One Day!

Wow, only one day left! I can't believe it. On Monday morning we will meet our daughter! Yikes- I am getting a little nervous.

When we return home, Matt and I have decided to practice “cocooning” with Annie. Cocooning is adoption lingo for the period of transition when a family focuses intensely inward, limiting the number of experiences a newly adopted child has outside of the home and family. We've done a lot of reading and this practice is highly recommended for infants. The purpose of cocooning is to ease the child's transition anxiety and make up for lost bonding and attachment time. The primary theme of this time for us will be that Annie can trust her mom and dad to meet all her needs. So, for at least two months after we return we will be the only ones holding, feeding, and changing her. We won’t be leaving her with a sitter for quite some time. The reason for this is that Annie has no idea who her parents are. She has had a number of people in and out of her life already - all of her relationships have been temporary. She could just as easily attach to a grandma, friend, or uncle as she could to us. As excited as we are to get home and into a normal routine, we also have to be cautious as Annie could attach to someone else or even worse, to no one at all. We don’t want to seem rude or hurt anyone’s feelings, but we believe that the first few months home will be a crucial bonding time for the three of us. Don’t feel like you can’t stop over to see her; please do. We just wanted to give everyone a heads up on why we have to be a bit possessive of her at first =)

Thank you for your prayers as we travel. We will be flying from Minneapolis to Washington D.C., from there to refuel in Rome, and then straight into Addis Ababa. Addis is the capital city of about 8 million people. We have 20 hours of travel ahead of us. The 20+ hours traveling home with a baby should be interesting!

I hope to be able to update the blog while we are there but I have heard from other families that blogger can be difficult to access. We shall see. If I can't I will try to access Facebook or email something.

Annie Bel, here we come!!