memory lane

The effort to tag along on my man's business trip for a few days has proved worth every frustration.  We flew from Salt Lake City to Ft. Myers, Florida yesterday and although we had to leave at an ungodly hour of the morning, we were both giddy upon arriving at our last city we called home.

Nearly three years after we were married, we jumped at the opportunity to relocate from Buffalo, New York to the gulf coast of Florida.  Our years in Ft. Myers marked our biggest life change, as this is the place where our first child was born.  Two became three and we discovered how much we loved being parents.

So much so, that we added another, and another, and another, and another.....

Before heading to our hotel, we drove past the apartment complex where we lived for the first year here with our two dogs, which were our only babies for that season.  We pointed out the neighborhoods we used to walk our dogs through and how we would dream of buying a house comparable to the ones we passed.

And then we laughed at how life has changed in nearly 14 years.

We made a special trip over to our house that was home for the rest of our time here.  It sits at a great location, very near the water on a little cul-de-sac off a historic road.  We expected it to have undergone major renovations since we sold it when we moved to Utah in 2002.

We two became three in this house.

Not so.  With the exception of the very large motorhome being stored in the driveway, it looks very much the same.  A new roof, a little paint, and a tree taken out were the only changes we could pick out.  We laughed at our happy memories in this house and pointed out where we sat for one of our Christmas card pictures.  We awed at how blessed we were to live in a great spot in Florida and then move to a very different, but equally great spot in Utah.

Brendan doesn’t remember living in that house, but I will never forget decorating his nursery, bringing him home from the hospital, giving him his first bath in the kitchen sink, and our early morning nursings in the quiet living room.

The best part about living here is that we made some wonderful, life-long friendships.  We moved here practically as newlyweds, and it didn’t take longer than an hour in a local church’s Sunday school class to become befriended by some of the finest people we know to this day, and that we still call friends over a decade later.

We are excited to reconnect face to face with these fine folks in the next couple of days.  I have no doubt that the easy laughter and genuine interest in each other’s lives will surface immediately when we are together.  I consider that a gift and I will not take it for granted.

So, we miss our kiddos and surely we will be excited to see them again on Sunday.  But until then, I’m going to soak up the sun, sleep, and silence.  I will enjoy the alone time with my beloved and our uninterrupted conversations, walks on the beach, soaks in the hot tub, and naps without consideration for any parental responsibilities.

I’m going to indulge my introvert nature and recharge my mommy-battery so that I return excited for the messy and wonderful life we live.

she's three

A letter to my daughter's birth mother on her third birthday.

Dearest,

I'm looking at my daughter today on her third birthday and thinking of you.  I know that today is her actual day of birth because you took the loving care to leave a detailed note next to her 4.8 pound newness wrapped in a warm blanket.

You wrote it on red paper, which I know means you were wishing her good luck in her future.

For that, and so much more, I am grateful.

But this letter is to you, and although I cannot mail it, and you will never read it, I want to write it.  I want to tell you about our daughter.

She is a tiny little squirt.  She is three years old today, however, she fits perfectly in size 2T clothing and no bigger.  Weighing in at 27 pounds, she has gained over seven pounds in the nine months since joining our family, but she is still just a peanut.  Her body is very strong and muscular though.  She is already showing her athleticism through tumbling and skiing.

Her weight on her earliest records lead me to wonder if she was born prematurely, or if tiny is just in her genes.  Her size reminds me that she is a fighter though, and I can see that she was from the very start.  She has clawed and battled her way through this transition.  Her loud, strong, and persistent cry makes us sure that she made her presence known on that January day when you parted from her.

She has worked through the obvious emotions of "hating to love us" and now she is on the precipice of releasing her full heart to us.  I can see it on the horizon.

She is so smart and readily imitates her brothers.  Just this week, I was paying close attention to her brother as he was reading me a story he wrote.  With five children, I try to devote individual attention as much as possible.  Joya tried to interrupt me several times, but I asked her to wait.

