Family Nopal

We’re slightly behind on providing this update, but we have a lot of good excuses that we will talk about in a minute.  First to talk about our recent trip to Hermosillo, Mexico.  We went to Hermosillo to visit with the social services director and meet her in person so she can see what we are like and hopefully fall in love with us and move us to the top of the pile.

We flew from Tijuana to Hermosillo and stayed with Edgar’s lovely tio and tia who not only drove us around, but fed us maybe a little too well!

Our main priority on this quick visit was to meet our lawyer in person and visit the social services director. We met our lawyer at a VIPS (which is sort of like a Coco’s or Denny’s) who works with our agency and we just adore him.  He’ s awesome and he knows everyone in the social services department we quickly learned upon touring the office with him.  It turns out he’s actually had a lot to do with developign the international adoption program in Mexico and in his spare time he helped to set up an orphange for abused girls as well.  He’s an all around great guy and we’re so glad he’s our advocate on the ground in Mexico.

We went with him to the social services office and first met the district attorney and then met the social services director.  The office where the social service operations are run is also connected to an orphanage or shelter (as they refer to it) called Acari, which is the Yaqui word for a home.

For a quick history/geography/anthropology lesson, the Yaqui tribe is native to Sonora and the The Yaqui language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family. Edgar’s grandfather is part Yaqui.

Here we are in front of the social services office which has a really cute fountain of kids playing.

Our meeting with the director went well.  She just asked us about ourselves, Edgar did most of the talking and most everything was done in Spanish with the exception of occassional translating for Siana.  At one point Siana had to show off her Spanish skills which were ok, but when she told the director that she can talk to kids because their vocabulary levels are about the same, she seemed ok with that!  At the end the director turned to our lawyer and said “me gusta esta pareja” which means “I like this couple” which we took about as good a sign of any that she likes us.  She really likes us!

So now we’re back to the U.S. and waiting for a referral.  In the mean time we are busying ourselves with some home renovation projects, the biggest being that we are going to re-do our kitchen.  We’ve been meeting with contractors, buying appliances, spending time at Home Depot picking out sinks and faucets and are glad to have the distractions to help us prepare our tiny hogar for our future kids.  We also got our plumbing fixed and installed a new garage door, nothing like the looming possibility of more people in our house to get us motivated to get stuff done!

Nopal update – our nopales have exploded!  There are so many pencas we realize we need to chop a few off and try to eat them.

Siana once helped Edgar’s grandmother clean the espinas off nopales, but it’s been a while. Like a long time, so we’ll see if our foray into actually consuming nopales is successful minus any injuries due to renegade thorns!