Tomorrow we should find out more about our upcoming adoption.

Although I’m doubting it will happen this month, since the month is half over, I’m hopeful we will finalize by the end of June.  Once the adoption is final though, I’ll be posting lots and lots of pictures.  After all, this little munchkin if 15 months old now and I have 15 months worth of pictures to share.

Assuming the adoption is finalized by July 1st, hubby will be taking some much needed time off.  One of the benefits his company offers is 12-weeks paid time off for the birth or adoption of a child.  He will take 8 weeks this summer and the rest in December.  Having most of the summer as a family of five will be so very nice.

We found out that our other two foster kiddos will be leaving to go live with a family member.  Between having them back in 2017 and them returning to us last year, we’ve had them for 18 months.  This is going to be a big adjustment to say the least and is truly the hard part of foster care.

With our adoption on the horizon, the other two leaving, a vacation coming up and a new grandbaby on the way, we’ve decided to take a break from foster care for the summer.

We will keep our license in tact so we can help out other foster families by providing respite for them in between our summer travels.  We will re-group in August and decide if we want to continue fostering, stay open strictly as respite providers or close our home altogether.  We’ve had 13 children come thru our doors and while that is only a small drop in a very large bucket, we have to do what is in the best interest of our family.  Having the summer to sit back and relax a little is very much needed, so that’s what we’ll do.

We also have some home renovations we’re hoping to work on, so having fewer kids, while getting some of these things done, will be helpful.

 

Mother’s Day was very nice this year.

Hubby made arrangements for me to have one-one-one time with each of the three oldest.  I had a nice breakfast date with one, went to Painting with a Twist with another and got a manicure and pedicure with the third.  There was a lot of running here and there, but it truly was nice having one at a time and getting a break from the two littles.

Part of gearing up for the summer is also preparing for more homeschooling.  Since we take breaks throughout the year, we keep working during the summer.  We still do a lot of fun summer activities, but our school doesn’t end like it does for public school students.

Life keeps on keeping on here.

I hope you all have some wonderful summer plans to look forward to.

 

It seems like everything is moving quickly these day.

Lili turns 12 in a few days, even though it doesn’t feel like she should be getting this old.

Our adoption case worker came over and had us fill out paperwork for ANW’s adoption.  She told us she is just waiting on the birth certificate, but thinks we should be able to finalize next month (May).

In 69 days we’ll be heading on our vacation to Florida.  I mapped out our route and finalized it today by making our hotel reservations during the drive to and from Florida.  I am so ready for some beach time!!!

Before our trip to Florida though, Naomi will turn 10.  Double-digits!!!

Seriously, how did my girls get this old so quickly?!

Life sometimes seems to change in a blink of an eye.

It’s an easy concept right?

So why isn’t it that simple?

As I think about the things that make me happiest in the world, these things come to mind . . . . .

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My husband

My kids

Extended family members

Good friends

Cruises

Being at the beach

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I’m really am fortunate to have a wonderful husband and a good marriage.

I have some pretty awesome kids (most of the time).

We have extended family members who are there for us when needed.

We’ve made some awesome friends over the years.

We have been able to take some fun cruises and have more booked.

We were at the beach for vacation last summer and are going back this summer.

There is also beach time during our cruise shore excursions.

However, time at the beach is something I long to have more of in my life.  It’s something my family longs to have more of in our lives.

Living in Texas means we aren’t THAT far from the beach, but it’s still a several hour drive to get there and my favorite beaches are in Florida and the Caribbean.

Life is short and getting shorter every day.  So if being at the beach makes me and my family so happy, why don’t we live closer?  For a matter-of-fact, why do we hesitate to make the changes necessary to do things that we know make us happy?

I have many people in my life that would rather live somewhere else, but they stay where they are.   Why?

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They live close to where they work and money certainly makes living life easier.

They have family in the area and don’t want to leave them.

They don’t want to go thru the hassle of selling their house.

They are fearful of change.

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The list of reasons are long and many have very good reasons for wanting to stay where they are, even if they aren’t completely happy.  Many of those reasons are the reasons we hesitate as well.

However, I don’t want to spend my life living somewhere that doesn’t make me truly happy and we’re fortunate to have choices.

We have experienced things in life that we know bring us happiness and enjoyment in life, so why not strive to make the changes that will allow us to regularly enjoy the life we want to live?  Isn’t that living our authentic life?

Recently, hubby was interviewed for a new position in his company.  The interview went very well and he was told he was going to be offered the position.  Upper management decided to make some changes regarding the job classification and unless he was willing to take a step backwards, they could no longer offer him the job.  It’s hard to get excited about a new opportunity only to discover it’s not going to be an option.  However, the experiences caused us to step back and look at the bigger picture.

