Day +5: Adoption Day

A year ago today we finalized Lil Bit's adoption. It was a crazy day with having to drive all the way to San Antonio to be at court and realizing we forgot all our paperwork at home. Talk about panic!! But we made it in plenty of time to have lunch with some of our extended family, finalize the adoption and completed our little family.

While she is too little to remember today, I do want to start a tradition of celebrating her adoption day with something small every year. She got a fridge dj (a learning radio toy) as a present and we went out to dinner. She loved the alfredo shells and breadsticks at Olive Garden and was amazingly well behaved.

I let her have the crayons and the children's menu for the first time. She did attempt to color with them before she started trying to shove them down her throat. It was very cute. My favorite part of dinner was watching daddy watch her. He just looks at her with such amazement and wonder. I feel so good about the job I've done while he was gone when I see him appreciating her cuteness and intelligence.

She was feeding herself and drinking milk out of a straw all by herself. I gave her a breadstick. She didn't really understand how to take a bite, but figured out how to tear off pieces and eat it. We shared a cheesecake, which she loved. I finally couldn't eat another bite, but it was phenomenal. She was adorable and very good for her age. She was also entertaining the sweet elderly couple behind us. They were eating her up.

I have spent most  of the day feeling pretty rotten from the cold that Chad brought home from Iraq. Honestly, I feel so horrible that I can barely function. But I wanted to take some time to recognize that today was a special day. I am so happy that we got to spend it as a family. I just wish the boys could have been here with us. I didn't take any pictures, but we made it a point to do something special even though she won't remember it.

I worry about how she will process being adopted emotionally as she gets older. I worry that she won't consider us her "real" parents. I worry that she will feel like we love her less or she isn't really part of our family. I've made it a point to introduce the idea that she is adopted from day one. I don't want the fact that she is adopted to ever be a surprise. I want the truth to be something Lil Bit just knows.

I can't control how she feels about being adopted. Her feelings will be her own, but I can present her the facts in such a way that she knows how special her story is, how much God meant her to be a part of our family, how incredibly much she is loved. I want her to know that being adopted, chosen, makes her special. Hopefully today is just the first of many days we can celebrate making Lil Bit our forever daughter as a family.

Day 110: One year

One year ago, I took a personal day for an afternoon to check out a few daycares. I knew she wouldn't be born in time to need one just yet, but I wanted to get a head start. I figured that daycares would fill up fast for fall and I wanted to have my choice, not be stuck with somewhere I wasn't happy with. I checked out a few and actually had one that was my front runner which is where she is now.

First picture - too many wires

I got home just in time to see my husband put on the finishing touches to his dress uniform for the military ball. He looked so handsome that I instantly regretted my decision not to go. I told him so. He said, "How fast can you get ready?" and I sprang into action. Thirty minutes later my hair was pulled up, make-up touched up, and I was hastily adjusting a gown that had been hanging in my closet from a few years prior.

I knew I would be tired the next day, but we had already paid for the tickets. Our friend Josiah drove us to the hotel in Austin that was hosting the ball. We took pictures and paid exorbitant sums for cheap wine. We sat down to eat and listen to the guest speaker. Some pictures of that night were ones I lost in my phone update last week. I had taken a picture of the program with my phone. I can't remember who he was, but just before he came up to speak, we were asked to turn off our phones.

I looked at my phone. We had six weeks before our baby was due, but every minute I was prepped and waiting for the phone call. I had a feeling she might be early. I decided to make a big deal of leaving my phone on would be silly, we had six weeks to go. Little did I know, during that speech our daughter was being born.

Holding her hand for the first time

We didn't get the phone call until the next day. I was very tired. It had been a long afternoon after a late date night at the ball. My phone rang at 3:55. Adoption Alliance came up on the screen. I answered and quickly stepped into the hall. Nikki told me that our little girl had been born the night before in an emergency C-section. She had very few details about the condition of our daughter. The birthmother had been depressed and decided that one line of cocaine would make her feel better. Between the drugs and moving some heavy furniture, her placenta abrupted.

The baby was in distress, so the doctor had to perform a C-section that was pretty drastic. At this point I realized the baby might not be ok. The drugs, the premature birth, the C-section all could have hurt my baby girl. I started shaking and my knees gave out. I sank to the floor. One of my teacher friends noticed me upset in the hallway. I was alternating between tears and panic. It took a few very tense hours of running and planning and packing to get ourselves ready to be gone for who knows how long.

We raced up to the hospital, several hours away. By the time we got there it was very late and because the baby was in the NICU, we weren't allowed to see her right away. We had to get wristbands and be approved to visit. It was hard to leave the hospital without being able to see her. We saw the birthmom and talked with her. She said she would take us down to visit in the morning. But she felt pretty rough after such a difficult delivery and had such a large incision.

I was so excited and nervous. We didn't know what to do or what rules we were supposed to follow. She took us down to the NICU, we washed up and gowned. They showed us our baby for the first time. She was almost two days old by the time we got to see her, but she was still so terribly tiny. Less than twelve hours after I got to hold her tiny fingers for the first time, she was legally ours (in guardianship).

