Two Pablo

We have an exciting announcement to make: the Pennings family will soon be a family of four!

At the end of April, we began the process to adopt another baby from Ethiopia. Our paperwork was finished and sent to Ethiopia in mid-August, and so began our wait for a referral. When we adopted Juan Pablo, we the phone call from our case manager that there was a baby boy for us two days after our paperwork arrived in Ethiopia, so we didn't really experience the part of the adoption process known as The Wait. This time, however, it was pretty clear from early on that things would be different. Many more people have been applying to adopt from Ethiopia since adoption programs in both Guatemala and Vietnam closed in the last couple years, and there were some recent procedural changes to the adoption process in Ethiopia that slowed things down for a while over the summer.

At the beginning of November, Jeff found out that he would have to go on a business trip for a couple days in December. This was the first time in our 3+ years of marriage that we would have to spend a night apart from each other, and obviously the first night that Jeff would be away from Juan Pablo, so it was a pretty big deal for us. At the time, I told Jeff, "Just watch, I'll get the call from our case manager while you're gone, and then I'll have to wait to get a hold of you in California while you're busy with meetings or something to be able to tell you." As Jeff's business trip drew nearer, however, it seemed very unlikely that this would be the case. I emailed our case manager for an update a couple days before Thanksgiving, and she told me that her best guess was that we could probably expect a call sometime in January. We prepared for a couple more months of waiting. On December 1st, Jeff left for California. He spend the morning with us, then went into his office for a couple hours, and left on the 4pm flight. At 4:30 my phone rang. It was our case manager, calling to say that they were going to be getting the paperwork for a baby girl from one of the orphanages that they work with later in the week, and she was wondering if we would be interested in seeing it. I was shocked. Though I had joked about this happening less than a month before, it hadn't seemed like it would be even remotely a possibility. And I was so excited, I had no idea what to do with myself. Obviously, I needed to talk to Jeff about it first, and he was going to be in the air for another five hours. I somehow got through dinner with my parents that evening, putting Juan Pablo down for the night, and sitting there waiting for Jeff to call without letting anything slip.

It took a few days for the baby's paperwork to come through, then a couple more days for the orphanage to send a picture. Then we had to wait for the paperwork to be resent, because there were some problems with the dates on the first draft...since Ethiopia is on a different calendar than we are, sometimes there can be confusion when dates are converted from Ethiopian to Gregorian dates. Finally, this past Thursday, December 10, we had the correct paperwork, as well as about 20 pictures and a few videos of our gorgeous 8 1/2 month old baby girl. We officially accepted the referral that evening! We are all so thrilled about our early Christmas gift!

Now about the title of this post: we've had a running joke for a while now that we would name our next child Two Pablo. Given however, that our second child is a girl, and not a boy, we've decided to put the name "Two Pablo" on hold, and instead we are naming our new baby Ana Luisa. This will make our daughter the fourth Ana Luisa in our family, after me, my mom, and my grandmother. It's a great name, and I can say from personal experience that St. Ana (Anne) is a wonderful patroness to have. She is the mother of Our Lady, and patroness of housewives and mothers, among other things. We will be keeping Ana Luisa's Ethiopian name as her middle name, though I can't post it here yet.

As I mentioned, Ana Luisa is about 8 1/2 months old. She was born March 26, 2009, which means that she and Juan Pablo will be about 19 months apart. She is beautiful, with huge, amazing eyes, and a beautiful smile. We can't post pictures of her here until after the adoption is finalized in the Ethiopian courts, but we can't wait to show off our little princess. We have a few videos of her, that show her smiling, playing with her feet, putting her hands in her mouth, and rolling back and forth, moving constantly. We have a feeling that she will have no problem at all keeping up with her older brother! She is really tiny, weighing in at only about 9 1/2 pounds. She was born with a cleft lip, and most likely, cleft palate, which makes it difficult for her to get enough suction on a bottle to be able to get enough to eat. There are special bottles for babies with cleft palates to help them eat, but being in an Ethiopian orphanage, she has not had access to these, and though the nannies in the orphanages are wonderful and do the best with what they have, the resources are very limited. When we bring her home, we will be able to spend the time that it takes to feed her properly, and when she starts gaining weight, she'll be able to have surgeries to repair first the cleft lip, and then the palate. Our case manager is estimating that we will be able to bring her home sometime around the end of February or beginning of March.

We are all so excited about our newest little family member, and just can't wait to be able to bring her home! It has been especially fun to watch Juan Pablo take all of this in. When we first saw her picture, he had this huge smile on his face, and started talking to and cooing at the picture. He has also insisted that we eat a couple of our meals with the computer on with her picture up so that she can "eat" with us. We talk constantly about his little sister, and what kinds of things they are going to do together. He is very excited to play with his dinosaurs with her, and to have her play in the basement with him and Jeff. When we first got the videos of her, he kept wanting to watch them over and over. In one of the videos, you can hear another baby start to cry in the background, and when he first saw it, he told me, "Baby Ana Luisa wants Juan Pablo's mom." Then he kept asking to see the video with her "happy smile". He is going to be an amazing big brother.

We feel so incredibly blessed already by this new little baby girl. Ana Luisa has already brought us so much joy, and we haven't even met her yet! We are so thankful to God for bringing her into our family...what an amazing gift!

Here we are seeing Ana Luisa's face for the first time!