and wrapped with a pretty bow

Some friends of ours had their first baby a couple of weeks ago.  I had the pleasure if dropping off a meal for them tonight, and of course accepted the invitation to scoop up and snuggle the little bambino for a few minutes.

After talking about the unbearable pain of childbirth that you can only understand once you've been through it, our conversation turned to how the baby was doing in the areas of eating, sleeping, and being cute.  He sure has the third one down, so there was no need to expand on it.

I listened to the innocent uncertainties of a new mother and responded to direct questions with some experienced answers.  Most of all, it gave me time to revisit the newness of parenting and the guessing game that kids throw us into.

I ended the visit with the encouragement to cherish these days.  I told her that as much as we want our children to fit into a neat little box, they just don't.  We have to mix and match parenting techniques, play guessing games, and definitely learn on the job with each individual child.

Today is Joya's Gotcha Day.  One year ago we met her in a conference room in a hotel in China.  We anticipated the day for a year prior, but to her, it felt like we swooped in and kidnapped her from everything that was secure and familiar to her.

We have spent a year in the messy world of grief and the hard truth of unfamiliarity.  Every day has been a guessing game.  Every day has had highs and lows.  Many days had tears.  Every day had smiles.  I would even say every day had laughter.

A year later, we see a girl who trusts, who laughs, who loves and knows she is loved.

In hindsight, I see some things I should have done differently and better.  But isn't that the case for every child - home grown or adopted?

Knowing the growth and healing she has experienced despite imperfect parenting motivates me to do it better as we awake to each new day.  She inspires me to be a better mom.

Enjoy the video I have created to try to capture how far she has come in her first year at home.

Happy Gotcha Day Joya.  Our family is richer with you in it!!

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.