We Finally Get to Tell Him!

The day finally came! The day that we could tell Jean that, contrary to what he thought, we DID want him to become part of our family!

The last couple of summers, it has taken about four months before adoptive families were able to tell their host child that they were adopting them, as they had to wait until they were very far into the official adoption process. Thankfully however, this summer Colombia has decided to allow families to tell their host children as soon as the the process has officially started, with approval of the Letter of Intent. This means that Jean only had to wait one month to find out. Still painful for him (and us!) but much better than waiting four or more months.

In early September we got word that our Letter of Intent had been approved, and that they would inform Jean that we were adopting him just before our next Skype call. We could not wait to finally be able to talk about it with him! I imagined how the call would go and prepared what I would say. We did a test run 30 minutes prior to verify that computer microphones and webcams were all working properly.

At the appointed time, the call came in, but neither Tom or Jean could see the boys and I. They could hear us, but not see us. We could not figure out what the problem was. I called my tech-savvy brother-in-law in Florida and he informed me that Skype had just put out an update, and that if we didn't all have the same version of Skype that might be the problem. Sure enough, my version of Skype was not as up-to-date as Tom's and Colombia's, so I downloaded the update. After installing it, a message popped up saying I needed to reboot my computer. I rebooted and watched the screen turn black, then come back to life with the blue screen. "Wait a minute," I thought, as a message appeared - OH NO!

This was one of those random Windows updates that they don't warn you about, they just do without asking if it is a good time. It was SO stressful and frustrating, the whole time I was worried because it was towards the end of the work day, and I knew that the worker that Jean was with had to leave soon.

Thirty-five minutes later ....

The update finally completed, I was able to be added on to the Skype call and finally we could talk about the adoption! Jean had been told about the adoption just prior to the call, but then he had had to sit through about 45 minutes total of technical difficulty. So our "moment" wasn't quite what we expected it to be!

"So Jean," I said, "I think you know that we wrote a letter saying that we would like you to be part of our family." He smiled. "Does he say yes or no?" Tom asked the interpreter, "Sí, o no?"

Here is the video so you can see for yourself what Jean said:

But there was something else we needed to tell him.

"Jean," I said, "we want you to know that from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to adopt you, but we weren't allowed to tell you. We knew we wanted you to be part of our family before we even met you in person. We so wanted to be able to tell you before you went home. It made us so sad that you thought we didn't want to adopt you, but we had to follow the rules and wait until we had permission to tell you. We want you to be part of our family forever, and we can't wait until you can come back to us!"

And now he knows!