Friday, August 31, 2012

Family Day

In adopted families, the day you adopted your child is a special day. Different people have different names for it: Home Day, Forever Family Day, Gotcha Day. We decided to just call it Family Day and make it special day for the whole family to celebrate.
Two years ago today, we drove to Little Rock after getting a surprise call the night before, and met Esther for the first time and brought her home with us. It was amazing and crazy how it all went down. In less than 24 hours we went from hoping to become a family someday to being a family with a 6 week old. You can read the story of that day here. Now in less than 2 years we are a family of 4.
Esther was an amazing gift and we are so thankful to have her as our daughter. We can not imagine life without her. It is fun/amazing/challenging/hard/crazy/awesome being her parents. She is growing up fast and learning so much every day. But I think we learn just as much about ourselves as she does about growing up.
One of the hardest things is knowing how to talk to her about adoption. She is still a little young to understand so it is not a really big deal yet. Even though she is too young to understand, we still make it a part of her life from the beginning. We have children books that involve adoption (A Mother for Choco) that we read to her.  It is really hard to get through them without crying every time.
Here are some pictures.

This is the day we brought Esther home. 

Esther loves taking care of her baby doll.

And taking care of her sister.

Last night we took the girls to the fair and Esther got to ride the carousel for the first time. 

And she rode the little roller coaster with mama. 

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Clara - 8 Months

Clara turned 8 months on the 6th. (We are a little late getting this out because it seems we block out everything except Olympics these days)  It is hard to believe Clara is 8 months, time has flown by.  It does not seem like she is that old.  I keep thinking that she is doing new things really early but then I realize that she is older than I am thinking she is.  She is growing up fast.  She crawls everywhere and pulls up to standing on everything.  She is also taking some steps while holding on to things. And she is in to everything.  We have had to put the baby gates back up (to Esther's dismay).  She is happy most of the time and a lot of fun. She makes the best faces and smiles constantly.  She is definitely more emotional than Esther was.  She gets hurt more often and gets her feelings hurt more easily.  She is a great sleeper, she sleeps 10 hours at night without waking up and hardly ever cries when we put her down for a nap or for bedtime. She is eating more baby foods and starting to feed herself some little puffs and yogurt bites.

Here is a video of Clara from this morning.  This is her first thing in the morning, right after waking up.  She is displaying some of her funny faces and her all around happiness.  This is how she is almost every morning when you go in to get her.