Update and Story

Well it's been a while since I posted, but thought I would take a few minutes to give a quick update. Time to blog has been scarce lately, but perhaps if I could learn to keep my posts shorter that would help. I have a hard time communicating anything briefly, much less something I'm as excited about as this (and now that I finished this post, I can say I didn't do well this time either. Perhaps next time).

We are wrapping up the last few portions of our paperwork and getting those off this week. We got our blood work done on Friday and are happy to report that Brandy and I are both disease free!!! We also got our home study back in the mail earlier last week, which is a huge step in the process and really gets the ball rolling on a lot of stuff. We'll be working on getting an appointment to get our 2nd set of fingerprints done with INS (again, happy to report that our first set of fingerprints showed that neither Brandy or I are criminals) and if all of this goes smoothly, we hope to be on the wait list within a couple of months. Very exciting times.

We're also excited to get to go to a dinner tomorrow night at Gladney. Their Ethiopia staff is in town, so this will be a cool chance to meet the folks who will be caring for our kiddo until we can go and pick them up. We'll also have the chance to meet more families in the program, which is always a treat.

And, as always, we're continuing to struggle through the adventure of parenting the two great kids we now have. We went on vacation a couple of weeks ago to Colorado Springs to see my brother, Matt and his wife, Kristen, to meet our new little nephew Grayson and then to hang out in the mountains. Highlight of the trip for me was hiking with Josiah. We took on Mt. Cutler together, about a mile long hike and the little guy did great. Only had to carry him for about the last quarter of the way down. We enjoyed lunch together on the top of the mountain as well as a great time of talking through Psalm 1, his daddy's favorite passage.

One of the things that came out of that time and that I was challenged with, was encouraging him to begin to have his own personal time with God every morning. Even though he can't read, he knows all of the key Bible stories, so I have been telling him each morning before he plays on the computer or watches cartoons, that he should spend some time looking at one of the Bible stories in his Bible and then talking to God about it. Wasn't sure how that was working until this morning. I asked him about it and he told me he looked at the story of Noah and the Ark. I then asked him if he talked to God, and he said yes, so I asked him what he talked to him about. He said, "I thanked God for getting all of the animals in the boat and for telling Noah to build the Ark and for bringing the storm." Proud moment for me as a daddy to watch him already digesting some of this stuff on his own. Praying he'll keep it up and be like the tree we talked about on our hike, firmly rooted by streams of water that yeilds its fruit in season and whatever he does prospers (see Psalm 1).