In this particular instance, the job change would have required us to make another move back to the Pacific Northwest.  We weren’t opposed to making the move because we knew from living there previously, that we liked living there.  However, we realized it wasn’t somewhere we wanted to live for the rest of our lives, so it would have been a temporary move for us or we would have been forced to stay there longer than we may have wanted.  So thru the disappointment of hubby not being able to move his career forward like we thought, we realized that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Instead of putting our focus on making a temporary move, we can focus on doing something that will make us happy.

For the short-term, we will focus on ANW’s adoption and we will make some changes to our home.  Hopefully within the next 1-2 years, we will relocate to an area that we so very much enjoy – the Tampa Bay area in Florida near Clearwater Beach, which is listed as the #1 Beach in the U.S.

Although we vacation at Indian Rocks Beach, a few miles south of Clearwater Beach, we are in our happy place there and it will be a great location for us to one day retire, so why not make the move before retirement and begin enjoying the beach life.

So we’ll set our sites on making that move in the future with no detours, because we should do what makes us happy.

This baby is something.  She’s 14 months old and said her first 3 word sentence yesterday – Thank you Lili.  Although it came out as tan oo e e, but it was very intentional and we knew exactly what she was saying.

She has decided she’s unhappy at meal time sitting in her high chair.  It’s pushed up to the table, but she wants to be sitting AT the dining room table in a booster seat.  This one doesn’t need a Patrick Swayze telling us “No one puts Baby in the corner.”  She is very capable of speaking for herself.

And speaking of meals, there is no feeding her.  She “must” do it herself.

Stairs!  Her favorite thing in the world right now is climbing stairs or anything else she can climb on.

Bath time ranks pretty high in her book as well.

Her smile melts our hearts.

Her laugh is contagious.

Her cuddles and hugs are to die for.

Her kisses are pure sweetness.

Life with this one is going to be an extreme ride.  🙂

The adoption attorney has been hired and I’ve spoken to the adoption case worker.  Things are moving along and sometime in the next few months, I will be able to share her name and face with the world.

I started this post over a month ago, but couldn’t seem to finish it.  I suppose I’m not always sure where to draw the line between sharing enough and not sharing too much.    Sometimes, or in my case many times, it’s difficult to share something so personal.  We’ll see how it goes.

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I was a young wife and mother.  Married (5 days prior to my 18th birthday), pregnant three months later, miscarried a couple of months later and pregnant again a couple of months after that.  By age 19 I was a first time mother of a beautiful baby boy and 17 months after baby #1 was born, I became a mother once again to another beautiful baby boy.  From the time I was a very young girl, my only real goal in life was to become a wife and mother.  I accomplished both of those things before I turned 20.

Life was good and it was a struggle at the same time.  Learning how to be a good wife and mother is difficult at any age, but at such a young age, it was especially challenging at times.  Having a partner who is there to learn alongside you and being able to support each other thru all the ups and downs is vital in making a marriage work.  I thought I had found such a partner, but when we discovered that our oldest son was not developing as most kids normally do, the struggle became very real.  Eventually a diagnosis that included the word ‘autism’ was more than my husband could bear.  He began to throw himself into his work even more.  He would take on extra shifts saying we needed the money, which wasn’t a lie, but it also wasn’t the truth.  Those extra shifts meant a lot of time sleeping when home and very little time interacting with his wife and two young sons.

During year 4 of our marriage I discovered there was a 3rd person in the relationship and that was the end.  We were divorced shortly after year 5 and I officially became a single mother.

After being a stay-at-home mom, I was thrown back into the workforce and got a small apartment.  The boys and I moved out of our 3-bedroom home with the big backyard, to a two-bedroom, 2nd floor apartment with a small balcony.  They spent their days with a grandparent, great-grandparent or an aunt while I worked.  It was exhausting, but I discovered that I was so much stronger than I knew.  I began to change and grow as a person.  For the first time in my life, I was learning who I was as an individual.  I wasn’t being taken care of by a parent or a husband.  I was now the one fully responsible for myself and my two little boys.

I was so very lucky to find love again after being so deeply hurt the first time around.  I really wasn’t convinced I could ever fully trust a man again, so I didn’t see it coming.  Yet, we have been happily married for 33 years now.  This time I found a true partner who I am able to lean on and support thru all our ups and downs.  Considering how major some of those ups and downs have been, I think it’s going to last.

