Life as a Mom

It's nearly 11:00 pm, and I'm finally sitting down. After I put the kids to bed I had to empty/fill the dishwasher, do two loads of laundry, take a shower and put all of the clean clothes away. I'm tired!

Life has been busy, but what else is new?! I feel like I'm constantly running in circles lately. Here is the finalization update that I promised last Thursday!

7/31/08 - when our alarm went off at 6:00am we turned on the news. Much to our surprise, we saw that there were tornado warnings just to the northwest of us, and severe thunderstorm warnings out for our area. Our adoption hearing was scheduled for 8:30. The weather dude said that the storms should be in our area around 8:00am ... right when we needed to be leaving. Lovely. My parents had taken time off from work - again! - and were planning on being here (remember this same story from two weeks ago? ... we were supposed to finalize on the 17th, and that got pushed back due to a jury trial ...) Around 7:30 I called my Mom, and they decided that they should stay home since the weather was so bad. We were all so bummed. :-( Around 8:00am, I thought my house was going to blow away. Seriously. We had 70+ mph wind gusts. It looked like a hurricane outside. It was simply awful. We called the courthouse, and they told us to get there when we could. They said that most of their employees were stuck in the parking lot, and that the judge wasn't even there yet!

Around 8:20 the storm was pretty much through the area, so we jumped in the vehicle and got to the courthouse as quickly as we could. We could not believe the damage from the storm. Trees down everywhere - it was a mess!

We were looking forward to my parents coming so that they could watch the boys for us. N sat on my lap and was really good, but my busy little two-year-old ... he was busy! He wanted to push there chair around everywhere. The judge just smiled at us and said "I have three boys -- I understand!" ;-)

The hearing itself only lasted about 10-15 mintues. The judge was wonderful! I still can't believe that little Miss M is ours forever -- what a surreal process this has been.

I pulled out all of our adoption paperwork tonight. When I pulled out her referral and read through it again, all of the emotions of that day 10 months ago (holy cow - it's been 10 months TODAY that we received our referral - that does not seem possible!) came rushing back. After reading through everything again and crying, I sat down with my precious little daughter and held her close. 10 months ago today she felt so far away from me - she felt real, yet she felt like a dream. I had my doubts that the process would work. My heart was guarded. I wanted to believe that at some point she would be home in my arms, but I had a hard time believing that it would really actually happen. For all those waiters out there -- it DOES happen. Your dreams will come true.

I leave you with a picture of M from last Thursday when she legally became our daughter, and the newest US Citizen! (which reminds me -- I have to start the newest round of paperwork ... will it ever end?!?!)