We’ve nearly been in the U.S. for a year now. Time flies! By the time we actually return to Indonesia, we will have lived in our Nampa apartment longer than we lived in Nabire! Crazy! But we are SOOO excited to get back to our life there and Nathan cannot wait to fly again.
In the meantime, we try to have little tastes of “home” whenever we can.
One of our favorite easy meals in Indonesia is Nasi Goreng Ayam– Chicken Fried Rice. You can buy nasi goreng seasoning packets there, just add chicken and rice! So simple. We brought several of these packets home with us, and so every once and while we break one out for a yummy taste of home.
You can buy these packets on Amazon, if you’re willing to pay $6.00 in shipping for $1.00 spice packets…yikes! The packaging is slightly different since the Amazon ones are “export quality,” but it’s the same thing.
These are no ordinary powdery spice packets though! They have oil and chili paste mixed right in there for extra yummy goodness so it comes out more like a goo. (Does it go without saying that I first cooked the rice and chicken before adding the seasoning? because that’s what I did.)
I know it doesn’t look like much, but I promise, it’s delicious and it tastes like home.
Our sweet baby boy is 10 weeks old. How the heck did that happen? He’s SO big!
We’ve been asked a lot recently about our future plans, so here they are:
-We just had our first post-placement meeting with our social worker this past Thursday. Everything went well.
-We will be traveling to Illinois at the end of June. Elias is in serious need of a Cubbies t-shirt!
-In mid-July we will meet with our social worker again and then hopefully be released to go to court to finalize the adoption.
-Scheduling of the court date depends on how busy the court is. We’ve heard that Canyon Country (the county we currently live in) is very adoption friendly and tries really hard to get those things on the docket! Yay! Hopefully we can go to court in August or September.
-Once the adoption is final, we will receive a birth certificate with Elias’s name on it (his current birth certificate has the name given by his birth mom), as well as our names listed as his parents. At this point we can apply for a passport for him…and then an Indonesian visa.
-Once we have visas in all of our passports, we can return to Indonesia! Yipee! We’re hoping that this can happen by the Fall, but it all depends on how quickly we can get visas. Governments don’t always operate on our schedule 
SO…that’s it. HOPEFULLY we’ll be back in Indonesia by the Fall and HOPEFULLY Elias loves to fly because it’s loooooong trip!
…now that I’m a mom. BTW, saying “I’m a mom” never gets old. I’m a mom. I’m a mom. I’m a mom.
I’m sure all you other mamas out there can relate!
1. Blog
2. Make a bottle.
3. Eat
4. Text.
5. Put on Make-up
6. Type an email
7. Do my hair.
8. Cook a meal.
9. Open a jar.
10. Drive (while my other hand is reaching in the back seat to comfort a crying baby).
I’m a mom.
Happy Mother’s Day!
We are visiting Phoenix right now, enjoying the heat for awhile. (Elias may as well get used to it now!)
Last weekend, we had the rare opportunity of getting all ELEVEN of Nathan’s Grandma’s great-grandchildren together. Eleven, ages 6 and under. Now, getting all of them in a picture together, smiling and looking at the camera at the same time is just IMPOSSIBLE. But we did our best…
Setting up…
Elias is crying…Grandma is trying to soothe him and therefore not looking…Plus only about 4 of the kids are looking.
No flash…sigh.
ESCAPE! (and another one is missing completely)
Annnndddd…that’s as good as it gets.
Any of you geniuses out there have hints on how to get this many kids to sit still and smile for a picture?? Because I haven’t a clue.
1. Elias, the name we chose, is the Greek form of Elijah. It means “Jehovah is God.”
2. Tate, the name chosen by his birth mom, means “cheerful” or “he who talks a lot.” Let’s go with “cheerful.” :)
3. Elias was born 9 months after we returned to the U.S. from Indonesia. He was growing away while we completed our home study and we didn’t even know it, but God did!
4. Elias was born exactly 6 years to the month from when we first started trying to have a child.
5. Elias’s first road trip was the 4-hour drive home from the hospital–he was just two days old. This kid is a traveller from the start!
6. One of the reason’s that Elias’s birth mom chose us is because she was excited about the adventure he will be able to have in Indonesia–the very thing we thought would turn birth mom’s off. God is awesome isn’t He??
#lovingourson #hesthebestever #jumpingonthehashtagbandwagon
I’ve heard so many stories about the moment a mom lays eyes on her child for the first time. The absolute joy and love. I really didn’t know if I would have that experience because I didn’t carry my baby for 9 months. I didn’t even know about him until 8 weeks before his birth. In fact, he was born and I didn’t know about it until about 12 hours later. And even then, we first had to do an hour’s worth of paperwork and then drive 4 hours to the city where he was born before we could meet him.