Along the way though, I learned that sharing children with someone means that you are always connected to them and one of the things I had to be able to do was forgive.  Not just the man who had hurt me so terribly, but I had to forgive myself as well.  Marriage is two people and there are always mistakes made by each person.  While it might have been easier to just place blame on him for having an affair and tearing up our family, I had to be honest and look at all sides.  We both played roles in the demise of the relationship.  As he dove more deeply into his work, I dove more deeply into my work as a mother.  I also didn’t invest the time and attention necessary to make the relationship work.  I had to take responsibility for my role, place part of the blame on me and forgive myself so I could truly forgive him.  It wasn’t an over-night process and I worked very hard to blame him for everything first.  After all, while I was home taking care of our children, he was out having an affair, so why not?  He was an easy target and self-reflection can be a very difficult.

Eventually, forgiveness came and my relationship with my ex was okay.  There were still many struggles along the way when it came to the kids and I could give many different scenarios on the differences in how we dealt with situations along the way, but that would be another book post for another time.

Our boys are grown so for the last several years I have rarely spoken to my ex-husband.  There really hasn’t been a need to, so when he called me one day late in January, I was a little surprised.  That surprise turned to deep emotion when I learned the reason for his call.  After 35 years, he called to ask for my forgiveness.  He was making amends and I was able to honestly tell him that I had forgiven him a very long time ago and it was in that moment I realized just how important forgiveness truly is.

Ten days later, my ex-husband died.  He had battled cancer for 11 years and it was a hard-fought battle.

Forgiveness brought about thankfulness in me.  Thankful for the good years we spent together.  Thankful for our boys.  Thankful for what I learned along the way.   Thankful that the divorce that lead me to my husband who gave me another son and our two (soon to be three) beautiful daughters.  Thankful for the opportunity to become a foster parent.  Thankful for all the things in my life, both good and bad.  All these things have helped shape me into the person I am today, both the good and the bad.

Good-byes are hard and this particular good-bye closed the chapter to that part of my life while another chapter is being written.  The new chapter will include a grandchild.  The first grandchild my ex and I would share.

And life goes on . . .

 

 

A few days ago, we had a visit from ANW’s case worker.  As all case workers are required to do in the State of Texas, she came for her monthly visit to make sure ANW is doing well and to give us an update.

She confirmed that the 90-day hearing was last week.  This is the required hearing after termination of parental rights.  There was nothing unexpected that happened at the hearing and she has now turned everything over to the adoption unit.  Hopefully before the end of the month, we’ll be contacted by the new adoption case worker to begin the adoption process.

I’m feeling a great sense of relief while also feeling some sadness that this chapter of her life will be coming to an end in the next few months.  Hubby and I are over the moon in love with this baby girl and can’t wait to legally become her parents.  At the same time, she has biological parents.  Unlike some other adoptive parents, I don’t feel that she was meant to be ours all along.  No child is born to be removed from their parents and placed with complete strangers, yet circumstances cause this to happen far too often.  Our choice to open our home to children coming into the foster care system allowed us to be the recipients of this beautiful and remarkable baby girl and now we will be raising her to adulthood.

Words can never fully express the millions of thoughts and feelings I have about adoption.  I feel great happiness for myself because I love her beyond words and don’t have to say good-bye.  I will continue to raise her, watching her grow, teaching her how to talk, walk, read, write, and all the other things parents get to do.  Equally, I feel great sadness for her biological family.  Not only do they miss out on knowing this marvelous little girl, but this miss out on all those milestones along the way.  For ANW, I have the mixture of emotions.  Without a doubt, she loves having me as her mommy, hubby as her daddy, and her sisters.  She would experience great trauma leaving us now, but at the same time, there will come a day when she will begin wondering why she isn’t being raised by her biological parents.  She will ask questions.  She will likely feel sadness and confusion.  You see adoption is never the first best option.  It’s never the second best option.  At best, it comes in third place and that’s a difficult place to be in for anyone.

The nice thing is that I do have the contact information for the caregivers of her siblings.  My hope is that we can establish a relationship so she continues to have a relationship with them throughout her life.

So we are moving forward by soon saying good-bye to this chapter in our lives and moving on to the next.

 

 

Anyone who has followed my blog over the years knows my family enjoys cruising.  There is something for everyone in our family and it just makes us happy.

This past year we had made reservations for a cruise to Bermuda, but realized it wasn’t going to work out.  We had been told that the two foster sisters we have would be leaving to go live with an out-of-state family member and as it approached the time to pay our final cruise payment, they were still with us and we feared they would be moved while we were gone.  We also wanted to take ANW with us, however, the stateroom we had booked wasn’t large enough to accommodate a family of 5 and they had no other room combinations in our price range that would work.  So we decided to cancel the cruise.

We have reservations to go back to the condo we rented on Indian Rocks Beach in Florida this summer, but next summer we have booked a 7-night cruise to the Western Caribbean.  It’s on Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas, which is a ship we enjoy.  We’ll be taking some friends with us and it will be their first time ever on a cruise ship and their first time out of the U.S.  It will be so much fun!

