This Blog

Okay, I know on my last post, I said that I was going to delete it on June 21....which is today....which is our 6 month anniversary of our effective court order making the girls ours. Tomorrow is our anniversary of the date of actually picking up the girls. It was about 4 in the afternoon.

We had gotten up late that morning - our last morning of actually getting to sleep past 9am, although that was Russia-time, which means it was actually 1am CST, so I don't know if that actually counts as sleeping in. We ate a great breakfast at the restaurant downstairs, our last before the onslaught of the dreaded stomach virus which kept us from eating anything but sour cream and onion Pringles and 7-up for the next five days. (I don't know why the Pringles were the only thing we could keep down. I guess it was just because our bodies needed the salt.)

At any rate, here we sit six months later with our happy, healthy girls. They've gained weight, grown hair, learned to talk, and recognize familiar places away from the house, like church and Del Sol, our favorite cantina. Those girls can put away a beef enchilada and beans like nobody's business.

Joe read that I was going to delete my blog, and he suggested that before I do, I backup all my posts into documents so that I can keep them for our girls and our own memories. They are as important to us as our photos from the trip, which I still have yet to compile into a DVD of our trip. Since there were three trips, we don't have a real "Gotcha" day like some countries where your first meeting is the day you receive your child.

When I got into the files on my blog and started searching where the trip began, I thought I needed to go back further. Then I couldn't decide where to start. Then I couldn't decide whether to backup only the posts that I published, or the drafts also.

Then I decided....at least for now....that I'm keeping the blog.

I may not post as often as I used to, because the girls are getting more active and sleeping less during the day, making for a smaller window of opportunity for writing. But I need more time to go through all the old posts and sort them into devotions that don't have anything to do with adoption, and the adoption posts. It will take time. As I uncover old drafts that didn't make the cut originally, I will share those if there is anything worthwhile.

Thanks for your readership.

JK

Me and blogging

It has been an on-again, off-again thing. It was all about chronicling a journey toward becoming a mother and hearing the sound of little footsteps running through my house.

Now they are here, and I am falling out of the habit of blogging. So here is where I stand right now: I will make one more post so everyone can know a little bit of how far we've come in the past six months.

That's right....June 21 is our six month anniversary, which happens to coincide with Father's Day very nicely.

But after this last post, I will gracefully take my leave of the blogging universe. Anything that I have to say, I will say it to people I know over on Facebook via "notes". One thing that blogging has taken away from me is actual physical writing in journals. That used to be my primary means of capturing the intimate ways God was speaking to me. Whenever I started spouting them out publicly, I gradually began to feel a little too vulnerable, with everyone knowing my personal struggles and interpretations.

Now that we have the girls, I really want to protect them. Growing up a preacher's kid, I was the butt of sermon illustrations more often than I wish to recount. I don't want that for them. I want them to have some privacy, some anonymity while they figure out who they are. And I don't want people always bringing up TO them, especially when they're older and I'm not around to sanitize, interpret, or protect them, topics related to their adoption.

I have noticed watching the blogs of others who have adopted a similar reaction - lots of writing leading up to the moment, a lot of posting on the first few months of incubation, and then life takes over. Here is where life has taken us.

Addie talks....a LOT. Not always intelligible speech, but from the moment she wakes up, she is running and gibbering. The usable vocabulary right now is mama, dada, baba, nana, baby, juice, dog, ball, peas (this means please, peach yogurt drops, and peas in the garden), and bath. And it seems like we add another usable word every couple of days. She understands everything we're telling her. And she's hearing "NO" a lot more frequently. She's still trying to climb on everything, but she is a lot quicker to sit down immediately. That took some training.

Now she's teaching herself to swim. We got a little inflatable pool - the double ring kind. I filled it up for the first time this weekend, and it only took a little time before she was totally comfortable in the water. I learned to only fill it up to the first ring so she and Anna could sit in it. She likes putting her face under the water. Tonight, we had company for dinner, and after eating (waaaaay too much) we went outside for the boys to kick a soccer ball around in the field. Bugs were carrying us off, so I took the girls around to the backyard, and while I was stripping Anna down to let her cool off in the pool, Addie did her first cannonball in all her clothes. It wasn't really a cannonball, but when she hiked her leg over the inflatable wall, she didn't weigh enough to keep it down, and it bounced her up and over into the pool before she had a chance to get her balance.

Anna is enjoying the pool, also. She is becoming VERY vocal about her opinions. If there is a toy, place, thing that she wants, she starts pointing and whining until you give in or distract her. I can tell now that I will have to hide the pool when it is not in use. I will also have to park on the opposite side of the church on Sundays so she can't see the playground. Last Sunday, I inadvertently started WW3 when I issued a firm "no" to her pointing, grunting, and whining when we exited on that side of the church. She cried as I put her into the carseat, inconsolably in fact. I had personally hurt her feelings. She goes down the small slide without anyone holding her. She holds on to the tire swing while I hang on to her and push. It kills my back, but she loves it. The only thing is I need about two other people with me to take the two girls to the playground. I need a church-nanny. Given Joe's work at the church, he is always tied up with someone or something. Since the fire, he has had to move chairs from the church to a nearby shop for one of the Sunday school classes. And this is camp season for him, so there's always a parent or kid with questions about paperwork, due dates, deposits, fundraisers....We haven't gone to/from church as a family since April. A sweet older lady, near 90 years old, arrived at church the same time as I did with the girls last week, and she got the biggest kick out of holding Addie's hand and helping me walk them to the nursery. We've decided to nix the stroller on Sundays now that Addie is a little taller and a little better about walking beside me. I know Mrs. Martha would gladly be my church-nanny for at least that little walk.

In Anna's other developments, she is now crawling. Not on all fours, but a decent army combat crawl. It is fast and effective. And she is pulling the knees in occasionally. Twice today, I saw her get herself on all fours, but it was on our concrete kitchen floor, and I don't think it was comfortable enough to stay for long. She's still not sitting up on her own, but we're getting closer. She can get up to resting on her elbow. It's tension in her legs and lower back keeping her from getting into a relaxed sitting position. She is talking some, but not as much as Addie. This is normal for twins. We have to speak to her and encourage her to repeat words when it is obvious what or who she wants. And what she wants is to be running alongside Addie.

She is not content crawling, sitting in my lap, or standing up beside something like the coffee table. She wants to be walking around holding on to my hands. 90% of her whining is wanting to be walked around. The only thing is she doesn't need to walk without having to put weight on her legs, or without balancing, something she still won't do. All our work on the exercise ball turns into her game of trust-falling. So I put her down for more crawling practice, and she lays there and whines. The special home educator that's coming out weekly said it may look and sound like cruel punishment, but we've got to encourage her to get up on all fours and help her build that core stability to help her progress toward actual walking.

We'll get there. Like the name says...

little footsteps.

P.S. I will leave this post up until June 21, then this blog will be deleted. Thanks for following our journey. Until next time....