Tuesday, July 12, 2011

In other news....

We have some other exciting news....we adopted! Obviously we did not adopt J or R, although we would have loved to. Let me start near the beginning....

We live in Upstate NY. Since our 9 year old daughter was just a year old, we have hosted "Fresh Air" kids. The Fresh Air Fund originates out of NY city. They take kids from NY city, especially high rise apartment buildings, and send them to neighboring states for a "fresh air" break. Its usually a 2 week trip, but the kids can stay longer if you invite them back the following summer. For a couple of years we had just one girl coming up, then about 7 years ago we started having 2 girls come up.

Maria first came to us as a spur of the moment thing...basically, we got a call on a Monday AM to tell us our regular Fresh Air child had failed to show up to catch the bus, and would we be willing to take a replacement child that was ready and waiting to come. How could we say no? Maria was such a sweet and polite 10 year old. We fell in love and have invited her back year after year, lengthening her stays until she was with us almost the whole summer. The last 2 years she even spent Christmas with us. In January she moved in and started school a week later. In April we finalized a formal adoption, and a week later she turned 16! Wow.

Maria's story is her own to tell. Without going in to detail I will tell you that she has wonderful and loving biological parents who are still involved in her life.

While I have always envisioned us adopting, I thought it would be through the foster care system, not someone we already knew! I couldn't be happier to have her join our family. So, in case you are keeping count, we are now up to 3 biological kids, 1 adopted, and 2 foster children....grand total of 6 kids. Yes, you should see the looks we get when we go out in public. I have now come to a place in my life that I truly don't care! I'm happy as can be, doing what we were made to do (that's not to say that there are not bumps in the road), and I'm not going to allow someone's opinion of me matter more than my Heavenly Father's!

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