Adopting Ahren (& PBJ, too!)

February came and we got the next pictures. He had changed so much at first we weren't even sure it was the same baby! It's hard to tell in this picture, but his hair is all greased down and there are little curly wings sticking out in the back. He had gained a tremendous amount of weight, and by the looks of it a lot of it went into his cheeks! The comment from our agency was that the foster mother reports him to be a good eater. I think we could have guessed that!
So as far as the adoption case is concerned, we have all of our final approval documents from the U.S. government and the entire dossier is off to be authenitcated and translated. Someday I will go into more detail about all the paperwork and the myriad of hoops we had to jump through.
We had been struggling with choosing a name for the baby. We both like biblical names, and we wanted a short, strong name that went well with our last name. For months we had been tossing around names but so far nothing was quite right. Then one day, Chris said 'Aaron'. I thought about it some. Aaron is Moses's brother in the bible. It was short and strong, not too common, and it went well with Christopher, the name we had picked for his middle name. Chris wanted to keep the common spelling of Aaron, but I wanted to be a little different. I had seen it spelled 'Ahren' recently and I had liked it better. So, after much pleading and begging, I talked Chris into spelling his name Ahren. (OK son, now you know who is to blame for the oddball spelling of your name. Don't hate me for it! ;-) So, big world, I would like to present to you Ahren Christopher, brother to Katie, Ashley and Levi, son of Chris and Wendy.