He’s coming.

Two years ago, we started the process to grow our family again.  But long before that, I knew that I had more children out there.  I didn’t know anything specific…no names, faces, ages, or even gender.  I just knew someone was out there…..waiting.

Now we know.

We have another son, and he is beautiful.

In February, we received word from our adoption agency about a child they thought might be “ours.”   After we received his file, we decided to spend a few days pouring ourselves out in prayer for discernment and direction from the Lord….but really, from the moment I laid eyes on a picture of his sweet face, I knew.   He’s one of mine.

We had to wait silently for a few weeks, unable to share the news until we had permission from the Colombian government to do so, but last week they stamped the paperwork and made the match official…We’re bringing our son home in a matter of weeks.

His name is Luís.   He’s 3 years old.  (Yes, we’re about to have 3 three-year-olds.  Pray for our sanity).  He lives in an orphanage in another city here in Colombia, and he has been there his entire life.  He only speaks spanish.  He has some special needs that will require a bit of therapy and lots of love.

And he’s my son.    

I can’t get over it.  I know his name.  I’ve seen his face.   After years of waiting, I know who he is.

I CANNOT WAIT.  I cannot wait until I can meet him.  Until I can scoop him up for the first time and kiss his cheeks.  Until I can get him out of an orphanage and into my arms.  Until I can introduce him to his two very excited brothers.  Until he’s finally home.

^ proud brothers

A few days after we received his file, I had his picture sitting on a stack of papers on my desk.  At that point we hadn’t talked to the boys about it yet, because we hadn’t decided quite yet how to do it.  But they spotted his picture.

“Who’s that?”  Barrett asked, pointing to Luís’s face.

“This is Luís,” I said, handing him the picture, but not sure whether I should give them any more information just yet.

“Oh… Luís,” he said, examining the picture closely. “Look, Noah, it’s Luís,” and passed the picture to his brother.

Noah reached out, took the picture, studied it thoughtfully, then shouted, “Mama, HE’S COMING!  Luís is coming!”

That’s right, boys.  He’s coming.  Luís is coming…Soon.

April Instagram Roundup

I’ve gotta do better at writing regularly.  My goal for April was one writing day per week.  Obviously, that didn’t happen.  Oh well.  I will try again (:

In the meantime, here’s my photo roundup from last month (from instagram and other iphone pics)…. enjoy!

The weight of waiting.

I’ve written this post about 18 times now, and I keep deleting it and starting over.   I don’t know why.  It’s nothing necessarily profound or controversial, and arguably it might not even be interesting.  Yet I still can’t seem to wrap words around it.  But I guess it’s still worth getting down in writing.

Waiting is hard.

Hilda (the niñera) and I have been talking about that alot lately (in spanish, which is also hard), because both of us are sitting right in the middle of a season of waiting.  We’re waiting for two different things, but they’re both things that are good and beautiful, and God promises that they’ll be a blessing.  We keep coming back to the fact that waiting is always hard…especially waiting for the good things from God, but it’s also always worth it.   Even the wait itself is a blessing.

But in this case, it’s sometimes hard to see it that way.  I’m waiting to bring my soon-to-be-adopted children home.

In many ways it’s nothing new, because we’ve been waiting for almost 2 years now.  But as time marches on, I am more and more aware that I have children out there growing up without me.  There are years that I am missing, vital life stages passing by without hugs and kisses and snuggles from their mama.  I’m ready to bring them home.  To kiss all my babies goodnight and tuck them in under one roof, instead of wondering if they’re sitting in a dark orphanage somewhere in a room full of other equally neglected children.

It is always heavy on my mind. Sometimes it’s back in the recesses of my thoughts, sometimes it’s right in the front and pushing me to tears throughout the day. But it’s always there.  And it’s hard to think of the wait itself as a blessing when there are little lives at stake.  The longer the wait, the longer my children sit in an orphanage somewhere.  That’s hard to swallow.   And who knows how many I have out there?  For this adoption it could just be one,  but maybe there are 2 or 3 more out there that I’ll have to wait a few more years for.  Years.   I hate the wait for my sake, but even more than that, I despise the wait for their sake.

And yet, still, I know it to be true.  Somehow, this stage is a blessing.  Somehow, I’m trusting the Lord that the reason all my other babies aren’t here under my roof with me is because he knows best, and right now, this is what is best.  Somehow.  If I believe that his ways are higher and his timing is perfect, I have to believe that to be true even in this.  Even while I wait.  Even while they wait….in an orphanage.

