Hello Summertime Days

Why summertime is SO exciting for our little family...

...Our summer is full of significant family days:

May 25th: The day Susan and I left to KZ to adopt the twins!





May 28th: Brent's B-day





May 29th: The very first day we spent with our babies
(any of these days in May can also be Memorial Day on a given year)

June 3rd: Susan's B-day

July 4th: Independence Day and Court Day (the day the twins' adoption was official)

July 19th: The anniversary of our wedding day

August 6th: The day Evelyn and Jesse became US citizens!





(and of course Mother's and Father's Day are in there too!)

Home with Dad

We have fielded a bunch of posts on great occasions and with deep messages. For a change of pace, I am offering to you an inside look at the mundane and everyday: the twins, at home with Dad.

If naps are part of the equation, Evie and I usually get to spend some quality time on our own before sleepyhead Jesse wakes up. Today Evie woke up after about an hour and a half nap and started calling for anyone who would listen (when I came in she was sitting with her blanket over her head and talking to herself). After the obligatory diaper change, Evie and I were on our own for a bit. Here's how we spent our time:

Washing hands in the dog bowl

Dancing

Laughing

Trying to get the baby latches off the kitchen cabinets

Jesse didn't wake up on his own. I woke him up so he wouldn't sleep the afternoon away and then refuse to go to bed tonight.

I guess you can see that he didn't wake up in a very good mood (poor guy)!

...but he cheered up quickly when I made him a smoothie for a snack.



And then the twins got busy with their (current) favorite games, which include figuring out how to snap the buckles on their booster seats, twirling with the music cube, and pretending to cook exciting new recipes to try out with one another.


Here, you try it!

I'm going to wrap this one up and head to the park for fun on the swings and slides. Happy Memorial Day!

Happy First (or Second?) Mother's Day!

I'm looking at an email that we received on April 9th of 2008 from Jim Harding at World Partners. It begins, "Dear Brent and Susan, Here are the twins we spoke with you about! His name is Nikita and her name is Raisa, and their date of birth is October 31, 2007. They are in Kokshetau which is NOT a standard trip..." (The last sentence is really just about the logistical and bureaucratic details of the adoption process in Kokshetau, but the way it sounds makes me laugh)
By the 29th of that month, we had travel dates and were knee deep in the effort to get ourselves halfway around the world to a little town in Northern Kazakhstan where our babies were just about to be six months old. We mailed a (signed and notarized) letter officially accepting the referral to adopt Jesse (Nikita) and Evelyn (Raisa) on May 7th. This means the letter was received by World Partners just in time for Mother's Day May 11, 2008.

We may not have known it at the time, but we were TOTALLY committed. I remember a conversation Susan and I had in our room at the cottage where we were staying in Kokshetau after a couple visits with the twins. We considered what our response would be if we discovered that either of them had some serious health problem, and agreed that, once we had met them, held them in our arms, taken care of them, no problem would persuade us to give them up. So, all it took was for us to get in that car and drive to the hospital for our first visit with little Raisa and Nikita. All it took to get in the car was to get ourselves to Kazakhstan in the first place. All it took to get ourselves to Kazakhstan was to decide, on May 7th, that we would post our official acceptance of the referral to adopt those twins we barely knew anything about.

So, maybe we were already parents on May 7th? Maybe Susan was already a Mom before Mother's Day 2008! In that case, tomorrow is really Susan's second Mother's Day to celebrate. (If this is true, then I'd better put on a good show, because I totally forgot about Mother's Day the first time around!)
If you take a look at some of these pics from the first days in Kazakstan in late May/early June, I think you'll agree that Susan seems to have been a mother of twins before arriving in country!Its fun to look at these pictures from just a year ago. What an exciting time of life; that place still seems close enough to touch. But, when I rehearse in my mind how much has happened in our family's life since then, the gulf widens and those first moments and days with the twins diminish to a point on the horizon.












In the here and now, it is time to celebrate Mother's Day, and there is nothing to speculate about in 2009...Jesse and Evelyn have the best Mom in the world for them, and her name is

Susan!

Happy Mother's Day!