Finding Happiness ... Revealed

We are squealing with delight here in the Witmer household over our new baby girl! So here is the highly anticipated rundown….

...I’m out of breath just writing this…

We accepted a referral for an approximately 4-month-old baby girl named S* this morning. We are keeping her Ethiopian name abbreviated for privacy reasons.   S* is an uncommon Ethiopian name that means, “you will find happiness.” How freakin’ beautifully magical is that?

Donovan and I have decided to name her Noemi S* Witmer. Noemi (no-eh-me) is a form of Naomi, which has always held a special place for Donovan and me. We have a verse from the story of Naomi and Ruth inscribed in our wedding bands and written on our Ketubah. We love the way Noemi sounds with S* and the way the three names look when written together with all of those pretty vowels. You know, we think of these things! Donovan has been experimenting with writing her name in different fonts ever since we named her.

So here it is: Noemi S* Witmer. We will call her Noemi.

She came into the care of our agency on February 28th. Reportedly, she has been eating and growing and sleeping and cooing and crying and doing all of the things that we want babies to do . . . she is being very cooperative and has a very sweet disposition according to AAI. Simply stated, she’s puuuuuurrrrrrfect.

We got the celebratory phone call on Thursday afternoon when I was home. Alone. I promptly called Donovan, only to find out he was over an hour away. What a torturous hour of waiting for his return so that we could open our email to read the baby’s file and see her picture for the first time together! We are not permitted to publicly post any photos of our darling until the adoption is official, so these videos will have to do for now. I will tell you that she has chunker cheeks, rosebud lips that every girl dreams of and sweet, wide-set almond eyes. She even has some curls on top of that brown sugar head.

So why the wait from Thursday until now, you ask? Well, we had some official things we needed to sort out first. Secondly, we wanted to witness the screams of Nana and Pappy, Grandma and Grandpa and Aunties and Uncles before we made it public.

More info to come on our new little bambino! I’ve got to get back to staring at her photo. Oh, happy time of rejoicing!

And now for two video responses by Grandma Witmer and Nana Roberts . . . 

We apologize in advance for the shaky video. We're still getting used our new camera.