It’s been two years since Eden came home, although it feels like she’s been with us forever.  We celebrated her Gotcha Day this year by having some friends over for dinner.  We had 9 adults and 4 kids and I think everyone had fun.  Last year I made Kenyan food to celebrate in the US.  This year we celebrated in Kenya and I made hot dogs, hamburgers and french fries.  Chrissie made a beautiful cake for Eden.  (You can see it in the picture below).  Eden had her hair braided on Saturday and Chrissie even included Eden’s long pigtails in her cake decoration.

We played a slide show of all of the pictures of Eden and it was fun for us to look back over all of the things we’ve done together.  Everyone commented on how small Eden was before she came home and Eden loved seeing her baby pictures.  We made it through cake and were visiting when the power went off.  It made clean up a bit difficult, but everyone pitched in and then headed home by the lights of their cell phones.

I’m looking forward to being home and adding this years events to her Gotcha Day scrapbook!

Our lawyer wasn’t able to move the date to get our travel order (Tuesday, October 18) so we had to reschedule our visa interview.  We are now going to the embassy on October 24 at 9:30am.  Thanks for praying for the process and for a successful meeting!

The time has come to pray like you’ve never prayed before!  On Monday, October 17, we have our visa interview at 9am.  (That’s 2am for most of you, so pray hard before going to bed next Sunday night).

We are still waiting on our travel order- a critical piece of documentation- but hopefully that will be ready next week.  Our lawyer didn’t realize our visa appointment was on the 17th, so he scheduled to hear the verdict on the travel order for Oct. 18.  Please pray with us that he is able to get in to see the magistrate next week, since we can’t go to the interview without it.

Otherwise, we have all of our supporting documents gathered together.  I’ve gone over the information they are looking for countless times, and feel pretty prepared.  The big thing is that they need to know we will return to Kenya.  We obviously plan to come back, since we need to finish Eden’s adoption, so we hope that won’t be an issue.

Last time the visa process seemed easy but we’ve heard that they are more selective with the visas now and the process has changed since we applied for Eden’s two years ago.  Please pray that we will have all of our documents, that the kids will be lovely while we wait and are interviewed and that the consular officer will recognize how important it is that we ALL come home for Gracie to be born .

We will post something as soon as we know!