Our third visit...

Some pictures from our visit with Joseph today...I wish I had taken so many more but it was quite an emotional day for us with him.  We came to see him and the orphanage hadn't really prepared a place for us to visit so we kept bouncing from one waiting room or hallway to another.  We'd made some good progress with Joseph the day before but he seemed very distracted/overwhelmed/zoned out when we first arrived today.  After bouncing around from space to space we were finally able to return to the same room we had been in the day before.  Once we were able to really sit and hold Joseph and make some good eye contact with him, he focused right in and that amazing smile and laughter started right up.

He was back...and he did even better today than he had done yesterday.  This little boy is amazing and his ability to handle orphanage life and still "come back" from it and respond to us with such joy and love just amazes Dan and I.  The orphanage workers are kind and they do occasionally stop and say their little hellos to Joseph but there isn't a deep personal connection simply because there isn't enough time for them to do that.  They are very short staffed most of the time...in fact, today there was one woman who was in charge of all that needed to be done around the entire orphanage.  When  he came to us today, he was in his own little world.  It was hard at first to get any eye contact from him.  He didn't respond to being touched.  He was there in body but not really present.

Then we got him one-on-one and really engaged with him and he completely came around.  And then some.  In the beginning of the week we were so surprised that he really didn't like being tickled.  He would recoil away when we tried to tickle him.  Today, after we got him back engaging with us, Dan had him wrestling on the floor, flying around like an airplane and tickling him so much that the sheer joy that was coming out of him brought us both to tears.  It was just such an amazing transformation.  By the end of our visit today, He was reaching out to be held and hugged by us.  He wanted to be held, squeezed and loved on more than anything else.

Dan and Joseph together today made me sob...I tried not to, but I just couldn't do anything but cry when I saw my amazing husband give this little orphan boy the kind of love that could take a vacant stare and turn it into more joy than I have ever seen in such a little boy.  I am blessed to be married to a man that would cross the ocean and give this kind of life changing love to someone he's never even met till this week.

We definitely love this little boy and it was heartbreaking to strap him back into his stroller today and watch him roll back down the hall.  He needed a diaper change...and this mama wanted to change him and make him more comfortable.  But I couldn't.  He needed to be held, not sat and rolled everywhere in a stroller because its more efficient...because as soon as he was strapped back in, he seemed to go vacant again...the smiling and laughing was gone and he was zoning back out into his own little world to comfort himself.  It hit both Dan and I today how little time we have left with him and how horrible it is going to be to wait 4-5 months to come back and bring him home.