Postponed!

We got word today from our CHS contact (Jackie) that our court case has been postponed. Due to the power outages in Ethiopia, the Ministry of Women's Affairs was unable to get some necessary paperwork to the court in time for our case to be heard. They anticipate our case being heard as soon as the paperwork gets in place, but they have no way of knowing how long that will take.

We're disappointed.

things

Thanks, everyone, for your input! I think we're just going to keep her name spelled Matea, and I suppose if she wants to change the spelling when she grows up she can. :)

Our court date is tomorrow. We should find out if her case made it through on Tuesday or Wednesday. As soon as we make it through court we can post her beautiful picture on the blog!

Exciting weekend here at the Petersons - we had a massively huge storm on Thursday night and we got a bunch of water in our basement. ANNOYING - seeing as our basement is finished and all the water just gets sucked up into the carpet instead of running to the drain. Things are still drying out. I think we've got a plan to try to get some things fixed with that, seeing as this isn't the first time this has happened. Here's hoping for no massive storms before that happens!

spelling debate!

There has been a discussion going on in our house for a couple weeks about Matea. It has come to our attention that many people see the name "Matea" and instinctively pronounce it mah-tee-ah rather than mah-tay-ah, the way we pronounce it. It was never even a thought of ours that people might pronounce it with a "tee" sound, so it has come to a surprise to us that so many people have! Of course, looking at the name, I can understand the confusion.

So this brings us to the question - do we change the spelling of her name? The spelling that comes to mind is "Mataya," which I think would dispel any confusion of pronunciation. Aaron isn't a huge fan of this spelling, mainly because culturally people are adding "y" to names to jazz them up. I do agree with him that our original spelling seems more classy. So we aren't sure if we should change it or not.

Thoughts, anyone?

photography

I just updated our "adoption timeline" thingee to the right...sometimes I still can't believe that the word "referral" is over there! It seems like we waited so long for that one phone call....and the word "referral" was replaced with "a little girl" which has now been replaced with "Matea." It still seems kind of surreal.

Anyway.

Over the last five weeks I took a community ed photography class with a friend of mine. I really learned a LOT about how to use my camera. The best part was learning how to take pictures of flowing water and give it that creamy effect. For our last class we went on an outing to Lester Park and practiced some techniques and settings. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from our outing.
I definitely have a LOT more to learn...I can think of some ways to adjust my camera settings to make some of these pictures better. Now I'm keeping my eyes open for a tripod so I can continue to practice! I really have no idea how people become great photographers before digital. I can hit a button on my computer and it tells me exactly every single setting for every single picture. It makes it easy to look back and see what worked and what didn't. Did they write down all the settings that they used? No thank you! So yeah, hopefully I can continue to practice and learn how to use my camera. Now the question is - how good will I be able to get at taking pictures of a certain little girl?

Court date

Another update on our process to bring home Matea Mimi. We received an email from our specialist at CHS which said that we have a tentative court date of June 9th! We don't have to do anything for this - it is all happening over in Ethiopia. If all goes well, on June 9th she will legally become our daughter. We will then get a birth certificate and a travel date, and we will be on our way to Africa. It is looking like we may be traveling at the end of July or sometime in August.

One last thing about the court date- sometimes things don't go exactly right in court and the case gets re-scheduled. I'm not even entirely sure what keeps the cases from going "through" - it seems to things completely out of our control, for example, paperwork that we have nothing to do with. We will know the outcome of our court hearing a few days after it happens.

So HAPPY FRIDAY!

anatomy of a name

Well folks - we decided on a name! Drum roll please... our daughter's name is Matea Mimi Peterson. Read on if you want the story...

Obviously we have been in this adoption process since March of 2007. We have spent time off and on talking and thinking about names - we narrowed down our boys names really quickly. Girls names...no such luck. For MONTHS we tried to figure out a girls name. I liked some and Aaron hated them, Aaron liked some and I hated them...some were too girly, some were too weird, some were too normal...you know the drill. Anyway, we kind of figured we'd get a boy so it wouldn't really matter if we had a girls name narrowed down or not.

So then, of course, we got our referral of Mimi. We knew we wanted to keep Mimi as part of her name. At this point Aaron decided that he really wanted a name that had a special meaning to it. So, that knocked out most of the names that we had on our "If We Can't Think Of Anything Better" list. Back to the drawing board, the name books, and the internet. We started looking mostly at meanings, and a few days ago we narrowed down the ones we liked to five.

So we've spent the entire weekend flip-flopping between five different names. Yesterday we narrowed it down to four. I was having a hard time wanting to commit to anything, and neither one of us really wanted to give in to the other's favorite. In all seriousness, I think we were driving ourselves nuts.

Today we went over to Jen's for dinner. Aaron made this declaration: "I'm going to go to the bathroom, and by the time I come out we are going to have a name." A few minutes later..."Her name is Matea." So, that's it! That's her name. Matea is Hebrew and it means "God's gift." What a fitting name for our girl!

Update on Mimi

We got a fun email today from our specialist at CHS - Mimi got checked out developmentally on Monday and we got the checklist today! She is able to roll over, she laughs, plays with her hands, reaches for objects, and babbles, along with other things! We are sure looking forward to hearing her laugh in person. All in all, things look great, and we are so thankful for that.
If you think of it, please be praying that Mimi stays healthy, gains weight (she currently weighs 11 pounds), and that God will be preparing her to attach to us.