Tornado

As gusty winds blow through the Midwest this week, I thought I would share a photo of what it looks like when a tornado blows through your house.

Adopted Again

This past week we turned one of the final pages in Bear's adoption process. We went to court to readopt him in the US and the state of Wisconsin. The end result of the hearing is a legal name change and a Wisconsin birth certificate.

Currently, US Immigration considers him a permanent resident with Ethiopian citizenship. Now that we have the Wisconsin birth certificate, we will file to make him a US citizen. Among other things, this will make voting, travel, and student loans easier for him in later years.

The agreement between Ethiopia and the US says that the adopted child cannot have dual citizenship. So in becoming a US citizen, he will no longer be a citizen of Ethiopia. This makes me sad. I wish so much he could have both. It also makes me sad that because he was not born on US soil, he is not eligible to become President of the US one day. Every kid in the US should have that possibility. We'll just have to settle for Secretary of State.

This day was really really fun and special. Dodd and I took off from work. I even managed to get all 3 of us dressed in coordinating attire. That rarely happens in this family. I've told Bear for the past few weeks that we would be going to court to see the judge and it would be fun.

He apparently thought that meant a party.

Bear clapped happily when the judge sounded his gavel and closed the case which made all of us in the courtroom laugh.
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Almost a citizen kiddo.



My friend Sharon, also a mom through adoption, shared this happy day with us and took some of the photos you're looking at. She told us that morning that her girls were adopted on the same exact day 17 years earlier!





After court, we had breakfast at an historic little restaurant along the river to celebrate. The sun was fresh and warm. The leaves continued their fall. We took our time. I sipped capuccino and Dodd sipped fresh oj while our boy scattered food about and waved to each new person who entered. And then he crashed. The End.



Great Map Resource!

This is for anyone struggling to locate a birthplace on a map.

My dear friend Julie works with a humanitarian relief organization and recently shared the ReliefWeb website. There is so much information here!

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc100?OpenForm

I labored a long time to locate Bear's birthplace on a map after his referral. I eventually found it thanks to another adoptive father with a child from the same region. He sent a UN relief map that showed the dirt roads that lead to Kacha Bira and surrounding areas. I had not thought of researching through a relief channel but was so glad he had.

On the ReliefWeb website, there is a tab just for maps, and it can be filtered by country. Besides locating a remote village, these maps will also tell about circumstances effecting a region. Issues of food security, relief programs, policy, drought, floods, conflict, transportation, migration, and many others. The information is current so it's possible to follow what is going on in a region of interest. I am intensly interested in the connection this provides us to Bear's birthplace and the place his birth family is living right now.

For fellow families out there with children from the Kembata region, also called the Kembata Tembaro Zone or KT, search for any Ethiopia maps with SNNP in the title. You will see KT in the middle of the region.

I hope this helps with the search!