in love and awe.

This past Wednesday our baby boy Jude Avery was born and we are onto the next chapter as a family of THREE (plus a few fur babies). We couldn’t be happier or more in love with him, and we definitely can’t stop staring at him and at each other in awe and disbelief that this little man is ours. Jude, we love you so much!!!

My water broke at 3am and after calling the hospital, we showed up around 4. Jude, though, kept us waiting until 6:53pm when he was born and we were able to love on him. Delivery was SUPER easy though (like literally two rounds of pushing total) so I’m grateful for that in addition to a very healthy boy who has passed all tests with flying colors. In a few hours we’ll be discharged and then we get to bring him home to meet his fur-brothers.

Jude, thank you for making us parents. We couldn’t be more excited to have you if we tried.

Beautifully Tragic

So on Tuesday I went to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity baby orphanage in Port-au-Prince. I went with two guests who hadn’t been and it was my first time there as well. We were driven there and walked the twenty minutes back, and totally managed to get lost coming back (so for us it was more like 45 minutes–woops). As soon as I walked into the first room, there were cribs (probably about 40) with adorable babies, most of them about a year old probably. Some of the babies had AIDS and some were malnourished, but they were all so precious. When you go there, you can hold them, rock, them, and feed them. I was drawn to this beautiful little girl named Christina and picked her right up (she stopped crying immediately) and sort of bounced her on my hip for probably fifteen minutes. When I could tell she was getting tired, I held her in the “typical” rocking a baby position for another couple of minutes. It was then that I realized she hadn’t been wearing a diaper! Woops! No accidents though, thankfully. 🙂

Then I moved to another room where the kids were a little older–probably three years old or so. As soon as they saw me, they put their arms up and called out “mama” towards me. I just started crying at that. It was so powerful, emotional, sad, joyful, and hopeful all at the same time. What really impacted me about it was that for the past few years, I’ve been feeling as if God has been calling me to adopt. So just hearing them cry out, “mama!,” to me just broke my heart.

It was beautifully-tragic, as Haiti seems to be in general. It was most definitely a heart-wrenching experience, but I think it was also my favorite one.