And the Band Played On

Our First Christmas

One week before Christmas I attended a meeting with a co-worker who coughed and sneezed through the entire three hours. He admitted to having a fever and seemed unconcerned by our worries that he was going to infect us all for Christmas.

Bah humbug.

Sure enough, on the first of my scheduled vacation days, I woke up with a cough and a fever.

Get-togethers were cancelled...

Cookies were not baked...

And this momma, who was so looking forward to a couple extra days of fun with her boys, spent the next two days in bed.

It was hard not to wish for a lump of coal for my co-worker!

On Friday morning, Christmas Eve, I was feeling a little better and the three boys weren’t showing any signs of illness, so we ventured north to Grandma’s house for our annual celebration. We had a great time and appreciated the welcome in spite of the risk of getting everyone sick (really hope you guys don't get sick!!!).

By the time we got home the boys weren't feeling well but that didn't dampen their excitement about leaving cookies and carrots for Santa and his reindeer.

Upstairs in bed, as he snuggled into my neck, Dash said, "Mommy yummy" and just before drifting off to sleep Taye said, "Mommy, Taye happy." Now if that doesn't just say it all :-)

Unfortunately the rest of the night didn't go as well. On a night when most children are tossing and turning with excitement, mine were tossing and turning with fevers.

They were really sick by morning but magic was still in the air. The look on their faces when they saw what Santa brought them was priceless.

They have been asking for big boy bikes since they saw our neighbor riding one in September and they couldn't believe that Santa really brought them one. They can barely reach the peddles but at the rate they are growing they will fit just fine by spring.

Santa left them notes telling them what good boys they have been this year and how proud and happy they make their Mommy and Daddy.

They are still talking about the fact that Santa and the reindeer ate the cookies and carrots they left!

Discovering the rest of Santa's presents was almost as much fun. We won't have to wait until spring to put these into action!

Trying hard to have fun but feeling pretty yucky...until some Children's Tylenol and a move to the couch, plus a few more presents, helped them find a second wind. Dash kept saying, "Momma, too much!", meaning too many presents, but really he loved it!

In spite of the fact that there was a lot of this...

And a ton of this...

I have never had a more wonderful Christmas!



Third Time's a Charm

Quote of the day: "Santa is vewy cool!"

Six Months Home - The Spirit of Christmas

Two years ago today we celebrated the end of six months of paperwork and the official first day on the wait list to adopt. Our agency was predicting referrals in 3 to 5 months. It was a season filled with hope and excitement.

Last year we were still waiting on pins and needles to find out who our children would be. It was a season full of anticipation and weariness.

This year our holiday season is filled with love and joy--enough of it to make up for all those other years--and it's full of firsts. Lots of magical firsts!

First visit to Santa

First time decorating a Christmas Tree

These sweet boys, who have not yet caught on to the materialism of it all, get more excited about the empty cardboard boxs that mail ordered gifts arrive in.

First time tasting hot chocolate



We even had a surprise visit to our neighborhood from Santa himself! He arrived on a fire truck, which was almost as exciting as meeting Santa again, and he hand delivered their first ever Santa presents. That is Taye in the first picture. Dash preferred the arms of a parent, which was fine with us!

"That's when the Spirit of Christmas smiled.

'Remember, this all began with a child.
Because it took nothing but love to begin it,
it's not really Christmas if love isn't in it.'

Your tree may be large as the room will allow
with a big yellow star on the uppermost bough,
but of one thing I'm certain,
I'm sure of one thing.

It's love that makes the angels sing.

And that's when I got it.
That's when I knew!
The thing that was missing
from Christmas was you!"

~Excerpt from The Spirit of Christmas by Nancy Tillman

Curls, Beautiful Curls

Whenever I post a picture that shows a close up of the boys hair I get comments about how lovely it is. Much of this can be attributed to nature, not nurture, but I still thought some of you might find it helpful to know how I care for their hair, plus I'd love to get some advice.

When we were waiting for our referral I read a lot about hair and skin care. I joined the Yahoo Group called adoptionhair_skincare and it's affiliated Facebook page. I read blog entries on Happy Girl Hair. I collected links to all the various recommended hair product lines (if you scroll down, you will see those links on the right). I also asked friends with similar hair requirements for advice.

