Brady’s Random Info

1- Tonight, our cab driver astutely pointed out “your son is black!”. I thought about acting all shocked and saying some smart like “Oh crap, are you serious?!”, or “I know, isn’t that the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?!” or “the doctors said not to worry, it’s just a phase”. Instead, I simply agreed. “Yep, pretty much”. We told him that we are adopting, and without skipping a beat, he asked us to adopt his two 8 year old twin brothers. He was dead serious. I didn’t get into the fact, that the process is brutal, and that twins freak me out (kidding, love you Barry and Brian), but we exchanged email addresses. So, if anyone wants twin boys that are 8 years old, let me know… I can hook you up.

2- We are still coaching Manny on the praying thing. Most of the time he just mumbles, but he really likes “thanking God”. He thanks God for everything – including his sins, “God, thank you for mommy and daddy. Thank you for food. Thank you for my sins”. It’s kind of appropriate though. I certainly enjoyed a good sin or two back in the day! We will continue working on it.

3- We talked with Manny’s grandfather on the phone today. He was very well spoken and very friendly. He and Manny talked for a while, and really enjoyed it. We hope to go visit the grandfather soon.

4- It turns out we may be in Africa for quite a while… I won’t bore you with the details, but it appears that these “investigations for the visa” can take months. I pray that it is much quicker, but I am beginning to realize that there are several families that filed for their visa weeks ago and are still waiting for approval. One family has been waiting 5 weeks, another is entering their 7th week of waiting. There only appears to be one family from the US that has actually been granted the official visa since April! I think we are looking at 3 weeks at a minimum.

So, you may be wondering, what are they actually investigating? The US is investigating a few things – 1) does Manny meet the definition of an orphan? 2) How did he come to be in the care of the foster home? 3) How did he come to be selected by an adoption agency? Essentially, they want to be sure that nothing illegal is going on. Plus, they want to understand how the adoption system works. They want to be sure our facilitator isn’t buying kids, and that the birth mother completely understands what is going on.

5- As a potential backup plan, we went to the UK embassy today and filed for a travel visa for Manny. We are considering going to stay in London for a couple weeks while the process drags out. We have considered other alternatives (I was wrong about the Bahamas – Manny would still need a visa, plus it was a real expensive flight!). We know that we have to come back to Accra at some point to get Manny’s visa, so we don’t want to get to far away. Anyway, point is, we may take a vacation for a while, and London seems like as good an option as any.