What Can Happen In A Year

It's been a year this week since we began working to bring Lucas and Eli home from the Philippines.

In this past year we've completed enough paper work to paper the walls of the White House (if not that than one very large office at the Immigration Department) we've read enough adoption books to fill 3 shelves in a library (beginning adoption, waiting to adopt, attachment, trauma, family adjustments, cross cultural adoption, international adoptions to name a few subject matters) we've had background checks by our local police and the FBI, we've completed social worker visits, parenting classes, we saw our 2nd oldest graduate from high school and our oldest move into her own apartment. We passed for approval to adopt from our agency, our government, the Philippine government and the Philippine Inter-Country Adoption board, our physicians, our kids' physicians, a psychologist and probably the mail man. We prayed for patience and really got a good lesson in practicing patience to make sure we knew it's importance. We received 3 dozen pictures of our boys. We learned some Tagalog. We were in and out of more of our government buildings than I previously knew existed. We anxiously watched as our boys survived 4 typhoons and massive flooding over the summer. We mastered security lines and body scans. We moved our second oldest to college in the fall. We received undescribable support from our family, friends, church and community. We navigated 2 U.S. airports, 2 international airports. Restrained ourselves (barely) with airline mechanical delays. We landed in a foreign country and were parents to 8 & 9 year olds 12 hours later. We learned more Tagalog in a week than we had in the previous 8 months, we traveled back to the U.S. with no major issues (thank God!) Our family expanded by 2 starting in February but was united in November. We've re-entered the world of the elementary school system, adapting to having 2 sons and 3 daughters, gaining a better understanding of the much heard of "attachment", entered the world of wrestling and basketball, re-entered the world of pediatricians, vaccinations and growth spurts.

Wow it has been a fascinating, wondrous and tiring year. But a year that we wouldn't have missed for anything....we have our sons, our girls have their brothers and Lucas and Eli have a family. 2009 was pretty darn good!