Eating Green Beans

Ok, so we haven't posted any updates in forever, and way too much has happened to summarize right now, but I just wanted to share a video clip that I thought was really funny.

You have to understand that Aaron really doesn't like to eat green beans (or food in general for that matter)...



This continued for quite a while (lots of green beans) - Sara is a very creative mommy!!

To My Wife

Happy Anniversary!!

We've been married 7 years as of today, and each one has been a great year! For those of you who don't know Sara personally, she is a very kind and compassionate woman who strives after God's heart.

She is also really, really, really cute. :)

One of the things that always surprises me is how creative she can be! This year for Father's Day she arranged to have some Daddy pictures put into the adoption newsletter our old agency puts out, and she also secretly arranged for some family pictures, which turned out really well:

She is always coming up with fun new places to go with Aaron (which always makes me depressed when I have to go to work and miss out on that day's activities), but she saves the really good places for when I can go, too. She is truly a blessing to me and brings so much joy and spice to my life! I LOVE YOU!

Adoption Update

We got two pieces of good news today!

First, we got our fingerprint appointment back from Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS), which is actually an important step in getting our visa paperwork completed (for our 2nd adoption). Our appointment is on July 14th - our 7-year wedding anniversary!

Our second piece of good news is that we now have our official court date to finalize Aaron's adoption in Nebraska. Technically, Aaron's adoption was final back in Vietnam, but here in Nebraska we actually have to re-adopt him again so the state will issue him a Nebraska birth certificate, etc. Our court date is now set for July 29th. This is when we can officially change his name from his Vietnamese to his American name! By Nebraska law, we had to be home for six months (and complete our 6-month post-placement homestudy visit) before we could file for this re-adoption. By the time we got everything done and to the lawyer......, well, it's been ten months now. :)

That's it for now!

Our Summer so Far

Wow, it's been an exciting summer around here!

There is so much to say that I'm really not sure where to start. Hopefully we'll be able to blog about each of these in more detail later, but for now I think we'll have to let the pictures do the talking!

Here's a quick summary of our summer so far!

April 19 - Our first "Family Vacation Day". We decided to set aside one day a month to do some around-town activities making memories just as a family (no other friends, etc.). We went to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) museum because Aaron loves planes, and then went to Henry Doorly Zoo so that Aaron could ride his very first "Choo-choo train" (he loves trains, too!).

Click here to the full-size slideshow of our Family Vacation Day #1.


May 3 - Our big trip to Estes Park, Colorado, which you already saw in our last post.

May 10 - Family Vacation Day #2 - We explored Fontanelle Forest where Aaron got to run up and down the boardwalk while looking at wild turkeys, etc. Then we went to nearby Lincoln, NE to visit their Children's museum. That museum has about everything possible a kid could get excited about (trucks/motorcyces/balloons, pretend houses/stores, space shuttles, water toys, tunnels, and more).

Click here to see the full-size slideshow of Family Vacation Day #2.


May 23 - Our very first camping trip! Ok, so we were a little nuts... We had a great plan to go camping with all of Chip's family (that live around here) over Memorial Day weekend to Indian Cave State Park. Unfortunately, Chip's brother and his family had to cancel out for most of the weekend when some stuff came up at the last minute, so it was just Chip's parents and us. We actually had a ton of fun, but we managed to pick the rainiest weekend of the year (we neglected to check the weather forecast). There was crazy rain, thunder/lightning, 60+Mph winds, etc. Oh yeah, and we were camping in a tent, not a camper. The tent leaked a little bit (somehow it always dripped right on top of Aaron!). We also had raccoons break into the food tent and try to steal food every night (and make a general mess of things in the process). But, we had the campground completely to ourselves for a couple days and Aaron had a blast exploring the outdoor world. He loved the tent, and we got some great memories. We ended up only staying for 3 days (out of 5) because the weather forecast started calling for possible hail and tornadoes. :) All in all, it was a lot of fun, and very tiring! Thanks G'ma & G'pa for all of your hard work!

Here's the full-size slideshow of our First Camping Trip.




May 25 - Sprinkler Fun! Since we came back early from camping, we had some extra time around the house. We pulled out a gift someone gave Aaron last fall - an "Octopus Sprinkler". It was Aaron's first time in a sprinkler, and after a little close scrutiny he loved playing in it! A couple days later a friend came over to play in it (and share popsicles). A couple weeks later G'pa and G'ma Shadbolt took him to a park in Fremont, NE that has (free) outdoor water sprinklers, fountains, etc. and he had a lot of fun there, too. He LOVES water! :)



Click here to see the full-size slideshow of Aaron's Sprinkler Fun!

Whew! Well, that at least covers the summer up through last week! I think Aaron absolutely loves the summer (and so do mom and dad) - there's just so much fun stuff to do!

Colorado Fun

Two weeks ago we went on our first "real vacation" with Aaron! We joined some friends of ours, two other couples (each with one baby), and made a quick road-trip out to Estes Park, Colorado. We're all from eastern Nebraska, which means this would be a ~8 hour road-trip under normal circumstances. As part of our parent initiation, we had the bright idea of trying to drive through the night so that the babies would sleep the whole way there.....yeah, right. All that really meant was that no one slept well that night so the whole first day was spent recovering and nap schedules were kind of messed up for Aaron the whole trip! :)

Nonetheless, we had a lot of fun and learned a lot about how to travel with Aaron. Sara did a great job of packing all sorts of fun new toys for Aaron, including small cars, motorcycles, helicopters, books, and more (she went garage-sale shopping that week), so that really helped. Aaron actually handled the road-trip very well (we drove during the day on the way back), and we all decided that made a lot more sense!

