Or hopefully more than halfway…we will have to wait and see!

But we finally received some good news today regarding our case: the judge has passed us through our first round of approvals! FINALLY!!! HOORAY!!! We are so thankful! It only took 5 days longer than it was supposed to. :)

Now our case goes to another Defender of Minors for a second approval, and then back to the judge for final approval. Best of all, our lawyer says that she expects our case will be finalized sometime next week. It’s just an educated guess, of course – not a definite – but still! We are hopeful and thankful.

There is other news, too – although it’s not such great news, at least as far as we’re concerned. We have decided that Shaun and Molly will return home to Austin this Sunday, Feb 26, and Katie will stay behind with Luisa to complete the adoption. Shaun’s five weeks of vacation will be over as of this week, and so he needs to get back to work on Monday. And Molly will be very happy to get back to her routines, her friends, her school, and some semblance of normalcy.

This has not been an easy decision – it will be very hard to be separated without knowing what the end date will be, and there is a sadness that we won’t be able to complete this long journey together. But we know it’s for the best, and now that there is some forward progress with our case, we are hopeful that it won’t be more than a week to 10 days before Katie and Luisa can come home, too.

Thanks for all your prayers and words of encouragement! We are choosing to trust God, and believing that He is good and that He will complete the work He has begun here.

So yesterday we had our first “big” outing. We rode with two other families 45 minutes out of town to Parque Jaime Duque. We weren’t exactly sure what to expect (mainly because the website is in Spanish), but I don’t think we could’ve been prepared for it anyways.

We had a great time aside from Katie getting a little carsick on the ride there. Have a look at the craziness that ensued below.

The view outside our hotel room window

OK, tonight we got a little update from our agency rep here regarding our case.  She called after dinner and said that there was no specific news for us, but that our court had just this week fired its secretary and hired a new one, because the old one was “slow and disorganized”.  And she said that this is why there has been no news about our case.  Sigh… :)

So, she said our lawyer was going to find out a specific update about our case by the end of the week and let us know the current status of things.  There is a possibility that this process could still take weeks, especially if there is a backlog due to an inefficient secretary, but there is also every possibility that the judge could decide to expedite our case, if s/he so desires.  Please pray for our judge to decide to make it quick!!!

Thanks, all!  We love you!

I know it’s been awhile since we updated everyone, so I thought I’d write a little post this evening.  First of all, thank you so much for praying for us!  We are grateful.

A few specifics regarding the things we asked you to pray about:

• Luisa’s grieving process seems to have ended, at least for now, and she is bonding well with all of us!  She calls me “mama” now, and she loves playing silly games with her sister – they laugh a lot.  She seems equally attached to both Shaun and I.  She also loves to give kisses to us and charm us with her smiles and giggles.  We are thankful for this!  We love her so much and she seems to be a perfect fit with our family.

• Molly seems to be doing a little better, although there are still ups and downs.  Poor thing – she has not only had to adjust to having a new sister, but she is away from her school, away from her friends, her home, her language, her foods – it’s a lot to ask of a four year old.  She is still under-rested, too.  Please continue to pray for her.

• Luisa’s physical therapy here is done – they gave us a home plan that we are using, and that will suffice until we get home and start physical therapy in Austin (as well as speech therapy).

Other updates:

I (Katie) was sick for about a week with a stomach bug – that knocked me out for awhile, but thankfully it is over now.  I was on an antibiotic because the doctor I saw said it wasn’t just a virus.  Now I have a cough that won’t seem to go away, though I suspect it may be related to the air pollution.  Between these illnesses and the 4-5 days it took to adjust to the altitude, I have not really felt very good the whole time I’ve been here – which has made being here even harder.  You know when you’re sick, you just want to be at your own home in your own bed.

Today marks three weeks in Bogotá.  That means it’s the half-way point for the average length of stay here for an adopting family.  We are in Court 22 – but because the judges all switch courts after the New Year, our representative didn’t know anything about the judge there (whether s/he is fast, slow, etc).  But you can please pray for our case in Court 22! :)  We are still hoping to have a 5 week max stay here, but that would mean our case would have to be finalized sometime during this coming week.

We are starting to go a little stir-crazy.  Just waiting and not knowing when it will end is pretty challenging.  We joke with the other families at the hotel that life here is like the movie Groundhog Day – you just wake up and repeat the same day, everyday, over and over again.  We eat breakfast around 8, we clean up, we go out for a walk and some playground time, we eat lunch at 12:30, we have nap/quiet time, then we have more time to kill (another walk if it’s not raining, or playtime and/or a movie if it is) until dinner at 6:30 , and then we put the girls to bed by 8.   Lather, rinse, repeat.  :)

Well, there’s not much else to say except that we miss all of you very much!  We can’t wait to be home again, but it’s quite possible that it could still be another 3 weeks, or even longer (!).  So please pray for us to be content here and wait well, as long as we are asked to wait.

