The First Days...

We spent our first day in Uganda getting settled into our apartment and buying groceries. We also had a meeting scheduled with our attorney that took up several hours of the afternoon. We had hoped to meet our sweet girl but it got too late and we had to wait until the next morning. That night we had dinner with another adoptive family with our agency who was staying in the same apartment complex as us. I'm pretty sure that we will be life-long friends with this family as well as many others that we met on our trip.

The next morning our driver picked us up to take us to meet our daughter for the first time. We had anticipated this moment for such a long time and it was hard to believe it was finally here! The drive took about 45 minutes and our driver kept having to stop to ask for directions. We took in the sights and sounds of Kampala and eventually we arrived at our destination.

(on the road to meet our sweet girl for the first time)

When we pulled into the gate, all of the children ran out to meet us. They were all in uniforms and I kept looking around trying to find our little girl. We were greeted by the director and a pastor who asked us to come and sit in the office. We sat down and a few minutes later she walked in the door. She was SO shy... she would not even look at us. The director asked her to say our names and to our surprise she very quietly called us Mommy & Daddy. It was so sweet! The director told us that she had been working on learning our names and the names of her siblings using the picture album we had sent a few weeks before.

(the door on the left is to the office where we met her for the first time)

We were given a tour of the school and as we walked around our sweet girl finally started to open up a little bit. She held my hand and giggled as we took pictures of the other children. She posed when we took pictures of her. All of the kids loved looking at their pictures on the camera screen. :)

(some of the kiddos enjoying suckers)

After a while we asked if it would be okay to take her out for a few hours. We were scheduled for court in two days and wanted to make sure we had as much time as possible to get to know her before then. We took her to lunch at a restaurant that mainly served pizza. She was not a fan! Oops!

After lunch we drove back to the apartment to play for a while. We kept catching her staring at us when she thought we weren't looking. Of course, we were staring at her, too! It was amazing and hard to believe she was really there with us! Soon it was time to take her back to the school. On the long ride back (over an hour because of traffic) she fell asleep in my lap. It was the perfect end to our first day together!