Progress

This kid (the little tiger on the left) is blowing me away.  Seriously.

He has grown by leaps and bounds in just a few short months.  His educational therapist from the IU is praising his ability to remember letters, which has been a HUGE setback for him this year.  This week, at the grocery store, he pointed to a sale tag and asked, "Is that tenny free?"  (translated:  "is that ten and three?")  Indeed, it was the numbers 10 and 3!!  He recognized them on his own, in random sequence!  Then, when I picked him up from his last classroom day in his transitional kindergarten today (tomorrow, his official last day, is "park day"), he showed me how he wrote his last name...PERFECTLY!  That was right before he held the door for all of us leaving the building and then asked, "Mom, can I please have grilled cheese for lunch?"  HE SAID PLEASE!!  You bet your sweet bippy I was praising him up, down and all around for that progress!

We're on a Break

If you don't get this reference then you're probably younger than 30 and I hate you.  Okay, not really but, seriously, just pretend you get it to make me feel better about the fact that 40 is stalking me like an ex-boyfriend with no appropriateness filter (you know the guys I'm talkin' about ...yes, I'm looking at YOU, sister).

An Important Distinction

"I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you.  We've had an overwhelming response..."  This is the refrain that I have heard a lot recently from the caseworkers who bother to respond to our inquiries on children available for adoption through the popular "clearinghouse" adoption sites.  And, it left me scratching my head, brow furrowed.  But, I thought NO ONE wanted to adopt the large sibling groups or the boys or the older kids. 

Waiting for NEVERMIND

So, what's the scoop?  I'm not sure how foster care goes down for everyone but this is how is usually goes down for us these days:

Out of the Ordinary

Enjoy the little things.  

One day you may look back 

and realize they were the big things. 

This little chippy drives me nuts.

A Year with Little Man

Since I missed a year of sharing my newest son's unobscured pictures with you, I thought I would let you marvel in his cuteness, too.

Last weekend, as we ate our first on-the-deck meal of the season, we joked and laughed and acted silly.  Little Man, smiling from ear-to-ear, said, "I'm so glad I'm part of this family!"

Building Noah's Ark

Have you ever felt like you were building an ark?  

In Genesis, God asked Noah to build an ark.  The ark wasn't some cutsie little floating zoo like we see depicted on nursery walls.  It was a humongous, boxy looking building (check out this life-sized replica built last year by millionaire John Huibers in the Netherlands).  The original ark was designed by God to withstand an epic flood while protecting all of it's inhabitants, except that no one on earth at the time had ever seen a drop of rain, let alone a flood of such devastating proportions.  So, Noah spent more than 100 years looking like a crazy-man constructing what amounted to a time machine in eyes of his neighbors.  "Crazy old Noah, at least he keeps us entertained!"