Welcome home, Hannah!

Since my computer was fried by a lightening strike to our house I wasn't able to blog for many months, and now that I am back to it I wanted to finish out the series on BWS before moving on to current news.  Now that I've finished the series I can happily announce our little Hannah is now HOME where she belongs!

The process to get Hannah seemed to take forever.  It's incredibly frustrating waiting on other people to do their jobs so that your daughter can come home, and we seemed to continuously find ourselves waiting much longer than expected.  There was 17 very long months from the time we were matched with Hannah to the time we got her home.  Needless to say her arrival was long anticipated and full of great happiness and excitement!

We chose to have only one parent travel to save money, and since we felt the kids at home would do best with mommy being with them (especially with one of them being a 1 year old extremely attached to mom) Ernie got to be the one to travel.  It's a good thing he has "been there done that" before because Hannah was NOT happy with the transition.  She screamed for a long time but soon settled in and attached to her new daddy, and as an added benefit Ernie gained new found respect for my role as a mom.  :)

After 2 weeks it was FINALLY time for Daddy and Hannah to come HOME!!!!  We have an incredibly wonderful church family, and we were so excited many of our friends from church showed up to welcome them home.

My kids were happy to have their best friends show up at the airport to help pass the time while waiting for Daddy to arrive! 

Joshua doesn't like to have his picture taken.  Apparently his friend doesn't either, so this picture is more amazing than it looks!

Looking for Daddy

The plane has landed.  Daddy and our little Hannah are HERE!!!!!

 

Watching for Daddy and Hannah to walk off the plane.  They were the last ones off.  :)

Waiting for them to appear.

THERE THEY ARE!!!  THEY'RE HERE!!!  THEY'RE HERE!!!

 One of the happiest moments of my entire life!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love this picture - the way my husband is looking into my eyes!  We are so focused on each other, I'm holding little Hannah for the first time ever, and Ernie is holding Elianna for the first time in over 2 weeks.  Such a special moment! Naturally little Hannah was ready to go back to her Daddy since she had gotten so used to him over the last 2 weeks, but I couldn't wait any longer to hold her and Elianna was ready to let Daddy hold her. (Once we were home Hannah took right to me.)

I was feeding Hannah little fruit snacks to help her get accustomed to me, but Elianna wanted to feed her new sister herself.  It was the sweetest thing ever to watch the first moments of bonding between the two girls who will grow up together as "virtual twins."

Micaelyn's first moments with her new little sister.

Even at her young age Elianna understood that Hannah was scared and upset and wanted to make her feel better.  Such love!

Our first family photo with Hannah (but missing Christina).