Adoption is tough

Adoption is beautiful, a miracle in many ways, but its also really tough. It would be easy to look at our family, see our posts of Samuel smiling and enjoying time with Jess and the kids and think that our journey has been easy, let me assure you, it is not easy. The truth is…

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Pictures of (foster) Mama

We had our visit with our social worker from our adoption agency on Saturday. As a part of that visit we talked to her about how Samuel has been grieving a lot more lately and how we have had several hard days with him. As we were talking the social worker asked if we had…

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Grieving on behalf of my son

Its weird. We are back from China with Samuel, everything is going well minus a few speed bumps, but my thoughts often return to his foster family and his loss. I find myself wondering how his foster mother is doing and what his foster father is like. I have no doubt that they miss him…

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Let me apologize in advance

This post is to attempt to explain a few things about the interactions of adoptive families with their friends and family during the period of time that they are trying to establish a bond with their child. It is common for friends and family of an adoptive family not to realize some of the complexity…

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Adjusting

We are home and we are adjusting. The last two nights we have gotten Samuel to sleep through the night, which has been a nice change from his wanting to get up and party at 1am. He is still grieving from time to time, but overall seems to be adjusting well. The other kids are…

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Day 6 – Gotcha Day

Today we woke up having not slept well. Up and down all night we woke up tired and knowing that we should eat breakfast but not at all hungry. We dutifully went down to eat and managed to eat a little bit. I ate a tea boiled egg (which was interesting) and Jess just kinda…

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Testing and preparing

We are in full out prep mode today, blitzing to clean the house, pack the bags, download good books, setup software and a million other things. Even this post is doubling as a blog post and a test post sent from the iPad WordPress app :). Lots of updates to come, and hopefully some sleep…

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We have Adoption travel plans – on our Anniversary!

Well, this week has probably been the hardest week for me personally regarding the adoption, but it is punctuated by great news on a special day. This morning around 1am we got the news that we will be traveling to China next week! And, this news came on our 10th Wedding Anniversary (May 17th, 2003)! We will…

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Valuing Time

As we are preparing to travel I find myself really valuing my time. Like most people there are a million things each day vying for my time, and like most people I like to say yes when I ought to say no. But with a trip to China on the near horizon that will take…

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The Waiting

The waiting part of the adoption process is hard. Really hard. Yesterday we were 95% certain that we would be traveling this Wednesday to go and get our son. Today we found out we will not. Its funny, sometimes you don’t realize how much you are looking forward to something until you are on the…

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