Five minutes after it was over and I was on to my next task, she came up to me with a piece of scratch paper in hand and held it just like her brother did as she proceeded to "read" me her story.  As complete jibber-jabber flowed from her mouth, my heart overflowed at what a quick study she is.

Our girl potty trained faster than any Sweeney before her.  The best part is that she stays completely dry through the night and has recently hit the milestone of now being able to use the bathroom without my help.

She must sense that she is a big girl now because she even refuses to use the plastic utensils that I have always provided her for her meals and insists on the metal ones that the rest of the family uses.

Her language is developing and she has great manners.  Whenever I serve her a meal, she says, "Day-doo Mama!" without prompting.  I don't ever want to forget that she calls underwear "ow-wa-dare" and she still calls a drink a "di-di," but is now getting more specific with having "water" or "milk."

She LOVES to dance.  She loves loud, fun music.  I am in disbelief at what a transformation we have seen in her time here.  She used to wiggle a little while her brothers boogied, but now she appears to hold nothing back and is the first to join into our family dance sessions.

She is starting to be picky about what she wears and would love to pick out her clothes every day and night.  Luckily, she submits to me if I must restrict what she wants to wear, but I have visions of our coming battles when she is a teenager.

She has been looking forward to her birthday for months now, as her entire family has celebrated birthdays since she has been home, and hers is finally here.  She knows what it means to have a cake and blow out candles.  She has been practicing telling us she's, "TWO!  Nu-uh, FWEEE!"

Last year I wrote to you because we were both apart from her and loving her from a distance.  This year, I want you to know that we have her, we love her, and we love you for your loving sacrifice.

I spent some extra time just rocking her chest to chest with her head nuzzled beneath my chin yesterday.  I soaked up my two year-old and started to pray over her third year.  I prayed for you too, and for her foster family that filled the gap between us so fully.

Her birthday cake is a colorful flower.  I looked for a sunshine design because her favorite song is "You are My Sunshine," and I thought she would be tickled at a cake that illustrated that.  But before I became frustrated at not finding my first choice, I saw the beautiful flower and was flooded with the parallel of how her little soul has blossomed since we have known her.

I'm certain that she is not done yet, and I am looking forward to enjoying the beauty of her bloom.

why messy and wonderful?

Our littlest wonderful mess maker.

My blog name needed to change for quite some time now.  Adoption has changed our lives in more ways than one and I’m really not in my “world surrounded by men” anymore.  I have been deliberately hiding from my blog for many reasons, but the change and overhaul was one of them.

Joya's adjustment into our family has been a moving target of what we might be dealing with next.  With each new challenge, we wonder if it is caused by the trauma of adoption or if it is merely a part of her two year-old life.  Should we handle it by doing "A" or "B" and which one won't traumatize her even more???  It's been messy.

But, when she counts off each family member by name every morning and reaches her arms out with a smile several times a day with the words, " I HOOOLLLD MAMA!" - wonderful doesn't even begin to describe it.  When we watch our fifth child take up skiing just like the other four have, with squeals of joy and a desire to go faster, our hearts overflow with how wonderful and worthwhile all of the mess is.

Tonight's dinner was breakfast burritos, served one at a time because our house was a complex machine of people coming and going tonight.  My meal prep and service was messy tonight.

But when they sat down to eat it, everyone loved dinner, and that is wonderful.

Our boys spent their coveted Christmas break passing the flu from one brother to the next, not coordinating well enough to all get through it at the same time.  We looked like a sick mess, but they all loved to snuggle close and watch lots of DVDs, day after day, and that was wonderful.

Down and out over Christmas break

The sickness was only compounded by the fact that our 40 year old furnace finally leaned too closely to, “Hey I might just leak enough carbon monoxide in the night to kill you all,” so we made the executive decision to shut it off and live without heat until we could get a new one installed.   We must install it in a new location in the house in order to actually conform to building codes.  This all happened while our outside temps in this mountain ski town dipped down to negative numbers.  Warm blankets and cold noses!!!