When we finally got to Ethiopia I had a large arsenal of hair and skin products. Organic this and all natural that, all labels scrutinized for hidden drying ingredients and cancer causing agents. I slathered conditioners, lotions, creams and oils into their skin and beautiful, but dry and frizzy, curls. The skin lotions seemed to be working ok, but nothing in my arsenal was helping with the hair. Then, after a week of these products, not only did their hair still look dry and frizzy, but the boys proceeded to break out in pimples and an itchy rash from head to toe! Worse still, Taye's scalp erupted in multiple, painful welts! It was awful, and I felt terribly.

For the next few months while we got these symptoms under control, the only products I could use on them were Aveeno Daily Moisture lotion and Aveeno Moisture Wash. Our doctor told me to use Vaseline in their hair but it just made their curls greasy without adding any moisture so I stopped that pretty quickly and just started rubbing handfuls of the body lotion into their curls. When finally their skin and scalp issues were healed, I cautiously introduced a new hair product thinking that would be a better option than body lotion, but their hair went from soft manageable locks back to dry frizzy curls that needed more and more product to keep them looking good. I experimented with a few other products but either saw the return of skin and scalp problems, or dry, frizzy curls. Finally I said forget it and went back to the body lotion.

With the onset of winter I have also started using Cetaphil lotion and cleansers, which are more moisturizing than Aveeno but still ok for sensitive skin. I rinse their hair really well with water a couple times a week and use the Cetaphil lotion like you would a cream rinse, and then again like a leave in conditioner. Sometimes on those days I need to add more later in the day to add even more moisture (even just rinsing with water is very drying). Once a week or so I wash their scalps with Aveeno Moisture Wash. On the mornings I don't rinse or wash their hair I just add lotion. I know this probably sounds crazy to some of you, and I will admit, the lotion dulls the shine of their curls, but otherwise this is really working for us.

Hope this helps some of you. If anyone out there has experience with eczema I would love to hear from you. I think that this is the underlying culprit to their skin and scalp issues, which are even more sensitive now that the dry winter air is here. The Cetaphil is keeping it at bay but I wonder if there is more I could be doing...

 *I was not paid or compensated in any way for the review of these products!

Wordless Wednesday

Six Months Ago

Waiting to board the plane home
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, May 31, 2010

Adopting Three Year Olds + Thanksgiving Pictures

November is, or I guess I should say was, National Adoption Month—a month set aside each year to raise awareness about adoption. On November 1st I started thinking about what I would want people to know about adoption. What haven’t I already said by sharing our story on this blog? The answer came easily and it is only because this has been a busy month that I’ve waited until the last day of the month to write about it.

To tell this story I must go back two and a half years, to the time when we started to get serious about adopting. This is the time when adoptive parents mull through a myriad of big decisions, for unlike growing a family through the birth of a biological child, in adoption you must choose things like age, race, nationality, gender, and openness to special needs. Making such decisions felt unnatural and uncomfortable to me. Perhaps it is my Catholic upbringing that instilled a belief that these are God’s decisions, not mine, so choosing things like gender and special needs was tough for me.

At first I thought age was going to be the easy decision. I had never been a mother and wanted the experience of mothering a baby, and it seemed sensible to begin parenting with a child who was not yet walking or talking. I was also afraid of the risks of long term emotional, physical or bonding challenges more commonly associated with older child adoption. The availability of healthy infants was one of the things that first drew us to Ethiopia.

As I continued researching and learning about adoption, I found myself experiencing deep emotion whenever I came across a story of an older toddler adoption. I used to watch this show on the Discovery Health Channel called Adoption Stories and I would find myself dry eyed during stories about infants but sobbing through episodes about three year olds. There weren’t many blogs back then, or at least I didn’t know of many, of families who had adopted children that age from Ethiopia (there are lots of them now), but I came across this one early on and it instantly became a favorite. Actually, I will confess, I never really read their blog. I just watched that video montage of them meeting their children over and over again. It kills me every time!

I started to realize that I was drawn to adopting an older child, and Mark was too, but I was scared. What did I know about parenting a three year old from a hard background? What if we had trouble bonding? What if the child had RAD? The first chapter alone in the book Toddler Adoption: The Weaver’s Craft was enough to keep me up at night. Still, I couldn’t ignore my feelings, so we had our home study approve us to adopt two children ages 0-5 years old, and went on the wait list with our agency to adopt siblings ages 0-14 and 0-36 months old. "Let God decide if I'm ready for this," I thought...

