A Nora Check-In

I've been posting a lot lately about what all God is teaching me and although there will be more posts to follow shortly continuing in that theme, I wanted to get out a few pictures and a video clip I received. These were taken by members of our church team who traveled to Haiti this past month to work at Mountain Top Ministries. While there, they also spent a little bit of time at the orphanage holding, loving on, and praying over Nora for us. We are so incredibly grateful.

(Elnora holding Nora. Elnora will be getting a Haitian granddaughter of her own here soon as her son and daughter-in-law, our dear friends, Joe & Kris are also adopting from Haiti. Nora gave her good practice! She is also wearing a beautiful little dress that Carol took down for her. Thanks, Carol!)

I asked Linda to give my baby girl kisses from her Mama. Thanks, Linda!! I miss those cheeks!

Emily continued our way of making Nora smile--touching her face and specifically her lips would almost always produce a smile.

Here is our pastor,and dear friend, Jay, holding Nora. How many orphan babies get to say the pastor of their church held them in their arms in their home country!

Here is Hannah holding Nora. Having her in Hannah's petite little arms makes Nora look like a beast! : )

We haven't heard anything from the orphanage since last month when we were told our paperwork finally entered IBESR. As far as we know, Nora is doing well and we are continuing in the process in IBESR. We did send down a new highchair with our church group for Nora to use while there. Rachel had said the toddlers had broken all the others.

Here is a photo taken of Nora in here new highchair (this one was not taken by our church group, but instead by one of the other families adopting from ROH who were there visiting their son at the same time as our church group was there!)


The men of our church group also put together these cribs for the babies. Currently, the little ones all sleep in pack and plays so cribs are a wonderful improvement! I found out the cribs have been sitting in boxes since this summer so I'm thankful they were finally put together and can be used! It will also save room having them stacked like this since these 14 kiddos basically live in two rooms of the orphanage.



Finally, here is the short video clip of our pastor's wife and friend, Beth, praying over Nora for the group. We were hoping this would have happened via Skype so we could have sat in on this prayer and play time, but it just didn't work. This is the next best thing, however! I love seeing Nora's big, beautiful eyes moving around--that doesn't happen in photos. Thanks to all of the team from our church for sharing your compassion and love with Nora and for being that extension of us to her.

* A funny side note--We stood around as a family watching this video together when we got it last night. Right after Beth prayed for Nora's protection, Toby exclaimed, "We aren't going to hurt her!" He said it again the second time we watched it too. Like he wanted to make sure everyone knew we would never do that. So cute!