I do believe that.  God has taken me through several phases of life where I’ve had to cling to that truth, phases where the waiting was hard.  And yet none of them were this hard.  In the past, I was waiting for an answer, or something to come to fruition, or a circumstance to change.  In many ways, the things I was waiting for were abstract.  They were concepts and ideas.  But these are lives.  Real children in real orphanages with real hurts and needs.  I don’t know how to explain it.  But God is asking me to trust in his timing on a whole new level right now.

Like I said, waiting is hard.

We have paperwork sitting in a Colombian government office at this very moment, waiting to be approved.  God could have that paperwork processed, stamped, and cleared this afternoon if he chose to.  And he might.  Or he might not.  Here in Latin America, things move at a slower pace… and that includes processing paperwork.  But either way, at the end of the day I will choose to praise him for how today turned out, because whether our file sat untouched on a desk all day long, or whether it was passed through the chain of approval, it wasn’t an accident.

I cling to the fact that he is sovereign, that he loves these children more than I ever could, that one day I will actually see the beautiful part that this wait played in the bigger story of our family.  And I learn once again that it is good and sweet to trust in the Lord….because right now all I can do is wait.

March Instagram Roundup

Since I can’t take my good camera all over Bogotá with me for fear of it getting snatched, I have started taking alot more pictures with my phone.  And since posting on Instagram is much easier than posting it on the blog or facebook, that’s where most of my photos end up these days.

Here’s a roundup of last month’s photos: (click to view larger)

Park duty…daddy-style. It takes a village (:

my sweet boys at today’s Easter/bday party for a teammate

Evening stroll. Full moon. Boys trying to see who can touch it first.

After a gray cloudy week, I’m happy to see such a beautiful Sunday morning in Bogota out my front window!

Playing in the curtains is not allowed around here. Obviously this is a well enforced rule.

SuperBearMan getting ready for an early morning mission

Told them to smile and say cheese. They both froze me out in the exact same way.

Noah, Barrett and the neighbor playing outside… Toddler Spanish is awesome.

Got to introduce myself to my newest teammate this morning. Sweet little Carter Kines, who I basically claim as my own (:

Night walks

Love having a full produce basket for a ridiculously low price…Onions, tomatoes, plantains, mangoes, apples, bananas, pineapple, potatoes, carrots, and yucca.

Rough-housing rules in the Bonham house: 1) only on the rug. 2) it must be voluntary for all involved. 3) to confirm this, you must ask “do you want to wrestle?” before you tackle anyone. 4) no crying aloud. Sometimes Nate and Josh don’t follow all the rules.

This morning we opened the last card from the big box that came in November. I have LOVED having 3 months of mail to open every day! And I LOVE having sweet words of encouragement covering two full walls of my dining room(: THANK YOU!!

Family time…. Boys holding hands while riding on our shoulders on our walk home tonight. (:

“Here, Noah, rub my feet.” And he did it. It’s good to be a twin.

[see all my instagram photos here]

mi barrio

There are alot of things about living in a big city that I never thought I’d get used to.  And really, I don’t know if I ever will.  It’s different, and for a Mississippi girl, the Big City culture shock is just as strong as the Latin American one.   And by big, I mean BIG…10 MILLION people in this little town of mine, and even though I’ll live in Bogotá for 2 years, there’s no way I’ll ever see all of it.   And even if I could somehow manage to pay a visit to every little part of this place, I could never show it to you because there are lots of areas where hauling a camera around really isn’t a great idea if you want to keep it.

…BIG city…  (click on this picture to see a bigger version)

But I CAN take pictures all over my little corner of Bogotá, so I thought I’d give you a little virtual tour of mi barrio (translation: my neighborhood).   Thanks to Lacey for the majority of these pictures, because she was basically the paparazzi when she came to visit.

We live in a little complex of townhomes that’s part of a bigger complex of townhomes and apartments.  The whole big complex is gated, and each little mini-section (called a sector) has its own little gate, guard, and playground.  Our little sector has about 3 or 4 buildings that make up about 50 townhomes.  Sounds confusing, but it’s not once you see it. Here’s my house:

la casa de la familia Bonham

Josh and Emily live around the corner in another sector inside this same complex.  It only takes a couple of minutes to walk to their house.  Normally anyone who doesn’t live in the sector has to sign in to visit, but the guards in both of our sectors are so used to us coming back and forth to each other’s houses that they don’t stop us anymore…they just wave and pass out high-fives to all the kids.

