last month

 

nothing thrills me more than to get one good picture of one of my kids.

 

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we just passed five months home and are in the midst of round 2 of post-adoption reports. speaking of pictures, i'm literally flabbergasted when i look back at the pictures we took when the kids first came home. kal has definitely grown and matured in the last almost six months, but it's rebuma that amazes me. that guy has gone from a giant baby to a little boy (he turns two next month...oh my).

 

 

if you don't take regular photos of your kids, start doing it! my husband can attest to the fact that i have a little obsession with taking pictures (if i don't have my slr camera shoved in my kids' faces, i at least always have my iphone handy). i like to catch the mundane things of everyday (seriously, i probably have a hundred pictures of my kids rolling a ball back and forth to each other outside or playing with toys in their playroom from tons of different days) because i want to be able to show them what it was like when they were little.



 

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our last month has been a little crazy. i had unexpected surgery last month for a basketball-size ovarian cyst that had been growing in my abdomen for who knows how long. it all came out of nowhere, and i found myself complaining a lot about how terrible the timing was. nobody really plans to have relatively major surgery four months after bringing home two children via adoption. we hadn't planned on our first "just the two of us" date being to an oncologist's office. and we definitely hadn't planned on some of the rules and boundaries we'd set up since coming home being temporarily thrown out the window since i spent about two weeks needing lots of help with even simple caregiving tasks. i struggled enormously the first week after surgery, fretting about attachment and whether my children would rebound from this disruption. i watched my son be confused about who his mommy was.

 

since then, i've come away with a sense of gratitude, not only because my cyst was benign, but also because i learned to cherish my children more. it's hard to be a parent, and, for me, it's been hard being a stay-at-home-mom. i see my kids every day, all day, which means i experience some of the best times with them and some of the worst (plus, everywhere in between). i often envy jamie when he comes home each night because he's got fresh grace for them and the ability to see everything they do as awesome rather than annoying. for me, having surgery and being forced to take some time off my job as mom helped me come back to my children with fresh grace. i still struggle day-to-day with my responses to them (i don't always give them grace, and sometimes i'm just plain mean), and some days being a mother (and an adoptive mother at that) still seems as overwhelming as it did when they first came home.

 

but overall, i finally feel normal and adjusted.

and my kids are seriously awesome.