I dropped Mark and Jafta off at LAX this morning. They are en route to Haiti, and the house is calm and quiet. It was really, really nice for about an hour. Now, it’s just eery. The girls and I leaving for Florida on Friday, to spend a few days with my family and meet my new nieces.
Being separated as a family wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend the holidays. I couldn’t afford to fly all five of us to Haiti, but we want to be visiting more so it makes sense to take separate trips when Mark has time off. It’s one of those moments where you just throw your hands up and say, IT IS WHAT IT IS. Kind of like premature graying, or having an odd-numbered house on the even side of the street. You just learn to deal with what you are dealt. It becomes the new normal. Until one day you take a trip to Haiti, or you notice your eyebrows are white, or the UPS driver sends the new Nike+ system back because he can’t find your house and then you continue to have no way of monitoring your pace when you run. And then suddenly you think, “This is SO not cool”.
So yeah. Back to Haiti. I think I’m a bit melancholy about this particular trip because it was two years ago on Thanksgiving that we visited for the first time knowing that Keanan was to be our son. We had met him before, but we didn’t know we were officially matched until a couple months later. Our adoption has taken so long that I have kind of stopped counting how many months/years it has taken. But this Thanksgiving there is no denying that we are well into two years and some months of waiting. That is hitting me hard today.
At the same time, there is some excitement because we’ve heard that we have finally exited IBESR – and Mark will be filing our I600 while he is there, which is the first step in getting permission from the US side of things. We’ve been wanting to do this for a long, long time. It doesn’t mean he’s coming home soon, but we will celebrate any forward movement we get at this point.
If you are a praying person, we would love your prayers that Mark can file this paperwork without a hitch. And while you are at it, throw up a prayer for my cross-country flight with The Screamer and The Puker on Friday.
praying:)