"God brought us together as a family."

ADOPTION FINALIZATION!

It’s official. On July 1st 2008 D’Angelo & Augustine’s adoption was finalized.

What an exciting and emotional day!! Finalization is the last formal step in the adoption process and the official beginning of our new family. As soon as the judge signs the adoption order, we gained permanent legal custody of our boys.

D’Angelo was placed with us when he was 10 days old on Wednesday, September 29, 2004

It was 1371 days from his placement date to his adoption finalization date!
How else can we count all these days?
3 years, 9 months, 2 days
118,454,400 seconds
1,974,240 minutes
32,904 hours
195 weeks (rounded down)

Augustine was placed with us on

Monday, November 21, 2005

It was 953 days from his placement date to his adoption finalization date!
How else can we count all these days?
2 years, 7 months, 10 days excluding the end date
82,339,200 seconds
1,372,320 minutes
22,872 hours
136 weeks (rounded down)

This is absolutely wonderful, we are so blessed. They melted our hearts the first time they were placed in our arms. It has been a long journey and we thank God for the miracle of creating our family and making it forever.

ART DAY

Thanks to Kathy who invited up to 30 kids from our Moms group to participate in her Art Day. This semester Kathy is teaching "Creative Arts in Early Childhood" at a local college. Yesterday each of her students presented an art activity for kids (18 mos-6 yrs). The big boys are at my Mom & Darrell's so I was able to make this a special Mommy daughter day for Adeline & me. Adeline had an great time and enjoyed getting really messy!

This was a great idea. I have done a version of this using a small box to roll around marbles or golf balls with paint but I loved how the kids were able to really move around, jump and have fun while holding the pool. Adeline & I are going to do this with D'Angelo & Auggie sosmeday soon.

Mini pinatas were available to decorate.
Glue and jello go well together on paper.Most kids had very bright beautiful creations. Adeline just kept mixing it all up.

I have been such a slacker when it comes to scrap booking. I have not completed any of the kids first year albums yet. I am the queen of random pages! I just work on whatever strikes me at the time. So, I am now on a mission to get these baby books started and completed. I worked on D'Angelo's album Friday night 7pm-2am and again Saturday from 11:30am-2:00 am. I did take a break to go eat dinner at Noodles though. Thanks to my friend Debbie for opening up her home to me and the other ladies this weekend! I made some good progress but I still have a long way to go. I have so many pictures of D'Angelo's first year I could almost do a page a day. Seriously, it's the typical first child scenario- TONS of pictures. I am supposed to go out scrapping again Tuesday night. Do I ever sleep? Not as much as I should. I will let you know that I was tired this morning and it took effort to get up and get to church.

Here are some photos from the week.

We were supposed to go to the spray park Wednesday morning but it rained and rained. We then decided last minute to meet up with my friend Debbie and her daughter Taylor at Nibbles play cafe. The kids had a great time there.

scuba anyone?
howdy

Xavier was very happy to push, pull and carry the chairs around.

beautiful face painting Adeline

Thursday morning we had a playgroup at Lake Arlington with our friends from MOPS. Then we went to another park a little later on our own.

not a care in the world...how far away from Mom can we wander?

Ahhhh, the great discovery!

Oliver is way too curious! No more pictures-I must get him out of the mud puddle.

I'm smiling, I'm smiling.