Also, thank you to all of you that have purchased Valentines!!!!!  It has been so very helpful and we are very grateful.  :)

Oh yes it is. :)

You may notice a new tab up at the top of this page: “Valentines”. Last year we designed and sold Valentines as PDF downloads to help raise money for our adoption. Now we’re doing it again!

You might be thinking: “I thought they were all done fundraising!” Well, we thought so, too.

It turns out that we didn’t raise quite enough money after all. We were just going off of estimates and suggested price ranges, and we hoped for the best. But some things have already cost quite a bit more than we budgeted. For example, our attorney fee was almost $1000 more than we anticipated. And out hotel is about $30 more per night than we thought it would be. That adds up over the course of 4-8 weeks.

Some of this is due to prices changing, but a lot of it is due to a weak US dollar and a strong Colombian peso. The exchange rate isn’t as good as it used to be.

So, that’s the skinny. We’ve put together two new sets of Valentines for sale this year, and we have the same sets available that we sold last year, too. If you’re planning on buying Valentines, please consider buying from us!

And please spread the word, even if you don’t need to buy Valentines yourself. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, whatever your social media drug of choice may be…we’d be forever grateful! :)

We leave you with some more pictures to enjoy! Thanks so much for your love and support.

A lot of people have asked about the adoption process and why exactly we have to be here in Colombia for so long.  (By the way, there are no “U”s in Colombia.  Just wanted to point that out.)  :)

So, here is the deal.  We had a one-week legally required bonding period.  Yesterday a social worker came to evaluate us, and she decided that bonding and attachment are going well, and she approved us for our interview today with a government official who represents the welfare of children in Colombia.  His official title is the Defender of Minors.  Doesn’t it sound like he should ride a horse and carry a sword or something?

So, we had that interview today.  We needed his official approval in order to enter into the legal process in the courts.  He was very kind and the whole meeting was about 5 minutes long.  At the end, he gave us approval, and we all had to sign a paper promising to care for and love Luisa and raise her well  – even Molly signed!

That is a big step behind us.  Now, our lawyer will file our case in the courts for us tomorrow, and from then on we will mostly just be waiting on the legal process to finish up.  It can take anywhere from two to six weeks or (rarely) even longer, depending on how crowded the courts are, whether our judge is a “leisurely” person or a more “get-it-done” kind of person, how favorable s/he is towards adoption, etc.

So, please pray for us to get assigned to a court where the judge LOVES adoption, and is QUITE a business-like, get-it-done person, and that the court would be practically empty except for our case! :)  The longer we have to stay here, the more expensive this trip will be…not to mention that we just would like to get home to family and friends and our own place.

Here’s one example of a challenging thing about being here:  our five minute meeting this afternoon actually took about three hours.  From the time we were picked up at our hotel, fought the traffic on the way there, waited and waited for the meeting once we actually arrived (because on-time is an hour late here), and then fought the traffic on the way home, it was almost three hours.  We hadn’t packed snacks or anything for the girls, and they were going crazy.  And the driver charged about $50 for that trip.  It was a somewhat stressful afternoon, to say the least.

Anyway – there’s the latest.  Now we are pretty much done with meetings and appointments, at least until the final sentencing in court.  So we have weeks ahead to fill with walks, playgrounds, parks, hanging out, and exploring Bogotá, and trying not to spend too much money.  : )

Thanks for your prayers and love!  We appreciate you all soooooo much and miss you tons!

It’s my party and I’ll wear a hat if I want to.

This post will be brief, but we just wanted to first of all thank you for praying for us! The second half of this week was better…our energy levels are higher, Molly is doing better with adjusting, and we are getting the hang of things a bit more.

If we thought we loved Luisa on the day we got her, we sure do love her so much more now. She is really amazing. She is hilarious – she loves to ham it up for the camera and her facial expressions have had us laughing harder than we’ve laughed in months.

We’ve also seen that she has a very fierce stubborn streak – and tonight we got to enjoy her first temper tantrum. :) (It was because we wouldn’t let her eat unlimited amounts of passion fruit.) She is making awesome progress with her walking, though – we can tell she really wants to learn and is more and more motivated. This is exciting!

Here are a few more pictures and a fun video at the bottom!

Luisa’s Birthday Party

Scenes From Around Town

At The Hotel

Here’s a little video featuring a walk around our neighborhood, Shaun making Luisa laugh, and some sizzling salsa street dancing. :) Enjoy!

Our hotel room door when we brought Luisa home.

Well, it’s hard to know where to start.  I know a lot of people are wondering about how things are here and all day long, I think, “I should blog about that,” but now that I sit down to write I don’t know where to begin.  So this will probably be a stream-of-consciousness sort of post…just getting some thoughts down.

First of all, Luisa is great.  We love her and she cracks us up  all the time.  She has the most awesome facial expressions and loves to laugh.  She is also super strong-willed and feisty.  Overall we can tell she has a happy, contented personality.

