Espy is Ours!!!

We passed court today! Hip Hip Hooray! This means that Nzayisenga Esperance is now officially a Vincent! Esperance Eliana Vincent, or Espy for short!

We are rejoicing and thanking God for this today!

We are officially departing the US on December 7th and will be united with our daughter on the 8th at around 2 in the afternoon. Home again on December 19th just in time for the holidays! What a gift our family has been given this year! AMAZING!

court and travel

Our Court Date is Monday! Yeah! Please pray that there are no hiccups! We are making tenative travel plans for sometime between the 4th and 7th. Will confirm those dates after Monday. Two weeks to go and we will hold sweet baby in our arms.

P.S. We think she has been at the orphanage since she was 1 day old... Nuns call her Espy. Super cute.. we are thinking of keeping that name since she is so used to it. Maybe Eliana Esperance, Espy for short... or Esperance Eliana, Espy for short... still thinking about it. :)

Lots to do lots to do. Gotta finish all my homework and grading for the classes I teach before we leave, plus travel and arrangements for kids while we are gone. Aghhh... any help would be most appreciated! :)

waiting on word

Waiting on word of our court date this week. Once we have it we can proceed with booking travel.

c'mon court date!!!

:)

Missing my baby girl and we haven't even met yet!

Eliana Esperance Vincent

We did receive the official email this morning. So happy to have it! The color photo is much better than the black and white copy we had received third party.

Unfortunately I cannot post pictures on a public forum due to privacy issues until she is official ours... after we pass court.

We are sooo excited though. So many emotions going on. I got back from a long road trip to Colorado and had a million things to catch up on, but of course all I wanted to do was look at my baby's picture!

We are waiting for a couple of documents from the orphanage that we need for court and our attorney in Rwanda is working on getting a court date as soon as he can. Still praying for one in November... please join us in this prayer! After court documents will go to the Ministry of Justice in order to issue her a passport (this takes up to two weeks). During that time another set of documents will go to the Ministry of Gender and Family who will issue us a travel letter stating that we are her legal parents and are able to travel with her. Once those documents are done we will travel to Rwanda... So... we are looking at maybe three weeks after we pass court.

After Rwanda we fly to Ethiopia where she will get a medical check up and we will be interviewed in order to get her visa to come home.

So... if things come together with court and document processing we could be in Africa mid December... I'm checking on flights just to see how outrageous they are over the holidays. Yikes! :)

New baby for the V family

We received information about our baby this morning. Soooo excited to get all the details. We have just a picture and a simple letter from the government... with few details, but she looks like she is almost a year old. We expect more information as soon as the ministry's office gets a chance. (They are busy this week with a major event and will get families information to move forward as soon as they can). Hopefully we can get enough details to secure a court date before December when courts close in Rwanda.

Needless to say we are estatic and exhausted. It has been a lot of sleepless nights waiting for this precious information. We are in love already... can't wait to meet her in person! She is soooo beautiful. Buster says she has is nose... ha!

Thank you so much B for the extra leg work to get us this information today! We appreciate you!

I will post more information as I can.

Thanks everyone for your prayers... let them continue so that we can pass court before December!!! With God's grace we can do it!

still waiting

nothing here...

Happy for all the families that got their referrals this week.

We did not.

Don't know why.

Pretty devestated today.

36 mile cool off

Ahhh.. ok... So my post 36 hours ago was a tad bit on the defensive side. Sorry. My mood was horrible until about 4 pm yesterday. I was simply exhausted from telling people we would probably hear something by the end of the week and then have to turn around and tell them it didn't happen, and I didn't know why.

This coupled with stress from inferential statistics homework I do NOT understand, getting ready for a conference in Colorado I leave for in the morning, sick family members, a rough week of teaching, lack of sleep, and exercise depravation left me really owly.

Anyway... sorry about being snippy. Thank you sister-in-law for convicing me to ride my roadbike with you 36 miles on a beautiful November afternoon to work off the agression. It worked. I felt much better and was able to block off 3 hours of time to think about how thankful I am for things... to gather my thoughts regarding the love of God... and to breath... in and out (or huffing and puffing at that time), and know that I can be confident in my Savior.

I still don't have any idea what's going on with our process... no expectations or estimations of when will will see her, hold her, bring her home. I'm still sad that it's taking so long and it might take longer than I want it to. But, I am at least more peaceful about it than I was yesterday.