Ethiopia Highlight #1: Meeting Luke!

I really want to blog a little about our trip, but I'm not much of a writer, so rather than taking you through the week day by day, I'm going to talk about a few of the highlights of the week. The first and best highlight (of course!) was meeting and holding our sweet boy! I know I will not even come close to capturing the emotion of this, but I will do my best.

We arrived in Ethiopia on Sunday, and we were told to be at the orphanage on Monday afternoon to pick him up and go through our paperwork. We knew this would likely be naptime for the babies, so we weren't surprised to find Luke sleeping. Here's our first glimpse of him.

This was a pretty amazing moment for me. Because of what happened with our first referral, I couldn't shake the idea that Luke just might not be there, or that he wasn't really ours. So seeing him sleeping in his little crib was beyond wonderful. I could have stood over his crib and wept, but I didn't want to get too emotional when I couldn't even pick him up yet! We stared at him for a few minutes and then tried to distract ourselves so he could sleep a little longer. We had a couple of care packages to deliver to some other babies and lots of pictures to take for the other families with our agency who were waiting to pass court, so we did that and played with the awake babies for maybe 45 minutes. Then one of the nannies decided we shouldn't have to wait anymore and woke Luke up for us! :) Luke wasn't very happy about this though. The nanny pulled out his going home outfit and went to work getting him all spiffed up for us. Poor Luke just cried the whole time. I rubbed his head and tried to soothe him. Finally he was dressed and I got to hold him in my arms. He settled down but then my tears came! It's a moment I'll always remember.

Eric was doing all the picture taking, so we didn't get a good one of him with Luke at the orphanage, but I did let Eric hold him...a little bit. :)