If you were to leave our complex and turn left, you’d find a little strip mall that has alot of little mom-and-pop shops in it.  On the corner is our fresh produce shop, which I visit almost every other day.  It’s crazy how cheap it is to eat fresh here!  One of the guys who works in this shop has a bike with baskets on the front and back, and he’ll even deliver to my house if I need him to.  It’s a great setup.

I still havent tried everything in here because I don’t know what most of it is!

Thanks to this shop, the fruit basket on my counter is always full, and we have fresh fruit and veggies with almost every meal.

I won’t tell you how cheap this is…

In this same strip is a little papelaría (shop with paper goods and knick-knacks), a few little homemade food shops, a pharmacy (no Rx needed), and a cute little coffee shop/bakery that we visit pretty regularly.  The bread and pastries are DELICIOUS and it’s a good spot to sit, drink a cup of coffee, and practice listening and understanding all the spanish going on around us.

YUM. Love this place.

Just past the coffee shop and cross the street is our little neighborhood grocery store.  It’s kind of hit-and-miss as far as inventory goes, but I can usually find all the basics.  Bread, eggs, milk, OJ, rice, pasta, etc…

Romi (our corner grocery store) and the meat counter that took me a little while to get the courage to order from…

But sometimes there are items on the list and the little corner grocery just won’t cut it….so I have to walk a tiny bit further to the fancy grocery store.  But on the way there, I pass the flower stand…

I buy a big bouquet of flowers every other week…for ridiculously low prices!

trekking back to the house with a fresh batch of flowers…

…and this place that sells lechona colombiana, which is basically a huge roasted pig…

Lechona… which I have not tried yet, by the way. But I should, because how can you resist that face?

…and a couple more miscellaneous shops before you get to the fancy grocery store, called Carulla.  It has alot of imported stuff that the smaller shops don’t have, and its meat, produce, and deli sections are really nice.  Of course, you pay more for it!   But there are a few things that I will buy from there if I can’t find it anywhere else.

a glimpse inside the fancy grocery store, Carulla. (technically, this is not OUR carulla bc I don’t have a pic of it….it’s another on in Bogotá but they’re all very similar!)

If you keep walking a bit further — about a 15-20 minute walk from my house, more or less — there’s a store called Éxito, which is kind of like a Wal-mart. I shop here even less often because it’s further away and it’s a much bigger hassle to navigate.  But, sometimes that’s the only place I can find certain things, so I fight the crowds anyway.

a peek inside Éxito

And if you cross over the Autopista (interstate, basically), and head back on the other side, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff to see, none of which I have pictures of, unfortunately.   But I’m not over there much (except for the mall and to our friends Esta and Matt’s house), and pics of that side would make this post too long anyway.  I’ll save it for another day.

So now that I know you’ve got all of that straight, here’s a little visual for you:

makes perfect sense, right?

So there ya go.  That’s my neighborhood.  It’s different from what I’m used to, for sure, but it’s quickly becoming home.  And I have no doubt that it will look completely different from wherever we end up after this.  But for now, it’s mi barrio and I’m kinda starting to like it.

Just the boost we needed…

After Christmas, we changed our routine up a bit in order to give our language-learning a boost.  For the first few months, we commuted about an hour in order to attend a spanish school for several hours each morning.  Things were going pretty well, but as we started figuring out which things helped us learn the language best, we decided to switch things up in order to make the most of our year of intensive language study.

So in the middle of January, we started with a new professor who kicked things up a notch.  She has 25 years experience teaching both spanish and english, so she knows her stuff.  She also has alot of experience teaching missionaries, so she is able to teach us some language and vocabulary helpful to our ministry.  But most of all, she’s TOUGH.   And she assigns ALOT of homework.   But she’s good at her job, and it’s worth it.

Clara, our professor

With the new professor, our schedule changed a bit.  Now our class is immediately after lunch (during naptime), so our mornings are free to study.  Spending several hours studying on my own before I walk into class has made a world of difference!  Plus, now that I’m not running out the door quite so early in the mornings, I have a good bit of time to sit and talk (and drink coffee) with the niñera, Hilda.  She has become an amazing language partner for me, and I think that has boosted my spanish as much as the new professor has.  Most days we spend almost an hour chatting in spanish over our coffee — it’s the best practice I could possibly get!

Then she takes the kids to the park for a few hours, and I crack the books while the house is quiet until lunch.  We all eat lunch together (more spanish practice with Hilda!) and spend some time rough-housing with the boys, then Hilda puts them down for their nap while we start our class at 1:30.

