Home For The Holidays

We've been enjoying the Christmas season with our expanded family this year.  This was the first full year of Kayleigh & Michael being part of our family and it has gone exceedingly well.  We still get comments from people saying that it is pretty much the best adoption story they've seen or heard of.  There were a lot of factors that played into our family being a great fit for them, but in the end I think it's just a God thing, taking two orphans that statistically had no real chance of getting adopted and finding the ideal family for them 6092 miles away!

We had a great Christmas time with the kids this year.  It's always a blast doing Christmas with the kids but in some ways it's like going back in time when it's a new things, as many things still are for K & M.  We give each kid a budget for shopping for presents and a lot of driving them here and there to do their shopping.  You will hear many stories of older adopted kids being extremely selfish and survivalist in nature (in knowing the situations they come from that would be normal....) but K & M are not really that way.  They really enjoy giving! 

Christmas morning ended up really being Christmas afternoon as our crew doesn't leap out of bed in the morning on the days they don't have to :)  We had a great time opening presents and just being a family.  I will still marvel almost daily at how natural it seems to have them in our family, and how much I love getting to be their dad now.

I've had some time off here around the holidays so have been enjoying one on one dates with the kids (it's something we do to get special alone time with each kid, away from distractions, siblings.....) and that has been wonderful.  Usually families with multiple kids have one that is a train wreck or something.  We've got five teenagers, two that we didn't get early in life, and yet all five are pretty awesome people :)

2014 is swiftly approaching and the goals are set for the year.  It will be a big year for kids ages as we'll have our first non-teenage child (Bekah turns 20....), TWO more adult children as Alyssa and Kayleigh hit 18, and another sweet 16 with Dylan in the spring.  Michael is still the baby who will turn a mere 15 in the spring as well.

All of the kids bring up adopting again, with Kayleigh and Michael being big proponents of it (although I think some of Michael's motivation is to not be the baby of the family .... :).  I think we need more bedrooms....

Wrapping up the holiday season (and Hallmark movie marathon, Kayleigh and I are hooked.....) and looking forward to an amazing year to come.  Best wishes to each of you and your families, thanks for reading along and being a part of our family adoption adventure!

Road Trip

We had our first major road trip over the Thanksgiving holiday, trekking 1200 miles up to frigid Wisconsin.  Jodi's mom had passed away so we were heading up for the services for her.  Not why you would want to go, but the silver lining was reuniting family and Jodi's family getting to meet and spend time with Kayleigh & Michael for the first time. 

Road trips are great as you get to eliminate the rest of the real word and just spend a couple days over-packed in a car without the distractions of a typical day, each junk food, and see how flat the Midwest is!

The kids had a great trip up and we were blessed by snow the night we arrived (the kids have really been wanting snow).  We had weeks of snow when we arrived in Ukraine to finalize our adoption, and K & M are accustomed to snow every year and I'm sure plenty of it.  Our others, well, not so lucky, I think we've gotten a quick bit of it 3 times since we moved back to Texas in 2001.  Anyway, the kids got snow fun all week because that stuff don't melt when it's 22 degrees!

Our Fab 5 got to reunite and spend a ton of time with their 4 cousins up there and they all got along very well.  Honestly, we just didn't see them a whole lot because they were always hanging out playing in the snow, gaming, watching movies, and anything else they could think of.  It was a great time for them to connect with more of their new family.

We're back home in Texas now and the cold followed up, so it's below freezing here as well, but no snow for us to play in :(  Fear not, it'll be back up in the warm range before we know it!

Now we're getting into Christmas mode, the tree is up and we're decorating it today, and the kids are getting excited as the holiday approaches.  Kayleigh is a Hallmark channel Christmas movie - holic, so we're getting our (over)fill of the movies.  Some are cute, some are truly awful, but we are truly blessed to have her here to make us watch them to begin with!  Michael has developed quite an interest in American football so at least I have that to counter balance a bit :)

This will be the wrap up for their first full year here in America, we are so glad they are here!