We finally have our blog!

Welcome to our adoption blog.  It's taken a while for us to get it started because neither one of us are very computer savvy.  We may be one of the few people in the world that do not have a myspace/facebook page (which ever one it is that people have now).  So please forgive us if our blog is very basic.  We will try to keep this updated as we continue through the remainder of our adoption process.   

I will attempt to give a brief summary of how we've arrived at this point in our adoption.  In September 2008 we began the paper work to adopt a child from the West African country The Gambia.  This country was new to having adoptions processed through the United States.  In fact we were going to be the second couple from the US to adopt from there.  We quickly processed our paper work and began waiting.  However, the first couple that adopted from there ran into many problems while they were in the country.  After waiting about a year, it became clear our adoption was never going to be processed.  So our agency recommended we switch countries.  The Gambia program has been put on hold since then.  So we began from scratch adopting from Ethiopia.  After finishing our paper work again, Ethiopia's paper work was much harder, we were put back on a waiting list.  Almost a year after beginning the paper work, Vanessa began looking at a waiting child list and realized there are many children in Africa that are not being adopted because they are HIV+.  After we researched it, we decided there is no reason we shouldn't adopt a child because they are HIV+.  So we told our agency we wanted to accept an HIV+ child.  We immediately received a referral for an 8 month old boy.  Shortly after accepting the referral we were told more tests were performed and it turns out he is not HIV+.  So to make a long story short, we have a baby boy!!!  We do not know yet when we will be traveling to Ethiopia.  We are still waiting on a court date.  We just received our monthly update.  His health is good and he is developing as normal.  They also attached the following photos.  And yes, they have him dressed in girl's clothes.  I guess when you live in an orphanage you wear whatever they give you.

Oh, by the way, some of you may have known we were having some trouble coming up with a middle name.  We originally had the name Denver Alan Morgan.  But it was brought to our attention what his initials would be.  So we had a contest to see who could come up with the best middle name.  We had many good suggestions, but there was one we liked the best.  Grandma Joy won the contest.  His full name is going to be Denver Kaleb Morgan.  Kaleb is an Ethiopian name that means heart, faithful or bold.