otherwise things are so good. I can't wait for you all to meet him - he is just the sweetest little baby. He loves to cuddle and stare into my eyes... oh man being a mom is the BEST!!

Kim - we are praying for you today & that court is successful!! We've seen "F" and he's SO cute!! :) I can't wait to tell you about him.

I've seen lots of your children and they are all doing great!! They are so adorable! The special mothers are awesome - they love these babies so much, just thinking of it makes me tear up. Please know that your babies are being loved SO much! We love spending time at HH. The boys LOVE Tim - I think we might be taking a few extra home! ;) ha.. just kidding... kinda.

Alright... we're off to HH for the day to love on all your children!!

He's PERFECT!!!

Today was the most amazing day of our lives. We met Jaxson today and
he is absolutely perfect. I don’t know any other words in any
dictionary that could describe the way we feel right now. Going to HH
and seeing, touching, holding, and kissing Jaxson all for the first
time was truly a dream come true. He is everything we imagined him to
be and more. When he saw us for the first time he smiled and truly
just melted our hearts. He is one of the happiest babies and always
smiling and so very content. We are overwhelmed with ALL sorts of
emotions and feel truly, truly BLESSED. What more could a NEW PROUD
Dad (and Mom) say. Dawn is loving every minute of being a mommy and
Jaxson adores her already! We can’t wait for you all to meet him –
you will fall in love just as we have. We are going to wait until we
get back to share his ADORABLE face, but we’ll leave you with this one
picture…haha their picture didn't work so you get nothing!!! :-)

From Dawn...

Hey everyone...Its Jenna blogging for Tim and Dawn...I've been out of town so I haven't blogged for them yet but here they are...Enjoy!!

We made it! It feels SO good to be here. Ethiopia is BEAUTIFUL!! We are
about 2 blocks from Jaxson right now – crazy huh?? We know that we can’t
see him until tomorrow morning and we are ok with that, but just a little
part of us wants to go and beat down that gate and scoop him up. But, we’ll
wait. J Today is Easter here and this is their biggest holiday of the year,
so lots going on here. We are going to get up and get ready and head out
for the day and come back when the other families arrive tonight. Autumn –
we had dinner with Emily last night! She’s great!! Ok… I’m off to figure
out the shower and attempt to not get ANY water in my mouth… wish me luck!!

They made it!!!

Hey everyone!!! Dawny and Timmy made it to Ethiopia safely with all their luggage! I'm still waiting to hear more about how things are...but just wanted to let everyone know that they are there and will soon be holding baby Jaxson.

Dubai... here we come!

We made it to New York!!! We are about to board the plane in just a few minutes!! We met up with Pat & Jody and had dinner and onto the 3rd plane we go. From here on out - my friend Jenna will be posting updates through us - so check back! We will get all of your comments though - so feel free to leave us some love!!

Thanks Tisha for the coffee!! :)

Dear Jaxson,

We are coming! I wanted to write you this letter so that one day you can look back and see just exactly how much you were loved before we even met you. I have so many different emotions swarming around inside of me that I have never experienced before. I don’t know how to put it all into words, but I will try. Your daddy and I have started dreaming about you many years ago… and next week we will finally be together as a family. Our journey to you was not an easy one, but worth every tear and every heartache and every bump in the road. It’s such a strange feeling to have never held you, but my arms feel empty without you in them. You definitely were the missing piece for our family. You have made my heart whole again. We know that God hand picked you to be our son and we would go to the ends of the earth for you. I lay awake at night and think of what it is going to feel like to hold you for the first time and it gives me butterflies, much like the ones I would get with your daddy when we first started dating. I can’t wait to look into your beautiful eyes, see you smile, hear your giggle, count your toes, and just hold you and know that you are my son and we are a family forever. We got a few new pictures of you today and you have grown so much, we can’t believe it. You are the most beautiful baby we have ever laid eyes on and every time I look at a picture of you, my heart melts and I can’t help but smile. People say that you are a lucky little boy to have us as parents, but your Dad and I are the ones that are blessed. There are so many things that your dad and I want to experience with you and teach you. I know I won’t be a perfect mother, I know I’m going to make mistakes – lots of them. But, one thing I know for sure is that I promise to love you and protect you always. My son, I want you to know that you are loved more than you can possibly imagine. And tonight as you sleep, feel the breeze on your skin as I’m blowing you kisses in the wind.

Love, Mommy

Help!

Did you think I was kidding when I said that my living room looked like a tornado came through? This is what it looks like when you are trying to pack. And apparently a certain someone that just so happens to live in the same house as me thinks that I'm a bad packer. So, I am now on supervisor duty.

