The trip we just got back from included too many wonderful moments for one post. So I'll start with this one, near the end of our trip. We were in Dallas for a few days visiting one of Ted's brothers and his family, so we drove out one afternoon to Fort Worth to visit the Gladney campus. We'd been wanting to do this for a while, and I am so glad we did.The moment I saw the sign with the address I'd written down so many times, I got teary. Then we walked in with Abe and after a few minutes Mary and Scott came down the stairs, and I was trying not to lose it. Mary was our caseworker, the one who made all those difficult calls with bad news...and then the one whose voice told me on March 3rd last year, "Lori, it's done!" signaling the news that we were Abe's parents officially. To meet sweet Mary in person was so beyond wonderful.
Abe meets Mary and does his teased "ooh, that's a pretty girl" routine.
I encourage any parents who travel anywhere near the Gladney campus to stop in for a visit. We had a wonderful time there, and I think it does the team a lot of good to meet the children they've heard so much about and worked so hard, long long long hours, to bring home to their families. They were so laid-back and wonderful, not even once threatening to take Abe away from us when he wandered off to find the fun toy-room down a long hall-way (seriously though--how ironic that we lose our child and send our former caseworker scrambling along with us calling out for lost Abe...in the agency building through which he became our son? Not my proudest mom-moment).The incomparable Mary, with Scott Brown, head of the Ethiopia program Finally, we found out while at Gladney that there is a movie out there about Edna Gladney called Blossoms in the Dust, made in 1941, which won an Oscar for Best Art Direction and was nominated for Best Picture. Wow. It's now on our Netflix queue.I'll leave you with some purposefully blurry photos of the next fun thing that happened on our trip to the South, which I'll write about next: