FAMILY weekend

Anna is sooooo lucky that a subset of her fun + cool family got to visit her in Charlotte last weekend. She thought her life was pretty fine until we showed up and made her do stuff like wear fashionable AND matching t-shirts. Here we are on the campus quad sporting our big greens.

Anna and Mary strike a pose with the Firebird sculpture outside of the art museum in downtown Charlotte.

Charlotte is a happenin' town!

Anna came to our hotel on Sunday morning to have a birthday breakfast- happy 19th Anna!

The Bengals happened to be playing the Carolina Panthers on Sunday... here are Karl, Mary and the college kids cheering on the Bengals during a rainy, rainy game.

Sparkle and tubesocks...

Rosie's is fortunate to have a big sister who knows exactly what is important and almost necessary to a two year little girl. Mary took Rosie shopping at her favorite shoe boutique (Target) and returned home with ruby red sparkle shoes. Rosie loves her new shoes more than anything else that she has ever worn and refuses to wear anything else. The only issue with her new footwear is that they are a size too big. Mary said that she had to guess on the size and that once she tried on the first pair, The Divine Miss Rose refused to let her take them off to see if the smaller size was a better fit. In fact she screamed at the top of her little lungs at the mere inclination of Mary removing her sparkle shoes... she won that battle but now must wear double tube socks with her fancy shoes until her feet grow a bit more.

"See them? So pretty... so pretty fancy shoes!"
Rosie G.

Yep... I do believe that our Rosie is girl with a thing for fancy shoes.

Sharkboy and the Spoon

Henry figured out how to balance a spoon on his nose and asked me if I could take a picture of him demonstrating his new skill. When I showed him the photo, he said "Man... I forgot I had a shark suit on- I look just like a sharkboy with a spoon on his nose..."
So... here is the photo, just in case you have yet to see a sharkboy balancing a spoon.

One year ago today....

Rosie at home... 9/10/10

One year ago today I met my youngest daughter Rosie for the first time at her orphanage in Ethiopia. It's hard for me to believe that it has only been a year- she is such a part of our family that it seems like she has been with us forever. Last fall, our kids school published a book of essays where students teachers and parents were invited to contribute essays of 500 words or less modeled after the writing pieces featured on NPR. This is the piece that I submitted.

I believe that adoption is a wonderful way to build a family.

I became a mother in two different ways. I gave birth to three
children and adopted three children. Both avenues to parenthood were
magical. No thrill came close to that of meeting my children for the
first time. There was no difference between meeting my daughters in
the hospital delivery room, my sons in Guatemala, or my youngest
daughter in an orphanage in Ethiopia. In the trenches of parenting,
biology doesn't matter. Genetics mean little. Love is what carries the
day, what pulls you through, what holds a family together. There is no
second best way to create a family. Through adoption, our family has
been blessed and enriched in ways too numerous to count.

Like all parents who have adopted from countries in distress, the
children we met who are still waiting for parents, stay in my heart as
much as the children who became my family. Most adoptive parents will
agree that this heaviness is a side effect of international adoption.
While we all feel proud and fortunate to have our children safe and
home, we carry the faces of those children waiting for parents in our
hearts. Those are the children that we think of as we protect our own
children. We think of them often when we hold our own children tight
against pain and sadness. Since our first adopted son cam home from
Guatemala, my thoughts go immediately to the children living in
orphanages every time one of our children is sick or frightened in the
middle of the night. Children need parents in order to survive and
grow and no one knows this better than an orphan who is longing for a
family of their own.

When I picked up our youngest daughter from the orphanage where she
had lived for most of her young life, a girl of about seven ran out to
greet me. She stopped short, looked me in the eye, grinned and said
something I couldn't understand. I bent closer and she spoke again and
I realized that she was speaking to me in English, not her own
language, and that she was softly and uncertainly introducing herself
to me. My heart broke for her. I know that children her age do not
speak to adults unless they have a very good reason. Her good reason
was that she was desperate for a mother and I looked like I had
potential to fill that role. The terrible sad truth is that in
introducing herself to a stranger, this little girl was speaking for
all of the waiting children at the orphanage, and by extension,
orphans everywhere hoping for parents of their own.

Becoming a parent is a personal leap of faith and an act of love.
Becoming an adoptive parent is exactly the same. While I understand
that the journey of adoption can be a difficult path to begin, I will
attest that the rewards have far exceeded the challenges. It is my
hope is that more families would consider adoption as a loving way to
build a family.

"I'm six, I'm six, I'm six, I'm six!"

Totally six!

Yay Schoolbus!

The gang just before the bus arrived, Rosie helped me walk the kids to the bus stop.

Ahhh.... the first day of school. I was so happy to welcome that bus and get back to a regular, if maybe a less fun then summer routine. While I love the idea of the kids going back to school-Rosie is having a tougher time of it. For the first few days she was really out of sorts...very insecure and insisted that I hold her all day while she bossed me around. She also refused to nap, which was a huge bummer because I was really looking forward to her naps to give me a break from the clinginess. Do you remember when Yoda had Luke Skywalker in Jedi boot camp and built his Jedi endurance by hanging on his back and giving him orders? Well, Rosie is my Yoda... she even sounds like him. "No sit mommy- no sit no sit- get kids... get kids, readygo- readygo-readygonow readygoNOW!"

Exhausting.
However...she does begin preschool soon which will give her school buddies and structure and a chance to wear a very cute backpack a few times a week.

Yay preschool!
Oh and the report from the big sibs is that school is cool. Mary is happy to be a sophomore and more importantly- not a freshman- Lily loves being in the 4th grade- the big cheeses of the primary school, Jamie is crazy about his 2nd grade teacher and Henry is embracing kindergarten with happy enthusiasm.
I love school.

And they're off...you can just barely see Rosie wistfully waving her pink pony in the corner. She is far less happy with the start of school then I am.


Imagine Luke as a cranky middle aged housewife, and Yoda looking a lot less pleasant and a lot more frantic and you will get close to my back to school week with Rosie.

Just bopping along, figuring stuff out...

Here is Anna on the school quad, just outside her dorm- she was bidding me adieu but I wasn't so sure about leaving just yet.

Anna started college last week... I mean how is that even possible? But it's true. It seems like it was just a few years ago that I moved into Bradley Hall at OSU... not 25 years...sigh.

Anyway... Anna is going to school in Charlotte, NC which is 8 hours and 23 minutes from our house. This meant that I had more or less 9 hours (counting lunch) to either remind her or bring her up to speed with tons of important stuff. She was a captive and mostly uncomfortable audience as I hit on every major life lesson I could think of...and I know she was faking sleep at least part of the time. While I let her "sleep" some of the time, I did wake her up with a start two times. Once to look at a rainbow and again to see a gi-normous wild tom turkey at a truck brake hill. I took both sightings as good signs, although I am not so sure yet how to read the wild turkey. As we drove along, some of her friends were moving into their schools and texting Anna every now and again. One of her close friends had just moved into her dorm and Anna asked her what she was doing "...just boppin' along figuring' stuff out" was her reply. I really loved that answer.

Here is Anna bopping along in her dorm, anxious for me to go and eager to start a new chapter in her life.

The cool rainbow that I had Anna take a photo of...