Monday, October 01, 2007

Finally done! (again)

I can't tell you how many times I thought we had jumped through our last hoop before we could bring Noah home. As ridiculous as it sounds, even to me, I actually think we really are done this time. Of course, I've thought that before. Who knows if I am going to be greeted by another email in a few days announcing that something else has been lost. Earlier today I sent off another packet of documents - another copy of our 2006 tax return and the I864A - and it should reach Haiti before the end of the week. Supposedly, that's all they are waiting for in order to issue his visa. I'm still determined to have him here for Halloween, even though I'm not sure that trick-or-treating will be the best introduction to our culture. I can imagine now what he might say if he were able to write to his friends back in Haiti the day after Halloween: "You won't believe what I had to do right when I got here. They dressed me up in some crazy outfit and sent me out in the freezing cold darkness to go door-to-door begging for food." Welcome to America.

This week-end Adam, Phil and I took off and hiked up to Timpanogos cave. Friday's temperature approached 80 degrees, and Sunday was very pleasant in the low-70's, but on the day that we needed a few hours of outside time we woke up to a weather report predicting rain and a high around 50 degrees. Even though it didn't appear that the weather was going to cooperate, Adam had been begging all summer to go and we made the reservations weeks ago so we decided that we would head out in the rain and hope for the best. By the time we got up to the base of the mountain the rain had pretty much stopped but it was still quite frigid and I would have been okay to bag it. Adam was very excited though and there was no way I was going to disappoint him by wimping out. We bundled up and took off on Adam and my first climb to Timp cave with Phil as our experienced (one previous trip) guide.

I'm happy to announce that we made it up and back down and the weather couldn't have been better. It was cold, but Phil carried his coat the entire way (except for when it was sprinkling when we left the cave), I shed my outer layer after the first half mile and before we made it to the top Adam had also removed his coat. When we came out of the cave after the 30 minute tour, it was raining a bit but that only lasted for a few minutes. Most of the hike back down was dry and it didn't really start raining hard until about two minutes before we made it back to the car. Thank heavens for small miracles. That type of thing doesn't seem to happen to us all that often so I'm extremely grateful when it does.

The cave was definitely worth seeing, but even while there I determined that for me, it's once in a lifetime thing. As we left the cave and started our journey back down the mountain Phil commented on how well Adam had done. He went on to suggest that we wait a few years until Noah is 5 or 6 and then go back up. I decided right then that Phil's idea sounded like a perfect "father-son" tradition that he and the boys can carry on for as many years as they would like.

1 comments:

Bike Junkie said...

great pictures. We haven't taken the kids up to Timp - in fact Kell and I haven't been up there since we were dating.