Day 1: The Journey Begins

Finally...the series of posts you've been waiting for!

Our journey began eventfully as there were serious storms in Atlanta (our international gateway) during the entire day on Wednesday.  Thanks be to God, the Atlanta airport opened for just long enough for our flight from home to arrive and our flight to Amsterdam to take off on time.  Brian and I are pretty easy-going, and we travel well together, so we passed the LONG flights with sleeping, watching movies, and chatting with each other.  After 24 hours of travel time, we arrived in Addis Ababa around 9pm on Thursday.  We navigated through the airport, got our visas, exchanged money, and collected our luggage with ease.  We managed to find our driver in a sea of people.  Tamu was the face with a huge smile holding a sign with Brian's name on it.  Finally, we had arrived!

We arrived at our guest house, Yebsabi, which means welcome in Amharic.  It was a lovely place with friendly and helpful staff.  We settled in our room quickly and tried to go to sleep because we knew Friday morning would be the time when we met our sweet daughter for the first time.  After a noisy night (other bloggers weren't exagerating about the dogs and roosters), I woke up nervous...in an excited kind of way.  We ate a quick breakfast and waited for our agency representatives to come and get us and take us to meet Mikayla.  A couple of weeks before our arrival, our daughter was moved to Acacia Village, which is our agency's transition home about 30 minutes outside of the city.  All of the children at Acacia Village have been matched to their families.  On the way, we picked up another CWA parent, Trent who was in country for his son's embassy date.  We connected right away and he offered to video and photograph the first moments when we met Mikayla.  What a precious gift!  In the video, you can hear Trent's sweet voice ooohing and ahhing over our new family-priceless!  We waited downstairs for Mikayla to be brought to us, and after what seemed like forever, we learned that she was taking her morning nap and that we didn't want to wake her up because she would be grumpy!  Brian and I were perfectly OK with going and staring at her sleep for a bit.  We were all for meeting a happy baby for the first time!  Here is the first time we saw Mikayla Tamir:

While she finished her nap, we enjoyed a coffee ceremony, we got a tour of Acacia Village and got to spend time talking with the director of Acacia Village, Haddush, a delightful man with an enormous heart for these children and their families.  Then, it was time to meet our daughter for the first time.  She was so alert and happy.  Shortly after waking up, I got to feed her.  Awesome!  Then we loved on her and played with her for most of the rest of the day.  We took a short break to have lunch with the staff.  Then it was back to spend time with Mikayla for most of the rest of the day.  We anticipated spending only about an hour with her during our first visit, but we were together for several hours.  It was wonderful!

Our first family photo. 

What a precious moment!

Asleep in Daddy's arms.  Can you tell she was playing too hard with the rattle and keys?

She was really taken with Brian immediately

More to come!