So now, we have walls ripped apart and floor plans being drawn for an unexpected and expensive project.  We are wearing fleeces and running space heaters.  There is a layer of messy construction dust almost everywhere I turn.

But soon it will be done.  We’ll be warm.  We have saved money for the unexpected, and it will be wonderful.

Our house is constantly noisy and it is never completely picked up.  By the time we finally update the outdated avocado green carpeting and 1970’s bathrooms in our house, the “new” kitchen we remodeled nearly six years ago will be outdated.

The papers on my desk scream, “PAY ME!  FILE ME!  READ ME!”

Parenting our brood is a nearly humorous trial and error experiment cycle as we weigh and measure each child’s needs, temperament, good and bad deeds, love language, and hormone level. Then we try to match all that adequately against our best prayerful guess of what is needed AND muster the energy to execute the plan.

My head hits the pillow at night yearning for a couple of extra hours to supernaturally sneak in to my REM cycle, yet the 6:30 a.m. alarm always feels too soon and too painful.  But during those hours, I’m wonderfully intertwined with My Beloved, who I love and respect more each day that I know him. 

We snooze when we can.

All that leads up to the fact that when I showed My Beloved my short list of truly inspiring and (I thought) fitting titles, it lead to a discussion about naming my blog something that reflects ME.  Not my kids, husband, passions, job, or interests.

So I asked him, who knows me best of all: “Who do you say I am then?”

He paused, looked down at the floor, then shrugged and sighed and said, “Messy and wonderful,” to which we both broke out into whole-hearted laughter.

To revisit in another post is the fact that ten years ago, that comment would have hurt my feelings and had me personally offended for being called messy.

But I am.  And our life is.

But it is so WONDERFUL.

trust

After nearly five months home from China, I finally put the time into creating Joya's "Gotcha" video.  For those of you outside of the adoption world, "gotcha day" is the term used for the day families are united with their child (got-ya).

Our adoption was and is an amazing and life changing journey.  It went beyond anything I could have imagined in the realm of both JOY and PAIN.

Although we are convinced that God had His hand on Joya's adoption and that she is perfectly matched for our family, we are equally convinced that this is NOT the way life is ideally supposed to be for her.

At one of our hotels during our stay in China, we noticed another family at breakfast wearing T-shirts that had the slogan, "Adopted By Design" on the back.  It implied to us that God designed adoption as a first choice for these children.

It actually angered my husband and it gave me great pause in my thoughts.

Adoption is a second choice for orphans.  It is a second choice to staying with each orphan's birth family forever.  It is clearly the result of a broken world.

No matter who an orphan's birth family is, there is LOSS and GRIEF in adoption.

But, over the last five months, I had one adoptive mom repeatedly remind me of the BEAUTY in the process.  And after making this video, I am far enough removed to see it.

Finally.

Because, as you can see, it has not been all sunshine and roses.  The transition has been HARD.  Our love was instant when we met our daughter, however, it took TIME to build our relationship and get to know each other.

And we are not done yet.

I was fearful to let her look back on the grief she has endured this year.  Up to this point, any reminder of China has only upset her. 

But maybe we both knew in our hearts that it was time to put together the memories.  I let her watch it and she stared intently at it and then looked at me and said, "SAD Lien Lien."  (She still mostly refers to herself by her endeared Chinese nickname.)

Then she smiled.

Relief washed over us when we realized that this did not re-traumatize her.  We have been working so hard to shower her with love and consistency - trying to establish coveted trust, that we feared the memories might hit the reset button on all of that work.

Personally, I think it had the opposite effect.  I think watching the road we have traveled together has encouraged her to hold more tightly to her forever family.  She has smiled more and been more affectionate in the last few days.

For me, it has completely renewed my COMPASSION for her and allowed me to feel pain for her that I had pushed to my back-burner as I have committed myself to the very tedious, daily work of mothering five kids.

I have a renewed perspective of adoption and the MIRACLE that occurs in the process.

And I am looking forward to watching the BEAUTY grow with time.

summer

Summer has eaten me alive.  We are all doing really well but this mama is TIRED and each day is very full.

I'll be back when those school days start again soon.

june 19th

We are home from our post sleep study check up with Joya's ENT, who has looked at her sleep study results and cleared her for surgery on June 19th.

Apparently, she has some sleep apnea, but it is mild and triggered from her brain and not due to her physical birth defect.  I am amazed that a sheet full of confusing line graphs and number tables can tell us that, but then again, I didn't go to medical school either.

Her first surgery will be on the side of her face and her ear.  I could explain each step, but I don't have the time.  The plan is for her to have two surgeries, first her face, then her mouth - both in 2012.  We all hope that she won't have to see the inside of an operating room until elementary school, when she will have the first of several jaw surgeries over the course of her growing years.

We are celebrating today.  Although the surgery is not without risks, I am very ready to get the ball rolling so that we can live life and not be waiting to schedule our life around medical procedures.

I have stopped giving perfect strangers detailed explanations about her birth defect when they ask about (and sometimes reach out and touch) her face.  I'm sorry to say that the number of ridiculous responses and follow up questions has reached the limit of what I can politely respond to. 

I went into this all prepared and motivated to help people learn about and not fear correctable birth defects, but now she is my daughter, I love her, and I'm tired of defending her to people who clearly have no social skills when they follow up with questions about her HIV status or statements about the evils of the Chinese government that have absolutely nothing to do with my little girl.

Stepping down from my soap box now.

Overall, she is making some big steps of progress, which makes me giggle.  I no longer fear when she hugs a perfect stranger, because she immediately comes running back to me.  She can pick her brothers out of a school crowd and treats them like her brothers - with love, affection, thrill, and admiration.  She also asks for her daddy when he is at work, but seems to completely understand that he will come back.

Her sleep is not perfect, but tolerable and we can manage on the status quo.  She eats a lot of food, but is not stuffing herself until she is sick as was her tendency when we first returned home from China.  She only tolerates her car seat for short rides around town - longer than 20 minutes and she turns into Princess Whiny-pants.

Luckily, this isn't my first visit to the royal castle.

he said, she said

Fifteen years ago today I became his wife and he became my husband.  We recited the traditional wedding vows and fed each other cake and left the building as Mr. and Mrs. Sweeney.

Fifteen years and five kids later, here we are.

If you've missed it, I told our dating and engagement story on our eleventh anniversary, titled "LOVE is a verb".

For our twelfth anniversary, I wrote the glass blower which talked about how the seasons of marriage change with time.

I seemed to have skipped year thirteen, but last year I wrote a letter to my 22 year-old self as I was reflecting on fourteen years of marriage.

This year I decided on a "He Said, She Said" question and answer format.  It is always fun to hear from his side of the marriage relationship.  His honest answers make me giggle and cherish him that much more.

1.  What do you remember about your decision to propose?

He Said:  We had a fight over whether your dog would live indoors or outdoors.  We didn’t speak for three days and I quickly decided that life was empty without you and I needed to seal this deal quickly.

She Said:  I didn't propose, but I knew we were heading that direction.  I knew that he was the man I wanted to marry.  We had the same values, enjoyed doing the same things, and made each other laugh.  And we still do.  I'm so glad he asked!

2.  How has marriage been different or the same as your expectations as a single adult?

He Said:  I entered marriage with the delusion that it would be the same as being a single adult (I was 22 after all) except I would be living with my best friend.  This naïve belief was quickly shattered within the first month and led to a tumultuous 18 months of marriage.  However, during that time I never questioned my decision since I had sampled three days without Laurie and knew that was untenable (as a first born I don’t mind a little conflict in my life….keeps it interesting).

