A year?

Hard to believe it's been 366 days—one full leap-year—since we saw this beautiful mug for the first time. I still vividly remember the sheer joy and excitement I felt when our agency rep called with the good news, and the gut-wrenchingly anxious wait between the phone call and the email that contained all his information (and of course his photo!). When I saw his picture for the first time, I remember thinking, "Of course. That's our son!" I can't explain the immediate and strong connection I felt to his photo. And after reading about his history, his first family, and his life up until that point, I was overcome with a sobering sense of responsibility for this little person.

While I was processing all this, Greg was stuck in a meeting and hadn't even had a chance to learn anything about his new son. All he knew was that we had a referral—he gathered that much from my screeching phone call (cut short by the start of his meeting) in which, he later told me, he at first thought I was shouting, "We have a squirrel! We have a squirrel!"

The 10 weeks we spent waiting to travel gave us an opportunity to wrap our minds around the idea of becoming parents. Our baby was no longer an abstract idea, but an actual living, breathing human being with a name and a story of his own. It suddenly was no longer all about us and our adoption journey, but about him. (Of course, it wasn't until we actually met him in July that we learned what "all about him" really meant.) It was the sweetest blessing of our lives.

Here's that sweet little blessing, then and now.


And here's Big Sidamo admiring Baby Sidamo. Who could blame him?