Our class lasts 2 hours and is pretty intense.  The entire thing is in Spanish, including any questions we ask.  Each night for homework I read a chapter of the book I’m working on (Cautiva by Clara Rojas) and write a summary of the chapter.  I also have to write an entry in the spanish journal I am keeping.  Most evenings, we have some other type of writing assignment as well (a few paragraphs on a specific topic), and some practice worksheets on whatever grammatical theme we’re studying at the time.   Then the next day, I have to read aloud whatever I’ve written and give an oral summary of the book I’m reading, and answer questions on any and all of it.  Plus she pulls out her red pen and marks up all of my mistakes.  Usually there’s quite a bit of red ink (:    Nate’s homework looks a little different from mine since we have found that our learning styles are a bit different.  He usually has some reading/writing assignments based on a systematic theology book in spanish that he’s reading, as well as some translation work in the book of Acts.

A little taste of my spanish homework: my spanish journal (lots of red markups!!), practice worksheets, and the first page of the chapter I’m reading for night in my book.

A little sample of Nate’s homework: theology book in spanish, the book of Acts, and his translation notebook.

The boys usually sleep for another half our or so after we finish class, so we have a few minutes of down time before they wake up.  Of course, after a morning of chatting in spanish with Hilda, studying for a few hours, then having 2 hours of class, we are TIRED by 4pm!  We usually take an hour or two to play with the kids before dinner just to give our minds a break.  After the kids go to bed, we usually do a little more work (on homework, missions stuff, adoption stuff, or other various things), spend some time reading, and occasionally pull up something on Netflix if we have time before we crash.   And that’s a day!

The new schedule gives us a bit more flexibility if we need it in the mornings, although we usually spend the time studying.  Plus, it gives us more time with the kids since we’re not away from the house as much.  It will also be a little more workable when the adoption goes through, which is a huge answer to prayer.

So far, the change has proven to be a good decision.  I’m a little more exhausted at the end of each day, but as Hilda always reminds me, “Vale la pena!”

Three million pictures, two months, one post…Go!

Can I just say that it is HARD to get the time and brain-power to write from here?  I don’t know why that is, but let me just say that I have major respect for the missionary mamas out there who can blog consistently from the field.  My hat is off to you ladies, because I am someone who loves to write, and somehow it still escapes me.

Maybe it’s all the language-learning, or the constantly changing routine, or the growing kids, or something else all together, but my days get away from me almost as fast as my energy does.  I’m going to have to find a way to remedy this.  If you have any tips, send them my way.

So in true Bonham fashion as of late, here’s yet another fire-hydrant style update from our family in Colombia.  It’s long, but don’t worry…I’ll include LOTS of pictures (:

First, I’ll back up a bit.   Christmas was good…. weird, but good.  It was definitely strange being away from our families over the holidays for the first time in our lives, but we expected that.  We had a pretty low-key day; we let the boys open the little gifts we got them, made a big breakfast, skyped with our families, made homemade tomato-basil soup for lunch (YUM), and got lots of time to rest.   We will probably do a few things a little different next year, but it was good to start creating traditions for our little family, all on our own.

^ my three favorites on Christmas morning

^ the bobbleheads digging through their stockings

^ trying out their instruments and hard hats

^ my three boys whipping up a big christmas morning breakfast

^ snuggling on the couch, watching a christmas movie while waiting to video-chat with the family

^ ending the night with glow-sticks in the playroom

The next night, my parents and little sister came to visit!  My dad and sister stayed for 5 days, and my mom stayed for just under 2 weeks.   We took them around town and showed them the sights, including Monserrate, which has the best views of this massive city.  We got some great pictures from the day:

^ Silly little Bear… not sure what funky thing he’s doing with his hands.

^ Amazing view

^ family picture! my sister Janie, the Bonhams, and my parents

^ love him (:

^ My sweet little Noah

^ An amazing view of an amazing city

It was a fun day of getting to see Bogotá from a whole new perspective.  This city is HUGE, and I never really appreciated its size until I could see it from above.

We also showed my family a few other cool parts of the city and spent lots of time playing with the boys.  Mom painted for me while she was here, and by the time she left I had a beautiful piece of art to hang on my bare white walls.

