brothers

I'm really not trying to be smart or rude when I answer the number one question people seem to ask when we are out with our boys, it's just that I love to say it.

"Are they brothers?"

They are now. 

We have three first-born sons and they are all brothers. I hope Bereket and Tamagn are as excited to have brothers as my biggest boy is. I know the wait was long for me. Can't imagine what it was to a little two-year old, how old Josiah was when we started telling him we were going to get him a brother from Ethiopia.

Once about two years ago, we pulled into the parking lot at Wal-mart and Josiah queried from the back seat, "Are we going to get my brother from here?" Wal-mart does seem to sell a little of everything....

And then when we were dropping papers at the State Representative's office to go to Harrisburg to be authenticated, about a mile from our house, he asked if this was Ethiopia. Really, he is a bright boy. Just kinda hard to understand it all.

Two years ago this month we sent our dossier off to Ethiopia. Finally completed all that paperwork. We were ready to be put into the queue of families waiting for children. I had wrestled over whether we should apply for one or two children. Had all our paperwork cleared for two but I wasn't settled with it. I didn't want to manage three kids under three (at that time we were told the wait was much shorter and were expecting to be traveling to get our baby the same month Josiah would turn three)--I wanted to be able to love them. And I just couldn't see it.

Finally I felt like God very clearly told me that the little boy he had a for us didn't have a brother or a sister. We signed up for one.

Eleven months later we still didn't have a referral and now we had a three-and-a-half year old and taking two seemed more feasible.

We changed our request. We'll take a sibling group.

Waited till just after Christmas for a referral and still didn't have anything. Put a call into our case manager and finally we asked the right questions. There just weren't any young sibling groups available. We can change our request back to one and have a referral in a few days, take two unrelated kids, or keep waiting, knowing that it might be another year still.

Changed our request again and had pictures of our two boys just 6 weeks later. On Valentine's Day. Their names are Bereket and Tamagn and neither of them have brothers or sisters.

We took them. Made them ours and called them brothers with our own.