Update Update!

Ok people, I have LOTS to update you on! I have been SO busy that I haven't had much time for blogs. We got the call on Friday with our travel dates and we just booked our flights yesterday. We leave next week Thursday... travel through 5 different airports (no that is NOT a typo) and arrive in Addis on Saturday at 11:30am. We are going to take a little extra time to see a little more of the city and experience the culture. We will then leave on Thursday night and travel back through 5 airports again and arrive in Milwaukee at 4:50pm. We can't believe we have tickets booked to pick up Jaxson! Wow. And we are so excited to see everyone when we get back, it sounds like we will have quite a bit of family and friends at the airport to welcome our new family home. :) We even have a very good friend flying in from Australia to see us walk off the plane... now that's LOVE!!

So..... we also got a little update on Jaxson on Friday too. No pictures, but we learned a little bit more about his routine. He wakes up around 6am, eats every 2-3 hrs, has 2 baths a day, lays out in the sun for about 2 1/2 hrs, likes classical music lullabies as he's being rocked to sleep, oh and he gets up 3-4 times in the night. Yikes! We will be trying to fix that part for sure. They say that he is a very content baby and sweet (well that part I already knew).

We had a busy weekend with our nieces sleeping over, good times with friends, and trying to start packing. Remember how I told you all that my house was super duper clean and everything was just perfect. Ha! Well, my livingroom looks like a tornado came through. We have donations GALORE! We have received an amazing amount of support from everyone - so thank you thank you thank you!! We started to pack up the donations tonight and weigh them and well we are going to have some problems I think. We have TOO much. We are trying to get creative and see what we can do. Otherwise we may be spending big bucks to get this over. We may have to leave some donations back and send them with other traveling families. Cass & Jess, I may be calling you.

I also had a little surprise baby shower at work today and they made a donation to HH in our name. I thought that was SO very thoughtful!! So, thank you to all of my co-workers!!

Well, the dryer just dinged. I just did my first load of baby laundry!! Woohoo!! I get to go fold his little jammies and roll his ridiculously cute little socks.

Oh Happy Day!

Ok, so let me fill you in on how yesterday went. Actually I’ll start with Monday. Monday morning was great, we were getting excited for our court date that night. Monday afternoon… not so great. I really do not know what happened, but something did and suddenly the wait was not so easy. Tuesday got even worse. Everyone and their mother was asking “have you heard anything… have you heard anything?” I know that everyone meant well, but it all got to be too much. I hit the wall and the “unknown” was enough to drive me crazy. Tuesday night was complete MELTDOWN. It was not pretty. I was doing the ugly cry – you know the cry where you can’t stop? Yeah… that one. When I get real stressed I get anxiety. So, I had a pounding headache, chest pain and no sleep. Yesterday I woke up and went to work and by 9:30am the headache hadn’t gone away and I already cried twice, so I just went home. I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up until Friday because that’s when I thought we would get the call. I got home and got right into bed. My phone was buzzing and I looked and it was Jody. I knew that she was calling to tell me some good news and it WAS! So, I hung up with her and thought ok probably Friday we’ll hear something. Little while later the phone started buzzing again, I looked and it said “Julie – AGCI”. My heart stopped and I started crying. Surely this is way too early and she is calling to tell us we didn’t pass. I let it ring a couple of times because I contemplated not answering and just having Tim call Julie back because I didn’t want to hear the bad news. I decided to just answer. Julie said “Hi Dawn…. do you have a couple of minutes….for some GREAT news!?” I said “Julie – I have ALL the time in the world!!” So, then she told me all the scoop. Wow – TOTALLY was not expecting that. Want to talk about a roller coaster of a day? I went from the lowest of low to the highest of high. I called Tim and he came home right away. There was a smile plastered on my face the rest of the day. Later that day we were invited over to a tea party hosted by my lovely nieces Bayli & Ava. We went over and there were decorations, signs, balloons, cupcakes, cookies, Tim’s favorite pie, gifts and they were wearing some cute little dresses for the occasion. They poured us some milk… oops I mean “tea”. They were so cute and loved celebrating with us. I'll post some pics later. Then we went to dinner afterwards to do some more celebrating. So, that was the happy day yesterday!

So… onto travel plans. The agency is working on getting our embassy appointments scheduled, but it looks like we will travel in 2 weeks! Of course I have a million things running through my head and adding stuff to my list hourly. I still can't believe that we've made it this far. We are ACTUALLY going now. Ahh!! Off to pack!

WE PASSED COURT!!!

And our hearts are happy!!