It’s now been about 3.5 weeks since we left home to come to South Africa and we now have just under 2 weeks left in our stay. In some ways it seems like the time is going slow and in others it seems so quick. Last week Wednesday (December 3rd) we got an email stating that this little guy (who can sleep anywhere!) is a Canadian citizen! Yay! The reason our stay is so long here in South Africa is for the paperwork. The three major things needed done are: adoption order – Canadian citizenship – Canadian passport. We’ve got the first two done and Wednesday afternoon our social worker…

I thought I’d take some time today to show you some random snippets of photos from our time here. this photo is pretty cool because this is the original but since my photos auto back up to Google+ and sometimes it takes photos that have multiple shots and finds the best smiles from each and combines them into one photo, it’s like lazy man’s Photoshop! Rae always thinks it’s bright out this photo is funny but I love it time in the pool just the gorgeous place we are at more pool time daddy’s girl passport photo! so this is our awesome shower, there is a grate over top but no…

November 17th was court day. We got to the home early and got to meet Tracy (the Newcastle social worker). Then the workers all said their goodbyes. One of them really teared up when she said goodbye to Ephraim, he’s been there since he came out of the hospital at 2 months old and you can tell he was special to her (and he liked her too), she gave us their email address and asked us to send lots of pictures (which you know there will be a lot of). Then we were off! We went into the court building not knowing what to expect. We went through a metal…

I won’t be sharing a post on every day that we are out here but I wanted to document the first couple of days while they were still fresh in my mind. Sunday, November 16th was our second day visiting Ephraim at the home. We had a little bit of one on one time with Ephraim before we went outside with 7 of the “older” kids (as in kids aged 18 months to just under 2 years). If you sat down anywhere, outside or on the couch for more than three seconds you are bound to be bombarded by about 3 or 4 kids trying to sit on your lap,…

It’s crazy to think that it’s been over a week since we first met Ephraim, he has come out of his shell so much in the last week, he doesn’t seem like the same kid we first met. Saturday morning came early for us since we were still tired from our journey over. But we woke up around 5:30 so we could grab the stuff we would need for the next couple of days and by 6:40 we were off on our 4 hour journey (on the left side of the road) north up to Newcastle where Ephraim was. Minus the GPS giving us a few odd directions we found our way…

Wednesday, November 12th we sent off to leave cold and snowy Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to travel the 40 hours to warm and lush Durban, South Africa. Thankfully our journey was completely uneventful and Raeca had a decent amount of sleep on the planes, she’s always been a great little traveler. Like I previously shared we went from Saskatoon to Calgary, about an hour flight with a few hours of a layover. Then we flew the 9ish hours to Frankfurt where we had a 9 hour layover (which didn’t feel that long, Frankfurt is the worst laid out airport I’ve ever been to, aka we wandered around for awhile trying to figure…