Official

We travelled to San Antonio this morning for our court hearing for our re-adoption. Our home study agency was Lutheran Social Services of the South and they recommended a wonderful attorney to complete our adoption for us, Victor Negron. He handled everything, down to the very last detail. We went before a really neat judge (thank you Jesus!) Judge Barbara Nellermoe. As we were walking into the courtroom, I was reminded that Adoptions are probably the only positive thing that a family court or district court judge gets to do. Most of what they see is negative and Judge Nellermoe was very happy to get to preside over our case.

So...the boys are officially Joshua Emanuel Flippen and Josiah Abenezer Flippen as of today. Thank you for praying for our journey and for our court date. I, for one, am so glad to have this part of the journey over and done with!

On another note, driving with toddlers is NOT my idea of a good time! Joshua and Josiah don't sleep in the car and don't watch the DVD players - although they LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to listen to music and get a kick out of dancing to Rhianna or Chris Brown. In fact, we joke that Joshua is going to be the next Chris Brown. He likes to move his WHOLE body (I'm not kidding-feet, head and everything in between)when the song Forever comes on. It's quite entertaining!!

Even though the twins, don't like to ride in the car, ALL my kids are precious and an absolute joy in our lives. Later!!

Re-Adoption

We have been working on our re-adoption through the State of Texas and getting our first Post-Adoption report submitted to our adoption agency.

We have our court hearing to finalize the re-adoption this coming Tuesday, September 30th at 1pm. The re-adoption is a requirement in order for the boys to receive their Certificates of Citizenship. Please be in prayer for us as we travel to San Antonio to go before the judge in Bexar county. We'll all travel down there so that we can all be at the hearing and have our picture taken as the judge hands us our official paperwork.

We'll let you know how things go!

They're Walking :)

Both of the boys are walking now - YAY!! We like to say that they are "waddlers" instead of toddlers. They waddle back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and eventually fall down. But, they are walking more and more every day, for which I am extremely thankful for.

Joshua and Josiah are hysterical these days. Josiah likes to scrunch up his nose and put on a fake smile. Then, when you laugh at him, he cracks up laughing. Joshua also gets a big kick out of making us laugh. This afternoon, we caught Josiah throwing a plastic ball, then he threw his hands up in the air and started clapping for himself, saying "Yayyyyy!". Joshua caught on very quickly and immediately started doing the exact same thing.

The boys are gaining weight very quickly. Josiah weighed 27 pounds about 2.5 weeks ago and I'm sure that Joshua is not far behind. In fact, I've been noticing that Joshua looks a whole lot more like Josiah now that he's filled out some. When Matthew gives them a haircut, they definitely look like they are identical. I don't think we'll ever know if they're identical or fraternal...

Jessica is enjoying playing volleyball for Summit right now and Christopher is in the throws of flag football. School is a bit more challenging, but we're so proud of how the 2 of them have really buckled down and taken school very seriously so far. Yay!

As I'm writing this, I'm overwhelmed that we're almost through the first 9 weeks of school. Somehow, I thought that having 1 year olds again would slow time down again. I remember when Jessica and Christopher were toddlers (18 mos apart), sometimes it seemed like time came to a standstill. Then, there were other times that I would do a double-take and wonder where on earth all the time had gone. As Christopher is about to celebrate his 12th birthday and Jessica is coming up on her 14th (YIKES), I am stunned that life is passing so quickly. There are parts of the day that time passes so slowly, and then we go pick up Jessica and Christopher and I realize that time has sped up again and the day is already over AGAIN.

One last thing...if you think about it, please stop and praise the Lord for His goodness in your life. I'm remembering our days in Ethiopia and how happy most of those precious people were in the midst of extreme poverty and hardship. Maybe someday I'll blog about our daily adventures while we were in Addis, but I'm still not sure that is something that I'm supposed to do. I'll let you know.

Blessings, Heather

I've been so busy lately, just trying to keep up with 4 kids, that I haven't had a chance to update the blog lately. If you've been anxiously waiting for an update, I apologize for slacking off and will try to update more often.

After our last round of treatment for Giardia, we've seen MUCH improvement, Praise the Lord! We completed the Flagyl and Joshua completed the Omnicef for his ear infection and Shigella. We saw immediate results during the treatment, then saw things start to decline again. Oy!

So, I headed into the pediatrician's office, yet one more time to see have her look at the boys ears. They had run fever for a few days and were pulling at their ears, so I decided to bite the bullet and take both of them in myself. BTW, I am very proud of myself, as this is a major accomplishment for me. She checked both of them and said that Josiah was fine, but that Joshua still had an ear infection in the same ear. She asked us to do ANOTHER stool sample because things still weren't where they should be (in the diaper department). As of yesterday afternoon, Joshua was tested negative for parasites and shigella. While most would see this as a positive, understand that it is a parasites JOB to remain undetected. So, I'm not putting much faith in the test results. However...

A dear friend suggested that I try a product known as Align (www.aligngi.com). When things started going downhill again, I bought some and started giving it to both of the boys. Poof! Instant results. It is a probiotic clinically proven to help with digestive issues. After trying several other probiotics that were useless, I'm now telling everyone I know about this product in the hopes that it will help others dealing with digestive issues.

As Tigger says, TTFN (Tata for now)!