What we have been doing....

     It's been awhile since I posted. (Understatement.) This has been a long year in some ways and also fast and chaotic year. Adjusting to our adoption of an older child with Down syndrome has been, as expected, hard. June has adjusted like a champ, but we are slower. It is so far from the natural course of things to add a 7 year old with grown up teeth to your family. I missed having the bonding time with Marcus and Eli in the womb that I had with Ruth and Byron. But losing that time in the womb and getting a snuggly newborn is nothing at all like the difficulty of having a school age child plopped into your life.

    The fact that it's hard doesn't mean that we regret our most recent adoption. Hard things are often the best things for us. But, I refuse to paint a sunshiney rainbow-filled picture of what older child adoption looks like because I know there are so many moms going through the same difficulty out there. We will get there, someday, to the place where we feel like all the members of our family "have always been here." I believe it. However, we are not there yet, and that can be emotionally exhausting. If you have wondered what has happened to us, or feel like we fell off the map... we did. It pretty much takes every bit of energy we have to invest in our marriage and our children at this time. I am okay with that, but it is isolating simply by virtue of the path God has led us down. It is not an easy one and it can be so lonely.

    I try my best to be honest, not in hopes of sympathy, but in a desire to let other moms walking similar paths know that they are not crazy and that they are not alone.  If you are a mom who feels like I do, please contact me! Yes, I know we chose this -- and yet, we still must live and feel the bumps along the way. The choosing doesn't make us exempt from the varied (and strong) emotions of walking the uncommon path of older child and special needs adoption.

All that said, life has been moving along and I know that our family members (hello Auntie Corrie!) would just like to see some photos of the kids. So, I will happily oblige. We had many highlights of our year... we try to not let having 5 kids stop us from having some fun!


 

 June's first day of school EVER.

 Halloween with neighbors

White Sands National Monument

Joshua Tree National Park 

More Joshua Tree. We camped in our pop up. Yes, I know, we are brave!

 Legoland

We camped at the beach, too!

Then, we were tired. So we took a LOVELY respite trip where only Andrew and I were invited.