It was a long week of gowning and washing to go into the NICU every three hours. We did let the nurses take over at night. I figured that I would be getting sleep deprived soon enough. We finally took her home 8 days after she was born, tiny and struggling with feeding issues, but growing.

Lil Bit was so tiny and fragile looking, but it was impossible not to fall in love with her. She was so bright eyed and aware from the get go. She stole my heart the first time I saw her and never let me go. Daddy melted too. Babies aren't really his thing, he likes when kids get older and have more personality, but he couldn't help falling in love with her. She had him wrapped around her finger before our first visit was over.

Those first couple of weeks and months had some really rough patches of sleep deprivation and exhaustion. She and I gradually figured it out together. I can't imagine life without her anymore. She was the most precious gift and blessing in my life.

I struggle everyday to make it through the hours I am away from her. While there were tough minutes that seemed to last a year, I wasn't prepared this year would fly by in a minute. She is already changing so fast. I just wish I could slow it down a little and have more hours to enjoy her. But today she is an infant no longer, instead is one year old and will be for all too short a time. I plan to spend every second I can this summer just memorizing her face and watching her learn and explore. But I know next year, her two year old picture will be almost as different from today's as this one is from the first ones last May.

It is hard to believe how precious she was to me in those first few second of seeing her face and impossible to believe that she grows more and more precious to me daily. The wonder of a mother's love is that it is boundless. I just wish my energy were too. Ha! 

Day 292: Fort Hood one year ago

A year ago, I was sitting in a meeting when I noticed everyone around me all of a sudden on cell phones. My principal stopped our meeting to tell us that an incident had occurred on Fort Hood. I tried to call my husband, who should have been home in bed sleeping after pulling 24 hour staff duty. No answer. I figured he probably was sleeping so soundly that the phone didn't wake him, but then we heard it was a mass shooting on post. It didn't matter where I thought he was, my heart was panicked, frozen between beats for a minute, like every other spouse, son, daughter, brother, sister, mother, father experiences when something horrible has happened where someone you love is.

He finally returned my call as I was racing toward the house. He was fine and had been just really sleeping. I let out the breath I hadn't realized I was holding and continued to the house. We watched what was happening on the news and took some time to call family all over the country to let them know we were all right.

But some people weren't. Some people never got to go home again. Some soldiers processing in from overseas tours, finally home safe from Iraq or Afghanistan, were gunned down by one of their own, an American, a soldier, a psychiatrist. Some soldiers were there gearing up to leave on a combat tour and never realized the danger they would face not just on American soil, but on their own military post. There just isn't any explaining what happened, although his lawyer is sure giving it a try in court this week. The evil in men's hearts and the sickness in their souls is overwhelming. Could this have been prevented? Was he mentally unstable and treatable?

One issue I have with the military now is despite all the claims that soldiers can seek help without fear of retribution, they fear retribution. I hear them talk about anyone who seeks help is marked as unstable, he/she becomes un-promotable, therefore is eventually separated from the military. I don't know facts and figures here, but as long as soldiers who want to be good soldiers and plan to make the military a career can seek help truly without fear of it damaging their careers (as long as they are not a danger to themselves or others), horrific events like those on Fort Hood a year ago today and the increasing number of military suicides are going to continue.

Who among us doesn't have a dark moment from time to time? Some of these soldiers are dealing with deployment after deployment and the stress of time in combat, time away from family, time spent in high stress situations and on high alert. Last time Chad came home, it took him about a month to drive faster than 25 mph because that is how you drove in Iraq and you drove down the center of the road. At a wine tasting event, they had a western re-enactment. We didn't know about it, until the gun went off. I can't even describe Chad's reaction, because it was so fast from recognizing the gunfire to realizing it was not a threat, but I could see that it really upset him. His eyes filled with tears and he told me he needed a few minutes to let the adrenaline bleed from his system. He had been worried I was going to be hurt. I had never seen him that upset before. He actually walked away from the main tents of the event for awhile.

My husband still carries the remnants of his tours to Iraq, and he pretty much comes back like he never left. Other than a few minor adjustments and catching up on a year's worth of sleep (he seriously spends like three months sleeping 10 or more hours a day, wherever he can catch them), he is the same guy who left. Well as much as I am the same person he left. People of course change and grow over a year, but he really seems to handle it pretty well. He doesn't have nightmares any more than I do, or anger issues or anything, but he is an unusual person, really built to be a soldier. Not everyone is, not everyone who can pass the physical, should be a soldier.

I don't know what the answer is, stricter screening process for the military? Better mental health availability? More awareness to what is going on around you? Could someone have seen what Major Nidal Hasan feeling? Maybe not, but we can't go back and change this event any more than we can change 9/11, but we can learn from the past. If we can take anything from this awful event, it should be some ways to make sure it never happens again.

Tonight, I go to bed safe and sound. My daughter sleeps peacefully in her crib. My husband is again far away, but alive. So tonight, I go to bed blessed and thankful, but also sorrowful for those who paid with their lives for one man's cruel insanity.