Day 4 - A family is born

9:00 AM

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.

Never has that statement rung so true!

Just after lunch today (=8 PM Norway time) we will meet with a representative of the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (=barnevernet), our interpreter, our lawyer, a social worker from ICBF, and a child psychologist for a brief discussion of our adoption and to check that all documents are in perfect order for the pending trial.


At the end of that meeting, we finally get to meet our child and take him back to the hotel with us. From then on we shall stay together for always!

Of course, we have been preparing for this moment for ages.

We have brought toys, crackers, tons of kleenexes, and our video camera, especially for the first meeting. I guess we are as ready as we'll ever be. But it still feels like we are leaping into the unknown!

9:00 PM

Wow! So that's what being the parents of a three-year old is like!

Everything has gone very well. Everyone here is really helpful and professional: The hotel staff, the lawyers, our interpreter, and of course the people from ICBF have all assisted in this type of process many times before, and the other four families that are staying here had already received their children and gave us good advice and encouraging words along the way.



Our beautiful son is now fast asleep (finally!) in our bed (note: not in the one we prepared especially for him!), and we are exhausted, but happy, happy, happy!!!!

He is a very active little bunch of energy when he's awake, and we've had our hands full trying to keep up with him all afternoon. The hot weather is not the only reason Ulf broke a sweat and had to change his own shirt three times between lunch and supper!

We did as we were advised to do, and asked tons of questions about him at the meeting today, because once the adoption goes through, no one is allowed to ask anything about his past until he becomes of age and can formally ask those questions himself. And we got plenty of answers.

We also asked about his habits, his likes and dislikes, his favorites and fears, and so on. We were told that he eats anything except carrots and coffee (which they emphasized, because apparently it is uncommon for three year old children in Colombia not to drink coffee!), and that he loves bread and crackers, but this turned out not to be true, at least not for his first dinner with us. We didn't try to give him coffee, but he refused to eat lasagne and also the sandwich we got him instead. All he ate was fruit, plus a lot of fruit juice and water. (We were probably partly to blame, having fed him candy and crackers all afternoon!)

Of all the toys we got for him, only two were appreciated, but he really loves those two! A radio controlled car and a little soccer ball. He really showed talent, so now we have high hopes that one day he will become a famous soccer player and make us all rich! But while playing alone with papá (Ulf) in the yard outside our hotel room, he got a little carried away and ran head-first straight into the protruding corner of a stone wall, causing both a little bleeding and a bump in the head. The shocked look on mamá's (Jelena's) face when she came back after having been gone only 15 minutes and saw her boy with band-aid on the head, reminded quite a lot of Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream"…

Except during ten seconds after hurting his head and five minutes after we put him to bed (i.e., until we let him sleep in our bed), he has not cried at all. He laughs and smiles and hugs us a lot, and although not very talkative, asks when he wants something and answers the few yes/no-questions we are capable of ask in Spanish. But mostly he just does things himself instead of asking for them. He can dress himself, eat and drink without aid, go potty when he needs to, and when we were getting ready for bed, he found the baby bottle we had bought just in case (but didn't think we would need), opened it and filled it with juice from a carton, and put the top back on. So of course we let him drink from that until he fell asleep.

He has never been sick before (that is one of the questions we asked), but now he has a little cold and his nose is a little clogged. Jelena has mixed feelings about sleeping beside two snoring men tonight!

He came with nothing except what he was wearing, and one toy bear (presumably his favorite). No extra clothes, nothing. We knew his size, so we have brought some clothes for him from home, but we need much, much more, so tomorrow we will take him shopping!

Please, everyone, be patient and don't ask for pictures yet. We have taken many and are dying to show them, but until the adoption process is completed (three to five weeks from now) and we are his legal parents, we are not allowed to post them on-line.