Anyway, enough ramblings, here are some fun pictures from our trip. Of the kids, Aaron was the oldest (at 20 months), then Naomi at 15 months and Natalie was 7 months. You can click the play button to see the slideshow below, or you can view the full-screen version.




It was kind of cold there - it snowed the day we arrived and finally warmed up again the day we left! :) The guys still went hiking, though, and it was a lot of fun.

Some of the other cool things on this trip: Aaron has learned how to smile upon request, loves pine cones, and says the word "Elk" because we saw so many of them on this trip (it comes out sounding more like "ihl").

As always, vacations are always over too soon!

Adoption Update

Well, we finished our home study and we were officially approved a couple weeks ago! With S. Korea adoptions, our homestudy document (which is now done) is essentially all the paperwork there is to do. Our homestudy has been sent to the Holt headquarters in Oregon, where it will be sent on to Korea so that we can be matched with our child! It's hard to believe things are moving this fast! Of course, this part of the wait (waiting for your referral) will probably be a good 10-12 months still. Once we receive the referral it'll probably be another 4-6 months before travel.

We still haven't picked out any boy or girl names yet - good thing we have something to keep us occupied while we wait! :)

Starting our Homestudy!

Our second adoption just seems to be going so fast for us! We sent Holt our initial application on Sunday, January 27th and heard that we were given approval to begin the process on Tuesday, January 29th. We were surprised to get a call only two days later!

It took us until March 24th to complete all of the homestudy paperwork. (This is mostly all of the paperwork required to adopt from Korea since there is no dossier process for this program.) The paperwork included questions about our respective childhoods and our parenting styles, physicals, an FBI background check, sex offender check, birth certificates, etc. Sara's parents had to watch Aaron one Friday night into Saturday morning for us to get enough time to complete everything. Thanks, Mom and Dad!!

We completed our first 4 classes of Adoptive Parent Training on April 4th and 5th. It was fun to meet so many other couples who were adopting from Korea through Holt. It was an interesting class because the students all had so much experience with adoption related issues. Our class included students who were adoptees themselves, 2 couples (including us) who had adopted previously, a couple in which the husband had adopted siblings, and a woman who grew up in India who married an American man (She was able to provide some insight into living in a new culture). All of us could have practically hosted the class ourselves once we combined all of our unique experiences!!! We were able to attend this class because Chip's parents watched Aaron while we attended. Thanks, Mom and Dad!!

Tomorrow we officially begin our homestudy. We will most likely have two homestudy meetings, one this Thursday and one the following Thursday. It amazes me to think that we are already this far along in the process! I told Chip tonight that I wanted to begin thinking about decorating another nursery!! Yea!

We are so blessed that God chose us to be parents through adoption. It was His plan for us all along and we feel amazed to see what joy and fulfillment it brings to our lives. God chose Aaron as a perfect fit for our family and we can't wait to see who the new addition will be!

I would guess we may get a referral another year from now or so. We'll keep you all updated as we know more!

Salsa

Just had to share a funny picture... We went out for Mexican this week, and discovered that Aaron loves salsa! He will dip the chip in the salsa, suck the salsa off the chip and then re-use the same chip to go after more salsa!

Our Announcement!

Well there's been a lot of stuff happening around here the last several months. I know we haven't been very good about blogging, but hopefully that'll get better sometime!

But real quick, we wanted to share some exciting news with everyone... We've decided to start our second adoption process! We are in the midst of filling out the paperwork to adopt a baby boy or girl from South Korea. We sent in our first application form back at the end of January, but we're just now getting most of the paperwork going (it's a lot harder to find time to fill out paperwork these days!). We thought and prayed a lot about this, especially about which country to adopt from. We loved our experience adopting Aaron from Vietnam and he has been such a blessing to our lives. However, the U.S. and Vietnam aren't getting along right now (as far as international adoptions are concerned) and the whole situation is very unstable (and slow). In contrast, South Korea is a very stable program (and South Korea doesn't require us to compile a dossier - so there's a LOT less paperwork!).

One of the hard things about making that decision was that we have to use a different adoption agency (we loved using CHI), but this time we're using Holt. Thankfully, Holt has an office right here in town, so it does make our process a lot easier. We don't know much yet, only that our baby could be a boy or girl, typically 8-12 months old or so. We probably won't get a referral (picture) until January or February of 2009, and be able to bring him/her home around July/August of 2009. Aaron will be about 3 years old by the time he/she comes home, so there will be about two years age difference between them.

Oh yes, Happy Easter! Here are a few pictures of Aaron recently with some Easter presents from his grandparents. Hopefully we'll get a few more cute pictures tomorrow. :)

His t-shirt says "When God made me, he was just showing off". :)

Here's a quick slideshow of some pictures from this month (click on it to see the full size pictures)

Welcome to our New Blog!

Hi Everybody!

I hope you're able to find our new blog easily enough. Our old blog location had a yearly fee, so we decided to expand the scope (beyond just Aaron) and make a more permanent Needham Family Blog. We're pretty excited about some of the fun features of this blog (notice the picture gallery on your right and the family video section below!).

If you want to catch up on old news, our old blog is still at its old location, but I'm not sure how much longer they'll keep it up. Maybe we'll get ambitious and try to transfer the posts to this blog just for history's sake. :)