christmas in july

i missed sending out a christmas letter this past christmas. kyle was working out of town, so i was an unexpected single mom most of the time; we were deep into house renovations and packing and planning a move. life was hectic - nervous breakdown type hectic! i had a friend of ours take these photos for us at tug's birthday party in january (yes, my children are barefoot in January - you gotta love the south!), with the intention of sending a late christmas/new year's/valentine's letter. well the crickets in your mailboxes tell the rest of that story!

so here are our christmas card photos - in july! isn't this better? now you can see the whole story and i don't have to pick just one photo. i bought these bouncy balls for our family as a christmas present, but broke them out at thanksgiving. they are fun fun fun! they come in all shapes and sizes and should be a staple in every family!

welcome back

welcome back! i've let this ground lie fallow to too long. now's the time for clearing out the weeds and working again to grow this community. i've written post after post in my brain and on my computer, to relaunch this blog and reconnect, but nothing seemed 'right.' so i'm just jumping back in - right in the middle.

these are my boys. my bright, funny, wide-open, adorable, exhausting boys! for so long, thru the fostering and adoption process, i could not post pictures of them. i could not even use their full names in a public forum. so this posting feels a bit clandestine. shh - don't tell!

in november we adopted. it's all final and legal now. they are stuck with us. they had been with us for so long, they were already ours and we theirs. we knew in august, when parental rights were terminated, that adoption was coming, so we didn't expect such a transformation in november. but finalizing the adoption brought a profound shift deep in the center of the earth. it was as if everything had settled deeply into place for the first time in 20 months. we all felt it. we were a family - come hell or high water!

i was guilty of immediately flooding facebook with 20 months worth of pictures, to share my loves with friends and family. we discussed the future without fear. we talked about what it meant to be a family. we talked about family lost and family gained. kyle and i were no longer afraid to imagine our boys growing up, becuase we will see them, know them, shape them as they grow. we exhaled for the first time since those scared little boys with hollow eyes timidly stepped across our threshold march 20, 2012.

welcome to our family.