^ the artist at work, and the finished product

The next week was spent interviewing potential niñeras and spanish professors.   We lost our sweet niñera, Adriana, the week before Christmas because her commission-based side job (a direct sales business) offered her a full-time salaried position.  I was sad to see her go, but excited about her new job and the awesome benefits that would come with it.  And thankfully, she still comes to visit often and will continue to be a great friend here in Bogotá.   (She randomly dropped by tonight, as a matter of fact!)   So we started over again, interviewing new ladies for the position.

We found an awesome professor named Clara who has been teaching both english and spanish for 25 years, and she REALLY knows her stuff!

^ Clara

She keeps us on our toes, and we are learning so quickly with her method of teaching.   She was also able to give us a much better class schedule, which allows me more time to study, more time at home with the boys, and more time for conversational practice with our new niñera, which boosts my spanish all the more.

The new niñera that we found is amazing as well.  God keeps blessing us with awesome (although over-qualified) niñeras, and this one is no different….except that we hope that she won’t have any other job offers in the meantime!!   Her name is Hilda, and she has been such a blessing to us.   She loves the Lord and loves my children — two things that make my heart happy!  The boys love her, and I have really enjoyed our growing friendship as well.  We spend about an hour drinking coffee and talking (in spanish) every morning before I go study, so she has become an excellent language partner for me.  She is quick to correct my grammar and pronunciation mistakes, which is exactly what I need!   And since she is a friend of Emily’s niñera, Nury, the two of them get together every morning with all the kids and take them to the park.  So the kids get to play with their buddies every single morning while I study spanish.  It’s a perfect fit!

^ Hilda

The week after we hired Clara and Hilda, we had the privilege of hosting 3 pastors from Bolivia for a few days.  They were in Bogotá to meet with some pastors and learn more about the church here, and we were excited to have them stay with us.  It was an intense weekend for Nate, because he had to operate in spanish almost 100% of the time since he accompanied them to almost all of their events all weekend.  But he enjoyed it and was able to form some great relationships with them that we hope will prove to be lasting.  One of the guys had some travel issues when he was going home, and ended up getting stranded in Bogotá for an extra 6 days.  He ended up staying with us while we got it worked out, and we were able to enjoy several more days of his company.  It was a great week for building cross-cultural relationships AND building our spanish!

^ our last evening with our new friends, Boris, René, and Nicolas

About a week later, Nate left for Peru with the other guys of the apprenticeship program for 9 days.  It was my first time being alone in Colombia while Nate traveled, so my sweet mama flew down to hang out with me while he was gone.  I didn’t have to twist her arm too much to come hang out with her favorite grandtwins.  My best friend Kelly was supposed to be coming down during that time as well, but something important came up at home, and she had to postpone her trip at the last minute.  I was bummed that she wasn’t going to be able to make it.  But little did I know that my big sister had booked a ticket on the same flight!  It was an AWESOME surprise, and I was so excited to spend 5 days showing her around the city.   Having Lacey and Mom here definitely made the time without Nate a little more bearable.  (Lacey wrote several posts about the trip on her blog — click to see posts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).  Mom also did another awesome painting for my walls while she was here.

^ Girls (plus the twins) weekend in Bogotá!

^ the next masterpiece by my mom… a Colombian Bird of Paradise for my dining room

Lacey left after a couple of days, then Nate returned from Peru, and Mom left the next day.  That next week, we prepared for a new family to join our apprenticeship program and two other families to join the long-term Colombia team.   The Jesch, Lupton, an Aschmann families have all landed in Bogotá, and we are so happy to have them here!  We got to know the Jesch and Lupton families during our month living in NYC for training, so it was a happy reunion.  The Jesch’s are part of the same apprenticeship program that we’re in, so we will be seeing LOTS of them!  We have tried to help them get settled into their new city as best as we can, because we remember all too well the stress surrounding the big move!

^ The current members of apprenticeship program… LtoR – Gary Waldecker (bossman), Kines, Jesch, Bonham, and Gutierrez families

^ All the folks in Bogotá with our agency! There are 39 of us now, including kids. We are growing!

In the midst of all of this, we’ve been steadily studying spanish and trying to do as much as possible to keep our adoption process moving forward with our most recent homestudy amendment.   The language learning is moving along, as is the adoption process, and we hope to see major strides in both this year.

Whew. It’s been 2 busy months. I always say “it’s probably about to slow down a bit,” but we’ve been here for more than 5 months and it hasn’t happened yet.  So I’m not going to say that this time.  So here’s to another month or two of craziness, and here’s hoping I’ll have the brainpower to write it all down.