It’s been 2 weeks since we’ve arrived home from Ethiopia with this handsome guy.

Gavin smiles a lot, seems to like everyone he meets and gets very cranky when he’s hungry. He was born in Assela just over 5 months ago and he’s our first child. Right now he has a bit of a cold, or sinus infection of some sort that our doc is helping us work through, but otherwise we’re all doing fine after the trip.

Adopting Gavin has been an almost 2 year effort for us, and for me it was easily the most arduous undertaking I’ve attempted in my life. Since I’m really just around to carry things, it must have been even harder on Cindy since she did all the real work. Thankfully, all the big stuff went as planned and now we have Gavin as a part of our family.

Before I go further, I need to thank everyone that’s helped us along the way. We had great support from our adoption agency - Children’s Hope, our home study agency Lutheran Child and Family Services, her former employer, my employer - Viewpoints, our travel agent - Golden Rule Travel, family and friends. We certainly couldn’t have done it without you.

I haven’t written much about the adoption so far, but now that we’re home and a bit settled I think I’ll finally give it a shot. I may delve into it a little, but I don’t plan to discuss much about the paperwork side to the process. It’s highly specific to the agency, the country we adopted from, the state we live in, and is constantly evolving. If you are interested in hearing more about our experience on that side of the process (or anything else), please email me at jro@codegrinder.com, and I’ll be happy to recount it in as gory detail as I can remember.

Look at More Pictures of Gavin!

This series of posts will go on both my more personal blog and on my more tech blog. This has been an incredible journey and I feel that it’s significant to both sides of my life.