We arrived at the hospital 16.5 hours after his birth and sat in the lobby to wait for our case worker. We sat and waited. It was really only about 10 minutes, but it seemed longer. Somewhere in that building was our son, our son who we hadn’t met. Our son who we knew very little about. Our son, who had no idea that the woman he had known for the last nine months would not be his mommy.
Our case worker finally arrived and we went up to the maternity ward to meet with the hospital social worker. She brought us into the nursery to introduce us to the nurse that had been caring for Elias since his birth mom’s release from the hospital. The nurse told us a bit about him: his weight and height. His eating habits. She described him as “spunky and oh by the way, that’s him.” Turns out he had been sitting in that room that whole time. We were well aware that there was a baby there, but we didn’t know he was OUR baby. Suddenly, the nurse’s words faded to the back of my consciousness…I walked over to the bassinet to see my child for the first time. There he was, tiny and perfect. The nurse told us we couldn’t pick him up in the nursery because technically we weren’t allowed in there. So we just stared at him with disbelief. Were they really going to just give us this baby? Could my 6 years of waiting for a child really be over?
The nurse wheeled the bassinet down the hall to our room, slowly. So very slowly. We awkwardly followed behind. Trying to speed her up. Finally we got to our room and we were able to pick him up. That’s when the joy came. I stared at his tiny perfect face with tears in my eyes. Our long wait for this little baby was over. He’s ours. Totally ours.
And we never have to give him up.
We have a 4-week old! For reals.
Let’s back this gravy train up shall we?
On January 3 we turned in our profile book…the book that the birth mom’s look at to choose their adoptive family. We fully expected to be waiting around for 6-8 months so you can imagine our surprise when we got a phone call on January 15 that we had been chosen by a birth mom, the very first birth mom (and also the very last as it turns out) to ever see our profile book. 12 days on the waiting list. We broke agency records. I think maybe God had something to do with it 
Eight weeks later, on March 11 Elias Tate Fagerlie was born. He was 8 lbs, 2 oz and 21.25 inches long. We received a phone call on the 12th informing us of his birth and we headed out to the hospital to pick up our son! He came home on the 13th.
Now he is four weeks old and growing like a champion. He’s the best baby ever! Like, really. We’re totally unbiased. For legal reasons, we were not allowed to share this publicly until now. This is also the major reason that I haven’t really blogged for the last three months…how do I write about anything else except our new little guy??
There are many many more blogs to come, but for now I’ll leave you with some pictures.
Has it really been since January 28 that I last posted. Sigh…so sorry. Truthfully I find blogging in America much more difficult than blogging in Papua. Regular life here seem so, well, regular. I am sure that you don’t want to hear all about my trips to Walmart….or maybe you do. But Walmart has become regular. It’s lost some of the excitement that it used to hold. Don’t get my wrong, I am still ever so grateful for a store full of food…but the aisle of 10,000 choices of toilet paper no longer surprises me. (By the way, I’ll still buying Charmin. Those little bears really are cute aren’t they?)
Meanwhile, we are waiting and prepping for baby….and dreaming of life in Papua again. Funny how that goes, huh? In Papua, we dream of America…well mostly family and food in America. And in America we dream of Papua, life in Papua…all of it.
Here’s to returning to Papua as a family of three…someday…in the future…can’t wait!!
(Artist’s Rendering: 3 Fagerlies in Nabire. All Rights Reserved)
When I was 9, we moved to my grandparents house. They actually moved out, we (“we” being my parents) bought the house from them and we moved in….but when you’re 9, you just say, “we moved to grandma’s house.” When grandma and grandpa moved out, they left this rocking chair behind.
I love this rocking chair. When we inherited it, it didn’t exactly look like this. It looked more like this:
Ignore my cute little brother in the front…he was a clown for Halloween; check out the rocking chair in the background. It was bright red when we inherited it and it had definitely seen better days. But I loved it because it reminded my of grandma. Grandma rocked all of her babies in it (she had 5) and all of her grandbabies in it (she had 11). This rocking chair is old and had the perfect, soothing creak. I’m pretty sure that Grandma bought it at a garage sale, so who knows how old it really is.
Several years after we inherited it, my mom had it reupholstered and fixed up a bit. So it got new fabric and it’s lost a bit of it’s creak. But it still holds all of the history and memories.
Now the rocking chair is sitting in our nursery, just waiting to be used again. Someday, I will rock my baby in it. Three generations of babies, one rocking chair. LOVE IT.
P.S.-Since I posted a picture of my brother when he was a kid, I’ll keep things all even and post a picture of myself as a kid too. This is from Halloween that same year…
P.P.S- my other Grandma made both of our Halloween costumes…Grandmas are awesome aren’t they?
Brrrr. (Please note that I was stopped when I took this picture )
It’s cold, but the ice crystals on the trees are so beautiful! We’re trying to enjoy it while we can!
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