Life With A Family: Two Years

I can't believe it. First I can't believe that I forgot this important date...and second I can't believe that Jack has been in our home for two years.

Okay. Make that two years and two weeks.

Yes. Jack's family day came and went and it took nearly two whole weeks until I realized that we had missed it. Two weeks.

That's like forgetting your child's birthday until two weeks after the birthday.

I felt like a pretty bad mom....but was extremely thankful that it was Jack's that got forgotten rather than Addie's or Will's. At least Jack didn't have a clue that we forgot. Even when we told him he just grinned and asked if he could open his present. :) Gotta love three year olds.

I don't know if any of you remember the ride we were on two years ago or not, but I remember it clearly.

It was a rough ride. We flew to the other side of the world on January 6th...and arrived in Moscow on the 7th, which happened to be Russia's Christmas. Getting there on the 7th was against our agencies wishes as they refused to ask our in-country reps to help us out on Christmas day. We agreed that it wasn't ideal, but when they didn't want to cover the $5000 difference in ticket cost for arriving one day later, we decided to sign the waiver and go for it.

Signing the waiver simply meant that there would be nobody at the airport to welcome us and take care of us upon arrival in Moscow. Not a big deal, except it's hard to converse with folks who don't speak English. :) We had booked a motel before leaving home and the motel did have a couple men waiting on us when we got there. It was a great faith builder. They stuffed Mom, Addie, Will, and I in the back seat of a car while the men loaded our luggage as it was freezing cold. When the time came to leave, we thought Mom and Dad would hop in one car and our little family would be in the other. However, they gave us no time for the switch and as soon as Dad hopped in the other car, he took off! Jason climbed in with us and off we went!

The unfortunate part of it was that our drivers took two different routes. We drove for nearly 1/2 hour wondering if we would ever see Dad again. It was a little humorous....after all we had flown all night and none of us were feeling overly well rested. The car was full of giggles. I'm sure our driver thought we had lost our marbles on that plane.

Dad beat us to our motel and was waiting with a grin when we finally arrived.

The next afternoon we flew on to Vladivostok and then the fun really began.

We had nearly a week to kill before we were to go to court on the 17th. And to court we did go.

And from court we left wiping our eyes.

No, we were not wiping our happy tears. We were wiping tears of sadness, fear, frustration, etc.

Our prosecutor wasn't impressed with the fact that there was an older brother somewhere who didn't sign off on the adoption. The social worker was required to attempt to find him one more time and court was to take place for the second time on the 21st.

The days between the 17th and the 21st were some of the most stressful in our lives up to that point. We did a lot of crying (behind closed doors so as not to scare Addie and Will, though they were ticked at the judge for not letting us go get Jack that day), we did a lot of praying, we did a lot of playing pool in the White Rabbit, we ate the remainder of our M&M's and sent a joking sos home for some more....and folks took us serious and shipped 10 pounds of M&M's to us. All the way across the globe. We watched that little box every day checking into various points around the world. It was more than we could handle the night when it said it was in Artem...a mere 30 minutes from where we were sitting. That next day we sat in the White Rabbit and were glued to the windows waiting on our precious box. :)

And then the 21st arrived and we were back to court...this time with a favorable outcome.

We left court with more tears, but this time they were tears of happiness and relief. That afternoon we raced off with Oksana to Nakhodka to pick up our little boy.

We walked in the door that night at the Vlad Inn and were mobbed immediately by my parents (who had made the trip with us, thankfully) and Addie & Will. Exhaustion was great, but our joy and praise to Jesus was so much greater!

The rest of our trip was smooth sailing. We ended up being in the grand country of Russia for five weeks and had so many experiences. Such as taking the train to various stops in the grand city of Vlad. Missing the last train of the day from downtown Vlad and having to hail a taxi...and of course not being able to talk to the taxi driver. Nearly missing the train another time from the Vlad Inn and Jason dropping his passport while trying to run to the train after purchasing the tickets...thankfully the engineer saw what happened and held up the train for him. Purchasing what we thought were round trip train tickets only to find out from the officer who roamed the train that they were one way and we were on the train back to the Vlad Inn with no tickets. THAT was a mess. :) She spoke no English and we spoke not nearly enough Russian. Some kind soul who knew tidbits of English finally stepped forward to let us know that we owed some more money.

