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. 

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