The gift of beauty

As I mentioned before, adoption is messy. But it is also beautiful. Sometimes it feels like you wish that you could bottle the beauty so you don't forget. And then, someone with an artist soul does it for you! I had to make a separate post for the amazing photos that my dear friend Jess at Olive Avenue Photography captured of our family last summer with a Red Thread Session. These images still take my breath away and I am so grateful for the treasure they are.

First a throwback...Full family pic.  Red Thread Sessions, two years apart. 

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.

Fake Birthday

Since Byron's class celebrates birthdays with special snacks from home and Byron and others have summer birthdays, his teacher allowed us to bring in a snack for him and he got to celebrate today. We created quite the distraction when walking in at story time (oops!) and the gang was excited to eat at Byron's table with him. In the name of keeping it real, I realized when we were all done and walking to the car that I had forgotten to bring Ruth's lunch as I had promised when I didn't have time to make it this morning. We ran over to the late lunch drop off area and left her juice boxes, chips and fruit snacks for lunch. It felt like a mom-fail but I am pretty sure she will be ecstatic when she gets home to have gotten such junk food for lunch! Ha ha.

The best day ever!

Byron proclaimed yesterday the best day ever. He learned to kayak up and down the beach of the St. Croix all by himself. You can see our friends and us here taking kids on the kayak. It was amazing weather and so nice to be outside. We also got our first family photo taken since June arrived home. It only took us 7 weeks!

The triplets

Aka the three stooges, three musketeers, three amigos... we could go on. These three are quite the crew. Almost the same height, similar developmentally, three different ages and hair types. June and Marcus are almost like long lost twins. Marcus wants to do everything with June. For the first 6 weeks June was home, Eli was grouchy every waking hour. He was feeling displaced though I kept assuring him that he was still the baby of the family! After that 6 weeks, Eli turned a major corner and most of his grouchiness left, for which we were ALL THANKFUL!

Easter Egg hunt

Pretty much everything is a first for June at this point. She has been taking it all in stride. It helps that she can just watch what her siblings are doing and she does it, too, no matter how crazy it seems!