Our miracle baby turned 1 today

Oh, Louisa! How you've wrecked us! We love you so much and we're so incredibly grateful you turned one today. Still can't believe we get to watch you grow. What an amazing gift you are.

Birthday photo shoot

Cake time

You weren't quite sure about all that messiness

Big brother endlessly spoils you

And Dad really likes to sleep when he gets the chance

Finally getting into some mischief 

"Maternal meltdown, aisle 5"

Our dear, sweet, precious gift from God is going to turn a year old exactly one week from today!  It makes me tear up just to write that.  What an amazing gift.  It seems funny to think about the massive fears and anxieties I had anticipating her birth a year ago.  This past year was so much more gut-wrenching and amazing than I ever dreamed it could be.  And our beautiful baby girl is still with us.  Her sweet smile is God's grace to me and it gets me through many trying moments throughout the day.

We go down to AA two days before she turns one for an echo and clinic appointment.  Which is of course bringing out all kinds of PTSD in both Nick and me (well mainly me, but yes, a little bit for Nick too - he confessed he didn't want to plan any family trips until he sees her echo results...).  It's frightfully cold and snowing just like it was last year at this time when we were stuck in the hospital and she was fighting for her life... will we be another story that starts with "well, we were in for a routine echo and they discovered she was in heart failure and she ended up on the transplant list"...  But!  Nick always reminds me that we know her really well now and she has been looking and acting great, in her slow-ish, lazy Louisa, soul-searching stares, goofy grins kind of way.

So anyway, sometimes the Lord gives us little distractions from some of that stuff, and for us the distraction has been in the form of our two little boys starting school this semester and all the issues that come along with big transitions for adoption kids.  K started a new preschool in the fall to try and give him a little more structure and the rest of us a few hours with slightly more calm.  The preschool ended up having irreconcilable differences with the dear boy and we were asked to leave.  I'm sure it's a wonderful place for well-adjusted, secure, calm kids, but it clearly was not the right fit for him.  So I started looking into other options and we ended up getting a full psycho-educational evaluation for him through our local school district and he qualified for the early childhood special education class because of his social-emotional "impairments".  I think this is going to be a really great fit for him right now, with tons of structure and routine, and he seems to be less anxious going to school than he was at the other one.  We're hoping some of the stuff we've been seeing at home with all the transitions will calm down a bit... the day before school started this week he smuggled some eggs upstairs, started cracking them on the way up the carpeted stairs and completed the cracking and scrambling process in the bathroom sink.  When we asked him about it, he said, "Mom did it."  Oh, the dear, dear boy!!

As for D, we felt like trying school would be a good idea with some of the things we're still working through with him.  He started last week and it has been wonderful so far.  We love his teacher, and being busy, out of the house, interacting with other authority figures, and again the structure and routine have been really good for him.  We've only had two big meltdowns so far, the first one was the first night after school, Nick happened to be gone at a basketball game with Noah (poor family planning), and all the anticipation and anxiety of the first day exploded.  I had absolutely nothing left in my tank to deal with it, so I sent out an SOS text and my saintly friend from down the street was knocking on my door within minutes.  She quietly and calmly (those concepts had left the building at that point) led him up to his bedroom and laid down with him in his stinky boy top bunk and read him a book until he calmed down.  I would definitely be sailing over the cuckoo's nest at this point without my amazing people.  Then yesterday morning (after a week of school), we had a meltdown of monumental proportions that involved me calling Nick in a panic from the school parking lot and required him to leave a poor chap on the exam table to rescue mom and son who were at an impasse.  SERIOUSLY, Karyn Purvis, where ARE you when I need you??  All 3 of us finally made it inside the school with the secretary and the teacher and the social worker helping us out (at least I don't have to worry anymore they're under the illusion that we're like a normal family or something...).  We ended up in the social worker's office which really made me feel warm and fuzzy, I wanted to stay and dig in some sand or something, but I snapped out of it and remembered Donavon was the one that needed the extra help.  [Side note: that gave me this funny flashback of going to the counselor's office in Middle School with my friend whose parents were going through a divorce and I remember at some point slipping in the fact that sometimes when I laid in bed at night I was sure I had a brain tumor or that my heart was about to stop because it was beating too hard and how it just felt good to tell a professional person that information and then I felt guilty because it was supposed to be about my friend and not me.  Just goes to show that I've always been an anxious freak, self-focused, and I really like sharing feelings.]  So we left him playing "Don't Break the Ice" with the social worker and the report was he went back to class like a champ after that and told his teacher that he "just didn't get enough beauty sleep".  The turning point was actually when Nick sat down next to him in the school hallway and told him that we are never giving up on him no matter what, he will never leave our family no matter what, and we will always love him no matter what.  These kids have to be told that stuff over, and over, and over.  And you have to do it no matter how frustrated or exhausted or impossibly busy you are.  Two hours later when I thought about Nick and that little boy who has been through so much sitting on the floor together with hundreds of people going about their normal days all around them, I started crying in the cereal aisle at Meijer.  Oh, Meijer!  When did you become such an overwhelming shop of horrors??  Well, when I left the store the sun was miraculously shining for 6 minutes in mid-Michigan and I had some new lip gloss in my purse, so I put some of that on and drove home.  It was a good reminder that we have to keep fighting TOGETHER.  We are on the same team.  I want to ferociously fight for these boys like I will fight for Louisa her whole life.

Sometimes it all just feels like too much.  When I tell Nick that I could have handled one or the other, but not both - a heart baby or adoption issues, he just laughs and says, no, you really couldn't have handled either, but our Mighty God can do both - he can do more than we can ask or imagine.  He can make the lame walk and the blind see.  And sometimes I am both.