Happy anniversary to our little family

Today – October 25^th, 2017 – marks the one-year anniversary of our little family being together. One year ago today Myron came to join our family and it has changed immeasurably!

Here’s a summary of the back-story…

The preparation and journey towards Myron began a little over 5 years ago when we were told we couldn’t naturally have children. This was a significant shock to us, who always thought that it would happen when the timing was right.

While we processed the news ourselves we continued to listen to friends, church members and acquaintances ask us: “when are we going to have children? Our body clock was ticking, we aren’t getting any younger, or are you baron?” – we heard all the lines. Mostly, we politely laughed, and sometimes with strangers pretended we were younger. Occasionally we just went in with a bang and said: “we can’t”. That sometimes stopped the conversation. It’s not exactly true that we couldn’t, we could try IVF, but just didn’t feel it was for us.

After much discussion, and prayer we decided that we would try to adopt. We just wanted to wait for the right timing (when we thought we were stable enough in one country for the process to happen).

We began the fostering-in-the-view-of-adoption process from Uganda. We were in line to foster/adopt an abandoned baby early last year; however close to the end process the baby died. That floored us! And I in particular became quite emotionally guarded from that time. We took a step back but still continued the process. A few months later we were told about Myron. We said we wanted to continue the process with him in mind, but didn’t want to meet him until we knew for sure that it was going to happen (trying to project both of us I guess).

We continued in that vain for a few months then on the 21^st October last year we got a call from the Children’s Protection Officer at our local orphanage, St Jude’s, to say that we could come and collect Myron in four days time. Yikes! Better do some fast acquaintance and bonding then!

I was quite worried, about many things. But my fears were quickly relieved. And apart from a bumpy couple of weeks settling in, it has been a match, literally made in heaven! It is quite phenomenal how well Myron suits us as a family.

Myron is loud, boisterous, talkative, absolutely loves imaginative play, screams out Bob Dylan when a Dylan song comes on a play list; often plays a pretend ‘harmonica’ or air guitar, or drums, or lets loose with energetic dance moves in the middle of our local coffee shop, ties everything up, takes an age to eat his breakfast (or lunch or dinner) because he is too distracted, loves wrestling with the dogs (and Dan), offers empathy whenever we hurt ourselves, will get annoyed when he greets people and they don’t greet him back, insists other children use manners when they talk to him, when he sneezes in bed he will yell out to us to “please say bless you to me”, will remind us not to say “huh” or “mmm” but to “say yes”, can sit and listen to stories being read to him for a good 20-30 minutes, will yell out each night (habitually) that his eye is sore, then answer in chorus with us that it will get better when he sleeps…

We haven’t read any books about adoption or attachment; but plenty of research on fine gross motor, imaginative play and early literacy skills 🙂

Although not yet officially adopted, Myron is a big part of our family! And we can’t quite remember or imagine what our life was like without him! Happy anniversary to us 🙂

Jody

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.