She Said:  Marriage has been very different than I expected as a very young single adult.  Luckily, now I haven't known any other life.  I have several friends who got married at a much more mature age than we did, so I'm sure they had time to savor or lament the single life.  Not me.  Being married at 22 years old means that we had to do a lot of our adult maturing together - and that's messy. 

We had to figure out how to live on our own, build a relationship, succeed at our work, balance our extended families, and just put the puzzle of our life (and individual lives) together.  Not to mention adding our first child at 26 years old.  Managing finances was much more complicated than I expected (must we really have a plan for the future? ;-)) 

Conflict within marriage was so much harder than I anticipated and we had to work through many years - and still even now - of learning to resolve conflict in a healthy way (I'm a middle child, so I RUN from conflict).

3.  What has marriage taught you?

He Said: 
-  Choosing your spouse is the ABSOLUTELY most critical decision you will EVER make in your life and you better choose wisely (seek wise read OLD counsel).
-  The world doesn’t actually revolve around me.
-  Physical aspects of marriage are incredible, but make up an infinitesimal fraction of married life.
-  Love/speak to your spouse the way they want to receive words/love, not how you want to give it.
-  I am lucky/blessed to be married to Laurie Kate Sweeney.

She Said:
-  Ditto to all the above although insert Kenyon in his last point.
-  I will add that marriage has taught me (the hard way) that I find joy and contentment when I stop focusing on myself and look for opportunities to serve others.  For the last decade and a half, that has meant serving my husband and children.  I have not always been good at it and often have to learn the same lesson over and over.  Marriage works better when each parties are more concerned with the other's needs.  It is not easy, but it is true.
-  Things usually change for the better as soon as I find a way to be content with how they are now.  Contentment is a decision.

4.  If you haven't addressed it in the previous answers, what is/was the toughest part of marriage?  Or do you have a biggest regret?

He Said:
-  Worrying about finances and allowing this to be a flash point in our relationship.
-  Not choosing my words more carefully in conflicts in our first 2 years of marriage (or occasionally in the present).

She Said:  The toughest part for me has for sure been times of conflict.  Well, equal to it is deciding to die to myself and put my husband before me.

My biggest regret is hanging onto unforgiveness.  I wasted so much time with grudges and if I could go back and do it better, I would.

5.  What is your favorite memory (excluding births) in your marriage?

He Said: 
-  Laughing with each other (i.e. Naples liquor store run, Pop up camper malfunction at Utah Lake, Boys “rafting” down CJ’s stream, listening to Car Talk on way to Moab, etc…)

She Said:  My favorite memories are the relaxing times that we have been able to appreciate "just us" by getting away from all the noise of everyday life.  Whether we get away for one overnight at Stein's, or a weekend in Palm Desert, or ten days in Ireland, we always laugh and connect and come home refreshed in our relationship.  Above all, we are reminded that we really like each other.

6.  What are your marriage goals looking forward?

He Said:
-  To LIKE each other more in 30 years than we do today.  (side note:  we really do like each other now).

She Said:  I really want to work to out-serve each other.  We are always happier when we are working to make the other's needs above our own.  I am mindful of the fact that we won't have a houseful of kids forever and when they're gone, we need to like being together.

I also want to make time alone together a priority.  We recently realized that our date nights alone have become a thing of the past, but really enjoyed our time together one day when we had to repair something together at our rental property.  We decided that our evenings are busy with five kids, so we're going to get a sitter for breakfast or lunch dates instead and enjoy the daytime together.

7.  What is your favorite quality of your spouse?

He Said:
-  Sense of humor
-  Drive to care for those in need
-  Desire to love me selflessly
-  Independent & strong

She Said: 
-  Sense of humor
-  Willingness to father a huge family (and work to father each one well) 
-  Drive to provide for this huge family 
-  Willingness to apologize with a humble and sincere heart (even going so far to use the word "jacka$$" in reference to his behavior, which never fails to make me laugh)
-  Passionate about people and things that matter to him.
-  Loyal always