A few weeks after making our reservations, hubby found another cruise that seemed to good to pass up.  So we booked it.

Sometime the end of October, 2020 we will fly to Italy and spend a few days seeing the sights and trying some authentic Italian cuisine.  We haven’t worked out all the details of our Italy trip yet, but after our visit to Italy, we will fly to Barcelona, Spain and on November 1st  we will board Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas (which happens to be our favorite ship so far)

and sail from Barcelona, to Palma de Mallorca , to Valencia and then on to the Canary Islands.  From the Canary Islands we head to Royal Caribbean’s island in the Bahamas, Coco Cay.  After spending a day there, we head to Miami, FL and then home.  In all, a 14-night cruise!!!

With every cruise, we’ve said the same thing, “It wasn’t long enough.”  Hopefully 14-nights will do the trick!

Both cruises are a long way off . . .  464 days and 604 days to be exact . . . but we are so excited about planning these trips in the meantime.

 

I spend way to much time thinking about blog posts and not posting.  That has got to change!!!!!!

So I’ll try better by starting today.

I suppose one of the reasons I don’t post often is due to waiting for major news to share.  However, there really isn’t any major news at this point, although I’m sure that’s even a matter of opinion.

So let’s start with the kids, specifically baby girl who I’ll refer to as ANW.

Back in December, the judge terminated ANW’s parents’ rights.  Neither of them had worked the services they had to complete to have her returned.  Mom was very consistent about coming to visits, but back in July that changed.  She missed a visit which turned into missing multiple visits, eventually not showing up at all.  It made me very sad to know that this beautiful, smart, and happy baby girl would be yet another child missing out on being raised by her birth parents.  On the flip side, knowing that we could potentially be her forever family made me very happy.

That is one of the interesting dichotomies in foster care.  We do this to provide children a safe haven while their parent(s) worked out their difficulties and learn how to lovingly and effectively parent.  We love these kiddos.  We nurture these kiddos.  We become their parents and in most cases, our time with them is limited and then we say good-bye, because that is our primary responsibility as foster parents.  Yet, at the same time, we find ourselves not wanting to say good-bye.  We privately hope they will stay with us forever because we love them and don’t want to say good-bye.   There are many challenges in foster care, but that is the emotional challenge.

It would be a lie to say that we want to keep every child that enters our home.  For so many different reasons, there have been some who we’ve lovingly and happily said good-bye to.

For example, the sisters who were moving on to live with their older sister and her dad.  That was a happy moment.

Or the little boy who so lovingly talked about his grandparents and eventually went to live with them.  We were very happy for him.

Then we’ve had some that had such tough life experiences, it was more challenging than we imagined it would be.

When we say yes to a child, we never know if we’ll tearfully or joyfully say good-bye, but we keep saying yes none-the less, because no matter how hard it is for us, things have been so much harder for them.  They deserve to have some happier and simpler moments in their lives.

Now back to baby girl . . . .

In the State of Texas, once rights are terminated, the parents have 30 days to appeal and family members have 90 days to come forward and request that the child(ren) be given to them.  Then there is a 90 days hearing to determine the next step.  The 90 days hearing was a couple of days ago and unless something unexpected happened, the next step would be turning the case over to the adoption unit so we can begin the process to adopt ANW.

I guess that is semi-major news.  🙂

So what else is happening in our lives?

A couple of months ago, hubby was invited to be part of a Senior Technical Leadership team.  He works for a very large company here in the U.S. and with only 300-350 employees invited to be part of this team, it is quite a big deal.

He attended the week-long kick-off for the team.  He learned a lot and returned home with a lot of excitement about his future with the company.  In a nutshell, the company wants to invest in the members of this team and help them take on more substantial leadership roles in the company.

We had to have some discussion about what this meant for his career and for our family.  The end result was acknowledging that we had to be open to the possibility of leaving Texas if that is where the next job took him.

Fast forward to last week when he had an interview for a new position that would move us back to the Pacific Northwest.  The interview went very well and he hopes to hear something very soon.

Again, maybe not major news at this point, but definitely news and enough that even the possibility of another cross-country move is putting us into high gear when it comes to decluttering our house.

And how is it that a family can accumulate so much in such a short period of time?

But that’s a post for another time.

So those are the two things that most closely align with major news.  Our girls are doing well and we still have our other two foster kiddos, who we’ve now had close to 16 months total.  They are supposed to be leaving us to live with a family member out-of-state and when they leave, there will most certainly be major tears.  After all, when it’s all said and done, we’ll probably have had them 18+ months and that is a long time to be mommy and daddy, then say good-bye.  Our girls will most certainly have a difficult time saying good-bye as well.  They have been sisters to these girls in ever sense of the word and we will feel the impact of their presence and their absence deeply.