Our smiling girl.

She is definitely going through a grieving process, though.  Please pray for her.  Imagine if you were such a tiny person and you were suddenly taken from the only home you ever knew and placed in the arms of strangers, never to return again.  She has been with a foster mother since October and when she is sad, she cries for this woman: “mama.”  It is a wonderful thing that she bonded with her foster mother so well.  But she is definitely grieving her loss.  This means she is a little wary of me – I am sure she’s thinking, “Who is this woman that’s  telling me that she’s my mama?!?”  She is warming up to me more and more, though, so we are thankful for that.  The main things I say to her, over and over, are “Mama esta aqui.  Yo soy tu mama.  Te amo.”  (Mama is here.  I am your mama.  I love you.)

After her first bath.

On the other hand, she completely adores Shaun.  She cries everytime he leaves the room (thankfully, I can calm her, though).  She loves being held by him and sitting with him and is basically totally smitten.  So we are thankful for that, too.  She also loves her big sister – they play and giggle a lot.  Another thing to be thankful for.

The hotel where we are is great in many ways.  All meals cooked for us (delicious!), laundry washed and returned folded, room cleaned every day – whoo hoo!  It’s like a vacation.  Except it’s also really exhausting to suddenly be a family of four and dealing with sibling rivalry issues while not speaking the local language, not even speaking Luisa’s language, eating different foods and dealing with different currency, being all in one hotel room, with no car of our own or any way to get around the city without hiring a driver…these aren’t things a family usually has to deal with.  So it’s a trade-off of struggles.  Overall, we are pretty tired.

The dining room at our hotel, complete with plantain painting.

Passion fruit: weird and delicious.

Molly had a really rough day today.  Please pray for her adjustment.  She is feeling the loss of being the only child and we are struggling with balancing our love and time and attention between the two girls.

The proud big sister.

Luisa requires a physical therapist because she is still learning to walk and needs a lot of work on her fine motor skills.  The therapist has been coming everyday for an hour to teach us the exercises that Luisa needs.  Luisa hates it – she cries pretty much the whole time.  And we sort of have to ignore Molly while the therapist is there, which today meant that Molly pretty much cried the whole time, too.

Molly is also under-rested.  She is waking with the sun at 6:30 or so, and then we can’t really get her in bed before 8 at the earliest because they don’t serve dinner until 6:30.  At home, she normally sleeps from 7-7 or so, so I can tell it’s affecting her – plus she has a cold, so she really needs her sleep – so please pray she either starts sleeping later or maybe napping when Luisa naps, after lunch.

Thankfully, Luisa sleeps well!  Hallelujah.  :)

Our hotel is not what you would consider a true hotel – it has just 7 rooms and there are 4 families staying in it right now, including us – all adoptive families.  Molly has a friend that she plays with sometimes – another little girl that is 5 years old.  We all eat our meals together and get advice from each other – it’s a great place to be.  The people that work here are amazing and treat us all like family, especially the children – lots of affection.

The dining room and its collection of plates from around the world.

We are in what is considered a very nice neighborhood of Bogota.  We can easily walk to parks, a grocery store, the bank, other shops and restaurants.  It feels very safe.  It is beautiful weather every morning, and thunderstorms every afternoon – consistently.  The city itself is also beautiful – urban yet mountainous and very green – except that the air pollution is terrible.  I can feel the smog just settling in my lungs every time I breathe.  We are at 8,000 feet so it took a couple of days to adjust to the altitude.

Tomorrow we go back to the orphanage where Luisa lived from age 3 months until just this past October.  We will tour it, meet her caregivers, and also meet and talk with her foster mother.

Well, I can’t think of much more for now.  Thanks for reading.  We miss and love you all.  Thinking of the many weeks that we still have to be here  - well, it feels hard.  We wish we could just come home now.  But we can’t.  :)  So prayers for that would be appreciated too.

Much love to you all.

Another interesting collection.

Molly with a big map (of Colombia). We’re in the middle of the mountain range on the right.

Here are some photos from our time so far. They’re in chronological order. You should definitely make it to the bottom. There’s a treat down there :)

Our first meal with Luisa (she mostly pretended to eat) from Shaun Fox on Vimeo.

To the mothers: we’re here and we’re safe.

We’re here at our hotel, Hotel Paris, and we’ve just finished breakfast. It was wonderful, including arepas and Colombian coffee :)

We arrived last night around 10:30p and went straight to bed. Molly behaved wonderfully as we traveled and a lot of other things moved in our favor to make the journey easier too. We didn’t get much sleep last night, though, so prayers for energy and rest are appreciated.

Turns out the internet at the hotel is a little spotty, so we’re not sure how much we’ll be able to connect. We’ll update again as soon as we can. Thank you for your prayers and donations and support of our little family that have finally brought us here. We meet our little girl tomorrow and we can hardly believe it.