We celebrated Savvy's birthday with a camping party, complete with tents, bobbing for apples, fishing and a nature hunt. A good time was had by all.
We took the kids to Disneyland and did Mickey's Halloween Party. Both kids did better than we expected. Miles LOVED the monorail and Jungle Cruise and Savvy rode all the big girl rides she was too tiny for last time around. We again learned that going on weekdays is the way to go. Just say no to weekends at Disneyland.
Miles' adoption is finalized. In what has to be the fastest foster adoption EVER, Miles got a court date 6 months and 13 days from the day he came home, allowing him to become part of our forever family on our third wedding anniversary. What a gift! He continues to get cuter and cuter by the hour and is also now walking! Sort of. He can walk about 6-9 steps on his own, but has decided crawling is still way easier, so he sandbags us a lot on that front. He is obsessed with all things car related and now makes little vroom-zoom noises when he plays with them. He is all boy. He is also talking a lot more now. He says mama, mommy, Nona, grandpa, car (of course), truck, dog, more (his second favorite word) and a few others. He eats more than our four year old, Savvy, and yet manages to gain very little weight. I SO WISH I had that problem. He is also attending Savvy's preschool three days a week and spending one night a week at his Nona's house so she can watch him the other two days we're at work. He LOVES Nona and would prefer, I think, to live there full time. He is doing much better with drop offs at his new school and genuinely likes being there now, which makes drop offs much less stressful for me.
Savvy is getting bigger and bigger every day. Literally. She fit into a bunch of 4T jeans I bought her a few months ago and they are now all high waters on her, which makes shopping for her somewhat difficult. Long legs, a big butt and a tiny waist are not great fits for most of what's out there. But I would take that combo any day. She is still in her dress mode, where she wants to wear a dress every day. How we ended up with such a girly girl and a boy's boy is beyond me. She's also in a stage where she wants to know how things work all the time. She wants to know where rain comes from and where fog comes from and, most recently, where she came from.
We've told her her adoption story since she was a baby. How her birth mother couldn't take care of her, but her social worker put her with her foster mother Elsa to take good care of until she could find Savvy a forever family. And how special we are that she picked us to take care of this little, beautiful baby. She's heard it a million times, but the other morning she asked us "Where did I come from?" I answered "Your birth mother gave birth to you." Then she thought for a minute and said "But why didn't she like me?" And then my heart broke into a million pieces. I told her "She loved you- how could she not? You're perfect. But she had trouble taking care of herself and she couldn't take care of you and give you a safe home, so your social worker placed you with Elsa and then found us to take care of you forever." And then she thought awhile longer and was fine with the answer and moved on to singing a little song. It hit me in that moment that the loss associated with adoption was not going to magically skip over our family because we adopted a child who was only two months old when we brought her home. On some level Savvy understands that she came from another family/person and that family/person is not here, in our every day lives, and she's already internalizing what that must mean. I wish there was a magic eraser I could use to erase any feelings of sadness or grief or self doubt that must be there inside her somewhere, but I can't. The reality of adoption is that for us to be lucky enough to get to be our children's parents, someone else was unlucky enough to lose these precious babies and the chance to get to watch them take their first steps, say their first word, to hear them make their first full belly laugh. I hope where ever their birth mothers are that they know their children are safe and happy and loved and that someday life circumstances may allow us to bring them into the fold of our large blended family, in whatever form that may take. They've given the world such a gift by bringing Savannah and Miles into it. And I'm forever grateful for it.
(Side note: I apologize for the jumble of pictures-- when they got uploaded to my work computer they scattered and now maintain no logical order). :)
