I posted this on Facebook, but decided that I'm posting it here as well. A little over six years ago, I unexpectedly met this guy when I decided to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Kenya. After two weeks that I will never forget, he looked at me as I was getting on an airplane to come home and told me that he was going to marry me someday. I laughed at him and came home. We spent the next two years talking by email and by phone, and in 2009, he made his first trip on an airplane and his first trip outside of Kenya and came to the US to stay with me for a month. He got to see how I live, experience a completely different way of life, meet my family and friends, and while he was here, he asked me to marry him. I told him that we both needed time to make sure that's what we really wanted because it meant that someone was going to have to make a pretty severe life change and let him go home without answering his question. A few short months later, I began filing paperwork with Customs and Immigration Services for him to obtain a fiance visa. After three long years and having to go through a complicated process not once, but twice, today marks one year since he packed up his entire life, got on an airplane and moved 8,000 miles away from everything that he's ever known. In a few weeks, we'll be celebrating our one-year wedding anniversary and a shortly after that we'll be welcoming our son into the world. Looking back to 2007, I left Kenya thinking it would just end up being a fun story to tell when I got home. Six years later, here we are. It hasn't been easy, but it's not been nearly as hard as I expected. Is there anything that I would change? Probably, but I wouldn't ever go back and change my mind.

Less than five weeks to go

Here we are, less than five weeks to go before our little guy makes his debut. Right now I'm sitting on the couch, feeling him bop around in there doing who knows what. It's a strange feeling, yet comforting. One of my nurses told me that an active baby is a happy baby - well then, I've got one happy little kid in there!

All the baby stuff is getting a little overwhelming. The crib is set up and now has his little mobile attached to it thanks to my boss and her husband. The pack & play is assembled, the car seat/stroller is in the box waiting to be opened thanks to my mom, there's a laundry basket full of blankets and towels and washcloths and swaddlers and clothes to be washed. My wonderful friends Cathy and Mary had a baby shower for me last week, so all of the sudden we went from having just a crib and mattress to all of this. And my former dressbarn colleagues are having a shower for me in two weeks. I feel like physically we'll be ready for him to come, but mentally, I'm not so sure.

I've had a few meltdowns in the past few weeks, stressing out over whether I'll be ready for this and if I'll be a good mom. It's scary to think that this little life will be completely dependent on me. It's overwhelming. But I can do this. I think. I know William has to be overwhelmed - he has none of this stuff in his culture. But he's been such a trooper. We put shelf paper on all of the shelves in the baby closet the other night and he mopped the closet floor. We put up the closet organizer set that my mom bought for us and unpacked and took everything out of its packaging. Soon we'll be close enough that I can order my breast pump (although I fully admit that the idea of breastfeeding FREAKS ME OUT). Yet I still panic that something will go wrong and I know I need to get past that. Every time I feel those little feet kicking me, he's reminding me that everything is okay in there and to stop worrying. Maybe someday soon I will.

So it's been quite a while since I have written anything and OH SO MUCH HAS CHANGED.

Here it is, practically a year and a half later, and what exactly has changed, you ask? My apologies in advance .. this is going to be a long one.

If you know me, then you know that in June 2007 I went to Kenya and met William. I was there for two weeks, and something happened. I can't quite explain it, but it happened. He told me he was going to marry me someday, I laughed at him, got on a plane to come back to the US and thought that was the end of it. In 2009 he came here for a month to visit me and officially asked me to marry him. I told him no and sent him home. A few months later I couldn't stand it - we talked it over and I started paperwork for him to be approved to apply for a fiance visa to come back so we could get married. After almost three years and someone actually joking about starting a betting pool to see if it would ever actually happen, it did. After going through the process not once, but twice, his visa was approved in May 2012.

Since we had no idea how long this process was going to drag out, I decided to take a trip to Kenya to visit him in May 2012 as well. His visa was actually approved four days before I was getting on a plane to go visit him and we actually went and picked it up the day after I got there. It was an amazing trip. We stayed at his cousin's place in the barricades for the Escort Unit for the President of Kenya (kind of the equivalent to our Secret Service), and I got to hang out with and really get to know William's other cousin Oduuh, who has turned out to be one of the coolest people I have ever met. While in Nairobi, we went to Nairobi National Park and to the animal orphanage, where I got to actually hold one of four lion cubs that were orphaned because Mom got a little too adventurous and kept leaving the park to go out into one of the local villages in search of food. That night, on our way out to dinner, I tripped down the stairs, hurt my foot and we ended up spending most of the evening in the emergency clinic, where they did x-rays, shot me up with some painkillers AND gave me 2 prescriptions for additional painkillers, all for a whopping total of about $40. Makes you really wonder about the healthcare system in America where you can even get the painkiller shot part of that ordeal for less than about $200.

Over the course of the next week and a half, despite what ended up being a severely broken foot (more on that later), we spent several days at the Maasai Mara, travelling through some of the Rift Valley lakes and back to Nairobi before I had to hop on a plane and head home. We both really needed me to take that trip. We had been through so much to get to that point and now that we had reached that final step, with so much that had happened that we couldn't control and so many outside influences, we needed to be sure that we were ready for that final step. After a pretty heavy and serious conversation, I got on a plane to come home, ready to finally plan our wedding.

After that, it was all a whirlwind. I had to have surgery on my foot a week after I got home. I had broken all five metatarsal bones in my right foot. I must have had hairline fractures that were too small to show up on the x-rays in Kenya and basically shattered then over the course of the next two weeks. Five and a half hours of surgery, three metal plates, about a dozen screws, a temporary pin, a cast for eight weeks and a walking boot for four weeks finally fixed it (sort of - over a year later, I have permanent scars and will never be able to wear those fancy heels ever again). I had to move in with my mom for three months, was off work for over two months if you count time off for my trip, worked from her house remotely for about a month, was finally allowed to put on something other than a walking boot and given permission to drive exactly five days before William arrived in the US.

Three weeks later we were married in the courtyard of the nursing home where my grandfather was a resident. It was the perfect day in more ways than one. We struggled so hard to get to that point - I still have no idea how I managed to get through it without crying. Two weeks later my grandfather died. Enduring the constant comments about how he had hung on just so he could see me get married and that he was waiting for William so that he knew there would be someone to get me through it were almost unbearable and at moments brought on such extreme bouts of guilt that I almost couldn't stand it.

Since then, we have started the green card application process, moved into a bigger apartment, I started a new job, quit my part-time job, William has a consistent job where he has fit in fabulously, and in October we'll be welcoming a little baby boy into our family - almost exactly on the one-year anniversary of my grandfather's passing. The significance of that hasn't been lost on anyone involved. We've certainly had our fair share of struggles but given that we have now spent every day of the past 10 months together after spending all but seven weeks of the past six years apart, I think we've done better than anyone ever expected. They say the first year of marriage is the hardest. If that's the case, then the rest of our lives will be a piece of cake. We certainly deal with daily struggles that the normal couple has never and will never face, but we get through them. We make each other smile every day and we have never gone to bed mad. They say that newborn babies can immediately recognize the voices of their mother and father. I told William last night that there's no doubt in my mind that our little boy will also immediately recognize the sound of his parents' laughter. And for that I am grateful and feel blessed every day.