finally.

A Year Ago Today.

Last year, right about now I was heading back to my classroom from the bathroom. While I was in the bathroom my cell phone rang. I ignored it because, you know, I was in the bathroom. On my way back to the classroom I checked my messages.

“Hi Abby, this is Angie from Children’s Home Society. Could you give me a call back before our meeting tonight?” I called her back. I was thinking she was going to cancel our meeting to update our homestudy. (She has 2 kids at home, it was December, I was assuming sick kid.) It was 10:20 am and since I didn’t have to pick my class up from computers until 10:30, I decided to give her a quick call.

A really perky voice answered the phone.

“Hi Abby! I’m so glad you called me back. I’ve got some news for you! (at this point I was trying to unlock my classroom door, dropped my keys twice and was desperately trying to get to my computer) We have a referral for you to look over.” Now she read me all the details of the referral. But she still hadn’t given me a name, age, boy or girl, etc. I was pretty impatient at this point. I cut in to the details with “I need to know if it’s a boy or a girl! I have 8 minutes left to call Kevin with the news, look at the pictures on the computer and pick up my class from computers.” She laughed and said “It’s a boy. His name is Rahimeto Keyredin and he’s 5 1/2 weeks old.”

I called Kevin and at the same time checked my e-mail. When my slow (ridiculously slow) computer finally opened the file I saw this:

and this:

I hung up with Kevin and went running down the hall at school, interrupted about 6 classes to announce “It’s a BOY!” on my way to pick up my class.

We got back to the room and I briefly explained what was going on. I told them they could color or play with toys or read books or basically do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. (not one of my finer teaching moments, I’ll admit it.) And I spent the next half hour pouring over his referral paperwork.

I printed off his picture and carried them around in my pocket for the next week at least, showing them to anyone who walked past me.

The two pictures above are Milo Rahimeto Hendricks – 5 1/2 weeks old.
Here’s Milo over the next year:
We didn’t get any more pictures until he was 4 months old

We met him in Ethiopia when he was 5 months old.

6 months

7 months

8 months (hanging out with friends from Ethiopia. Harry was at the Care Center with Milo. We met Claire on the plane ride home.)

9 months

10 months

11 months

12 months

13 months

adoption, family, things that make me happy | Comments (3)