One Year!

One year ago on June 15th, 2009, we woke up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, walked down a little dirt road, through a certain red gate and held our precious baby boy for the first time! Here is a picture of that first moment that I held Will Tekalgn Harper!
Here is the picture of Sean as he held Will for the first time. I think he was about to kiss Will's cheek in this picture! So sweet! I loved that the special mothers had dressed Will in a red shirt and Sean had worn a red shirt as well!

June 15th will always be quite special for our family as we remember the gift that we were given just one year ago when we met Will for the first time! How will we celebrate? Well, I think that in the years to come, we will certainly talk about this day with Will. We will look at pictures. We will talk about and remember his birth family. We will talk about and remember the special people at Hannah's Hope. And we will continually praise God for His plan to knit our lives and our families together in such an amazing way! This year, we had the wonderful blessing of celebrating this one year home milestone with some very special people! When we traveled to Ethiopia last June, we met many amazing families and two of them were from Tennessee! Yes, Will was coming back to Tennessee with two other babies that he had been spending time with at Hannah's Hope! This past Saturday night, we attended a cook-out at the Johnson's home to celebrate our one year home with Lucy Lane and her family and Silas Lucht and his family! It was so great to be with these two families that we had been with just one year ago and had shared such a special week with! It was great to see Will, Lucy Lane and Silas together again! So here go the pictures of the evening.......

When you are one and a half years old, you don't really play with other kiddos....you just sort of play around them! So here are Silas and Will playing beside each other! That water table was a huge hit with our boys and they were soaked by the time the evening was over! They did do a great job taking turns on that yellow roller coaster car!

Here is a picture of Will and Lucy Lane playing beside each other at the water table! Their little buddy to the left is about their same age, and his family is traveling in about a week to bring home his baby brother from Ethiopia! It was so great to be with so many families who were at different places in their adoption journeys!

Lucy Lane and her brothers and sisters have some super fun toys! Will was all about this lawn mower!

He was also very much into this car! And he wasn't too interested in sharing, or being taken away from these wonderful toys to take pictures!

So when the mommas decided that we needed to get some pictures of these three buddies together, it just wasn't happening. Maybe we will learn that in the future, we should take the pictures at the beginning of our time together when everyone is fresh and happy! This picture just makes me laugh! Will was not getting out of the car, so Amber and Kristi set Silas and Lucy Lane in front of the car. LL either fell over, or just decided to lay down and Silas and Will were not interested in smiling, so pictures were pretty much a bust!

Kristi had this adorable cake made to celebrate one year home with our children. So cute and so thoughtful to include all three Ethiopian Tennessee friends! Loved it!

Now the real trick was to try to get a picture of them all with the cake. Again, I had taken Will away from the coolest toys ever and he was just not feeling the cake! He was momentarily captivated by the flame as Kristi tried to light the candle, but he really wanted to get back to the play lawn mower! I still love this picture! It just overwhelms me to think about the fact that these three children came from different parts of Ethiopia with very different life circumstances, that they were all born within about four weeks of each other, that they were all three brought to Hannah's Hope and that God placed these precious children with families who all live in the same state!

And here they are one more time with their mommas! Silas with Amber, Lucy Lane with Kristi and Will and me. They really are very happy, laid back kiddos.....it was just a very warm night with lots more fun stuff to be doing rather than taking pictures! And by the way, these sweeties do have wonderful daddies! Don't know why we didn't take a picture of them with their dads. Wait, maybe it was because they were over pictures!?!?

And did I mention all of the fun toys at the Johnson's home? Will wasn't the only one enjoying them! There are absolutely no pictures of Beckett and Helen from the cook-out because they were so busy having fun in the best backyard ever. That is Beckett on the far right on the trampoline. He had so much fun that he didn't even eat supper. Helen was probably on the zip line, or the swing set, or the see saw, or in the play house or.......so many fun things to do!

Thanks again to the Johnsons for hosting such a fun, memorable evening for our families to celebrate one year home with our children! It was a great night!

My heart is full. Full of love for all three of my precious children. Full of memories from that special day one year ago today.

Thanks be to God!