We flew to Moscow February 1st to have the final steps of our paperwork completed and continued to have awesome experiences! Such as trying to get out of the Vlad airport...but we got in the wrong line, and they didn't like something about Jack's paperwork..and we stood there waiting on several different folks to clear us for about 45 minutes...which made us come very close to missing our flight. Made it to Moscow and were met by the proper gentleman, but he got sick and we never saw him the rest of the trip. He had his buddy haul us around the rest of the week. Walking to Red Square multiple times. Walking to Arbat Street. Walking downtown after dark. Going to McDonalds. Staying in an apartment on the eighth floor of some apartment building...and cringing. It was so filthy dirty that we called the Marriot to see if they had any rooms at all. They did for only $1500 per night or something like that. We stayed in the apartment. All the dishes were dirty and had to be washed before we could use them, the one bed (for seven people) had obviously not had clean sheets for quite some time, the hide-a-bed couch was broken (so dad and mom pulled the mattress off and slept on it on the floor. Nasty.) The floor was dirty. The bathroom was far from clean. We searched closets and finally resorted to breaking a lock on a cupboard door to get some clean linens for our beds. And we didn't even feel that bad about it.

We saw more things in that one week than we ever thought we would. We walked miles every day, too stingy to hire a driver to haul us around. I'm still amazed when I think about that. Jack in the Ergo, the rest of us walked for hours every day. It did a super job of wearing out Addie & Will. :) They slept like logs that whole week.

We flew back to the states on February 5th, missed our flight out of Atlanta, spent the night in the airport, and caught the first flight out the next morning. It felt so good to be home...except I forgot about one thing. Sometime during our weeks in Vlad we received a very depressing phone call from home.

Our furnace had quit, pipes in the upstairs bathroom had frozen and burst...the result? A flooded downstairs. There we were on the other side of the world. Our house needed vast repairs. Folks back home were making decisions for us as we didn't know what the extent of the damage was. It ended up being a little more serious than we thought. All new ceilings downstairs, except the bedroom and bathroom, new floor in the kitchen, refinished floors in the dining and living rooms, new walls in the dining room, and a whole new paint job for the whole downstairs, except for the bedroom and bathroom.

All that to say, when we got home we couldn't actually go home. We lived at Jason's sister's house (she's a travelling nurse and happened to be in Arizona working right then) for two weeks while they finished up the work on our house. It was interesting.

Two years have passed since that time. Jack is now three and a half. The little 17 month old closest-thing-to-a-baby-that-we-thought-we'd-ever-have has grown by leaps and bounds. He still doesn't talk much, but words are being added daily and they are even getting easier to understand!

He still sleeps downstairs as we only have two bedrooms upstairs and there is nowhere to put a third child right now. We thought we would stuff all the boys in one room and the girls in the other....but when children don't sleep overly well, it's really not a good option to put them in the same room. Having Will and Jack in the same room would be chaos all night long. Nobody in the whole house would get any sleep. So. He's on a toddler bed mattress which is strategically placed under the bay window, behind the loveseat and the recliner...which results in his not being able to see around the house too much.

We skipped clean over the terrible twos and barreled headlong into the torturous threes. While the shaver is a ton of fun, he can also be the most horrid little guy around. He's very stubborn, but quiet about it.

We did have a little party for him. Yep. Our children each have two birthday celebrations. The day they came into the world and the day they came into our family. We treat it just like a birthday, complete with cake and gifts. When we remember.

This year, due to my forgetfulness, the cake was totally un-decorated but did have two little candles.

And the gift? Lets just say it's good he's only three and any gift at all is cause for much rejoicing. His gift consisted of a shutterfly book that records his first two years in a forever family. He of course was thrilled and didn't know that he would have had more had his mom found the time to head to town.

What he doesn't know won't hurt him.

He was beyond thrilled with our little celebration.

One more thing about Jack...he is a superb big brother. Nobody can coax a smile out of Ty quite like Jack can. He's a super entertainer.