Meryn is Officially Adopted!


Our first order of business on arriving in the US is to get all of Meryn's paperwork in order.  Our end goal is a US passport, US Certificate of Citizenship, and a visa to India in that US passport.  The first step to getting those things is to register her adoption with our home state, Kansas.  We also want to legally change her name from what it is on her Ethiopian passport and current paperwork.  Currently, her legal name is Helen Paul Preedy.  When Meryn was found outside the orphanage in the small town in Ethiopia, someone decided to call her Helen for paperwork purposes.  We're not sure who that was.  Since there is nothing known of her family, and we're pretty confidence this is a randomly chosen name by someone who did not know her, we've decided to change her name to Meryn.  "Meron" is an Ethiopian name which means various things.  It can mean crimson.  It can mean "a gift from God." It can also refer to a name of an oil used in Ethiopian Orthodox worship services.  We especially love the "gift from God" connotation.  We have always wanted a name that is Ethiopian for her, but many of them are long and very difficul tot pronounce.  So we loved Meron when we read it.  We simply changed the spelling to make it a bit more feminine.  We will also keep a variation of Helen as her middle name, and call her Helena.  It is now all finished, and we are happy to present: 

Meryn Helena Preedy!



The judge we had was simply awesome.  He was so kind and lively, full of personality.  He asked the kids to come into the courtroom, let them sit in his chair, pound the gavel, and told them official sounding things to say into the microphone. They had a great time, and he made the whole experience lighthearted and fun.  He's a granddad, and just seemed like he loved being around kids.  As we were leaving, others were coming into the courtroom, arms full of documents and files, looking professional in suits and ties.  We thanked him profusely for giving us so much of his time, and allowing the kids to experience a real court room.  He whispered back, "Hey, this is a whole lot more fun than what I'm about to do!" nodding his head in the direction of the others entering the room.  We're glad we could brighten up his day too! : ) 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commonplace Essays with Writing & Rhetoric

It bears repeating.  The Writing & Rhetoric series by Classical Academic Press is really amazing.  My 5th and 6th graders are in Ch. 5 of the sixth book. They are learning to write commonplace essays, which are six paragraph essays refuting bad character traits.  They wrote their first essay this week.  We were behind schedule, and weren't going to finish for class. I was fine with that and wasn't rushing them, but they both wanted to finish their essays for class so badly they stayed up late Thursday night in order to finish it. This is their first attempt at a commonplace essay. I was SO pleased with the results. They had minimal help with these! :) (These were typed as they were written. Any mistakes are not typos, but the kids' grammar and spelling errors.) :) Against Boasters by Kiryn Preedy (10 years old) Boasters cover up weakness by puffing up their deeds and can cause real harm. When boasters exaggerate things they have done, they don’t kno...
Read more

The Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric

Image
Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...
Read more

Picking Up Meryn!

Image
We made it to Ethiopia after a long day of travel!  We had a morning flight to Delhi, then a 15 hour layover, so we got to spend the day with some good friends in Delhi for the day.  We even got to sleep a few hours before going to the airport at midnight.  We had a very smooth process getting checked in and to our gate.  Kiryn was an amazing travel companion. I'm so thankful to have her with me. We left at 3 a.m. from Delhi, arrived a bit late in Addis, but had no line for a visa or immigration, got some money from the ATM, got our bags straight off the belt and found our driver outside.  Certainly, mercies from the Lord to make everything so easy. I'm not used to traveling alone... We got checked into the hotel, and hurriedly got a little unpacked, showered and changed, and I made all the 25 or so Thank You cards with tip gifts for the nannies to take to the care center. I got all of our gifts together for Meryn's nanny, Aynalem.  As soon as we went ...
Read more