Summertime

Well guess I got a bit behind on my blog so guess I will try to sum up the summer here.

Was a busy, fun summer. We had lots of thing we did.

The summer started with Aaliyahs Eye surgery in June. It only slowed her down a little bit. She did have a bit of pain and swelling from it but never the less she was out and playing on the play set as you can see on the picture below. Her face is a bit swollen in the picture but she was still our little fire ball :) After about  a week she was back to her normal self.

We had a fun family day at the zoo. I managed to tackle going with just myself and the three kids. This day we went the weather was great and the kids enjoyed the animals.

 Fourth of July was a festive event. NeVaeh really enjoyed all the fireworks. She was cheering on the fireworks. We saw the display at Garretson.

 We also went to Laura's to set off fireworks. The kids got to play with cousins and set off snakes and snaps. They enjoy playing with cousins.

 Gramma at Lauras

 Couple candid pictures of Aaliyah and Andres

 NeVaeh worked hard all summer with communication. We added new features on her Talk Tablet on the Ipad. She now has some jokes and starting to add some games.

 The weekend before the Fair in Sioux Falls there was Family Fun Days at the fair grounds. The kids had a blast...they also went to the Sioux Empire fair the following week but I didn't get any pictures of that.

 After the family fun days we ate at Mckennan park and played there too.

This has been a very fun summer. Its been very busy!

We ended the summer up a week before school started with a vacation in the Black Hills. It turned out to be a very enjoyable and welcomed getaway!!

These are pictures taken at Reptile Garden.

 Aaliyah (the brave one) pet a snake.

 We watched the Alligator wrestler.

 She of course had to pet the alligator too.

 We drove through Bear country too.

 Saw Mount Rushmoore...Or the Men on the Mountain as the kids call it...LOL

 We visited Crazy horse too.

 Dinosaur park had many steps up to it about 120 or 130...NeVaeh was NOT going to go to up those steps so we stayed down and checked out the gift shop while Dan and the other two checked out the dinosaurs.

 Old McDonalds Petting Farm was a hit with the kids too.

 We spent a long time at Story Book Island.

 A little dinner theater in the motel room LOL

We went to Flinstone Park in Custer. The kids had lots of fun there too.

 Met some animals going through Custer Park.

 We saw the Mammoth site in Hot Springs

 Andres kept in good spirits even in the ride home.

 Aaliyah took pictures on the way home....she hasn't showed me the pictures she took of me yet LOL

 NeVaeh concentrating on her movies.

 We found lots of this on the way home...........

 We got home on Monday and the kids started school on Wednesday...Yayyyyyy!!!!!

 Aaliyah Kindergarden, NeVaeh third, Andres first...cant figure out how to turn the picture LOL

And off they go to school.....Next season LOL :)

Yahoo!! Finalized! We're adopted!!

While casually reading my emails yesterday I came across the most wonderful email from our children's wonderful case worker Stephanie. It starts...

Hello Dan and Patti,

The adoption has FINALIZED! Congratuations! :)

 Aaliyah Louise and Andres Daniel

This was the happiest news ever! Andres and Aaliyah happened to be right there so I told them guess what! then continued to read the email. The two were jumping around like wild kids. Aaliyah gave me a long hard hug. Andres said "This is a real good day! I'm going to live here forever!"

Aaliyah looks at me and said whats that water coming down from your eyes?

Andres "I gotta go tell Dad!!"

The kids ..especially Andres were on a high all day long and still are today. Just like a huge weight lifted off Andres. It seems even though we've been reassuring him he won't be going anywhere he is a deep thinker and no telling whats going through his head.

It has taken over 1 year and 2 months from the time they came to live with us for this day to come.

Yes we still have to wait for the actual paper work to come in our hands but they are ours in name!

You see there's many ways to choose a child. Many have their child the conventional way. They get conceive and have a child at birth and they don't have to go through all the paper work and red tape. Then there's adoption. Well we chose adoption. God blessed me with infertility so we had the choice of many ways to adopt as there is no two adoptions the same. 

We chose not to adopt an infant as we feel they would be the most easily placed.

When we first adopted in 2006, we felt like we got the run around from DSS and a couple agencies said they only placed infants. With a pure miracle and Gods help with in a half hour one day and agency found us with a two and half year old that needed placement. That was how we were brought to NeVaeh. She was placed in our home in 6 weeks.

 Andres (7) NeVaeh (9) Aaliyah (5)

 Now when we chose to adopt again we figured we knew all about adoption lol. This time we thought we would simply get a young sibling group from foster care with maybe a mild special needs. That's simple right? Should be matched and we should have kids in no time right?

Wellllll

I went to work searching the adopt us kids and any other search sites on the internet. I would see many kids thinking oh this will be easy there's so many kids that look just perfect for us. Well for some reason most sites required the social worker to inquire not us giving the agency a big job and there was almost no response....Well one month, two month, six month, one year........frustration. It seemed like we were going no where. I never really shared with many that we were searching. There were times I wondered if it was all in vain. We were going to have children but wow this is in sane!

How long could this take. Occasionally we would hear a little about a child and Dan and I would say no way or ok and never hear any more about them again. We finally found a site called A family for every Child and it allowed us to inquire in children on our own. This made our search speed things up. We had already been searching for nearly 3 years..yes thats right.

It took almost 4 years to get matched. We have been double fingerprinted every year for our home study it gets very redundant.

We had a couple near matches. We inquired on about 150 different sibling groups. We went to committee I believe 4 times which is when your one of  3 chosen families and we weren't' chosen. Each time is like you lost your babies. The last time we went to committee was two days  before we went to committee for Aaliyah and Andres.

This was a long process. We first learned about them July of 2011. For all our 1p family it was the week of the convention in Minnesota. We actually went to commitee a couple time with them. The first time was actually postponed needing more information. Then we were matched in the fall. We had hoped to go around Christmas but something happed to our paperwork and it got lost. After the new year of 2012 it all needed to be resubmitted. We finally got to go to meet them in March of 2012. The kids came here March 24th 2012. Its been a long road.

 The wait and anticipation has been worth it. Andres has put us through some behavioral challenges as well as Aaliyah which are actually tougher to deal with but they are both easier now to handle and deal with that they were before and are both getting much more mild.

We learned a lot about adoption this time..

1. Not everything writen about the kids is exactly true. Its sometimes writen worse that it actually is.

2. The time line they give you is only a time line lol. This adoption day is the absolute only time that was dead on when they said otherwise things were like months off of what we were told it would.

3. Expect anything. 

4. Nothing is so until its happened.

5. We know nothing. No matter how smart we were on adoption...lol we didn't know anything about it.

6.The first year is a big challenge.

7. Our kids are very wonderful! The systems are overworked so things take much longer than they should but more people need to adopt from foster care to give them forever homes!

7. ITS ALL WORTH IT!