Special Dates

Ice cream at McDonald's!!!!! Such a treat!

This girl loves her some sweets!!!

Last week we got to see Momma G and Momma Mandy. I can't tell you how wonderful it is to be able to see both of them in the same day!

What's even cooler is the way our visits came about, and how incredible these mothers are to open their lives up to us. I saw on TV just this week where a birth mom asked her adult child that she had placed years before, to keep the adoption a secret until she could figure out how to tell her family. While I can completely (try to) understand how hard it must be to be open about something like placement, I have to be honest that I was completely devastated for that "child". On the day he finally found his first mother, he was again rejected by her. So hard. Again, I am not trying to undermine what birth moms go through, just so thankful our situations are different!

One thing that many people don't understand about adoption is how a person will forever feel strong connection for their birth family. Most (not all) yearn for a relationship with their birth family. Most people think that if a child is in a healthy, loving family, that they will never want to know more about their birth family and never feel the need for connection to them. That breaks my heart!!! But if you ask children how often they think about their birth family, it's daily.

So, you can see why I LOVE having relationships with these two. I think it helps our children to understand how loved they are to have two families. Not that they won't grieve their adoption as they grow up and understand it more, but I pray that already having that relationship in place will help.

On Tuesday we had arranged to have a date with Sadie's birth mom. As we were leaving Cooper piped up from the back that he wanted to "smoosh Mandy". I couldn't quite understand what he was trying to say, so it took us a minute to figure out that he wanted to love on his Mandy. Oh man...so sweet! Then Owen said, "Mom, you forgot to call my birth mom!" The truth is that I didn't, but was going to set that up another day. But I immediately texted her and told her what the boys had said. She was so cute and asked us to come by her work and give her some loving!!!

We only stayed for a couple minutes before the boys went bonkers! But it was incredible to feel such pride coming from her. It is SO obvious how proud she is of her decision, how much she loves all of us and wants us to be a part of her life.

So while I don't have pictures of their special time together, I did take some when we went to play at McDonald's. And I know you just really want to see my cute kids anyways!!!