As I wrote in my last post (and last year if you were reading that long ago! Thanks for still reading if that’s you!) ultimately our agency asked us if we wanted to increase our age range in order to adopt our boys. Having our home study written to approve us for a wide age range allowed them to do this. Initially we thought the children were 14 months old, but it turned out they were 28 months at referral and just two months shy of three by the time we were able to bring them home. Obviously we said yes, and I thank God every day for finding me worthy.

Allowing myself to be open to adopting three year olds was the most complicated, difficult and BEST decision I ever made. There are unique challenges to adopting older children, but there are also joys that I do not have the words to describe. All of it, the hard and the wonderful, have enriched my life beyond expectation. That is the awareness I want to shout from the rooftops. Adopting an infant is not the only path to a happy ending and if you feel an inkling in your heart to adopt an older child, I encourage you to listen to it.

OK, enough of that. I know most of you come here for the cute pictures so here are a few more from our VERY thankful Thanksgiving!


FOOTBAAAAAL!



Not so sure about this Santa guy...

Christmas Angel

No words needed...



The Difference a Year Makes

November 2009 was a very challenging time for our family. We had been on the wait list eleven months, a record with our agency as far as we could tell, and we received a series of phone calls from our case worker that presented us with a unique and unexpected set of challenges.

First our case worker called to ask us if we would be interested in increasing our age preference to pursue a sibling pair that was about to become available. She could not tell us anything about these children other than their ages, but as I listened to her talk on the other end of the phone, all I could think was, “That’s not them”. I asked her a few questions, most of which she couldn’t answer, but mostly I just kept asking, “Are you SURE we haven’t been matched yet??” I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the children she was talking about weren’t the ones meant for our family. She said she wasn't sure. There was the possiblity that the in country staff had matched us and she didn't know about it yet. After talking it over with Mark, who had the same gut reaction, we called her back to tell her that we wanted to keep our age preference unchanged.

The days that followed were some of the most difficult of my life. I had many moments of doubt and was deeply saddened by our decision to turn this sibling group away, even though I was certain that another family would accept the referral and that they were not the children meant for our family. I was distraught at the prospect of waiting another several months. We had been pretty sure that we would have our children home for the holidays and now it seemed that we wouldn’t even have a referral to celebrate by then. I was a mess.

Six days later, I was standing in a train station when I received another call from our case worker. Again she was asking if we wanted to increase our age preference in order to pursue a sibling pair that was about to become available. She still couldn’t tell me much about them, couldn’t share pictures, but this time she was able to tell me age and gender.

“Fourteen month old twin boys” she said.

“THAT’S THEM!” screamed the voice in my head. In July, Mark and a good friend and I had written our predictions on a blackboard in our kitchen. I had written "14 month old twin boys".

Turned out they were 26 months old, but that's another story...

It was extremely tough waiting another couple months for our referral. People would tell me, "At least the holidays will keep you distracted", but at that point nothing could distract me and the holidays just made me sad that we had no children to celebrate with.

With one hundred percent certainty, I can say that these are the children that were meant for our family, and every minute of that extra wait...I would do it again and again and again to get to my boys.

Early December 2009
Photo taken one month pre-referral thanks to the Britt Family

November 2010

If you are still waiting, maybe trying to forget that you thought you would already have your children home for the holidays, hang in there. You will be writing a post like this one too next year, and saying a prayer of thanks that you followed your heart to the child or children at your Thanksgiving table.

Worth the wait

Happy Friday

Re-adoption Day

I had visions of a family photo on the steps of our historic City Hall, complete with lovely foliage and crisp fall air...

Instead we got this.

Eating raindrops



Even with the rain, it was a beautiful, wonderful day.

The Judge gave the boys twin bunny rabbits, which they named Peanut Butter and Good Boy.



Peanut Butter posing for the camera

The whole thing took no more than five minutes, yet it was more emotional and ceremonious than I expected. It certainly was a happier occasion than our embassy appointment in Ethiopia.

This time we felt like a family and there were only tears of joy.

To celebrate we went out for blueberry and banana pancakes and coffee-milk (really just warm milk, but they call it coffee-milk because the cup looks like Daddy's coffee). Then we stopped at Barnes and Nobel to pick out some new books (thanks to everyone who gave us recommendations last month!!)

The boys got to pick out a toy, too. Here's what they chose...





 No, we weren't surprised that he chose a pink princess phone.

One of many accessorized moments

It was a very good day.

The obligatory group shot

On the way out, the Judge said he wanted to see us back next year with the baby sister.

HA....no comment!