I'm BACK!

I seriously cannot believe how time has flown! I cannot believe that it has been so long since my last posting. I have had a few crazy weeks for sure. Little miss is just scooting and crawling along-so much for setting her in one place and being able to get other things done!

So, I have not made blogging a priority. I will try to be better.

So what has been going on, you ask? Well, first of all, I am on a mission to find HK a Vols outfit for this upcoming football season. I have become obsessed. And a regular, old cheerleader outfit will not do. I have to find something unique, or smocked. So, mom is making her an outfit, and we bought another one this weekend. With a matching hair bow. I feel like we are well on our way to a great UT season.

My friend Stephani and her two boys stayed with us a few weeks ago as well. It was so great to see her, and her boys provided lots of laughs. But, I had my first experience with trying to explain adoption to an eleven year old.

Steph and I were looking through a photo album, and the first picture is of me and Justin at a restaurant. It was taken the night we found out that we had been chosen by a birth mom. I was explaining this to Steph as her oldest is sitting there taking it all in. After we finished looking at the pictures, Joey turns to her and says something about HK and the fact that we "won" her. Won her???? He mistook us being "picked" as us winning a contest of some sort. In this great contest, we apparently won a baby. Well, my first reaction was to laugh, but he was truly perplexed. It was then that I first discovered the difficulty in explaining adoption to another child. His mommy was pregnant with him, gave birth to him, and that created his family. End of story. When Justin began explaining that HK's mom and dad had her for us, lots of other questions arose. Why couldn't we have kids of our own? Why did HK's mom and dad not want to keep her with them? It was an eye opening experience for us all. The innocence of a child trying to grasp this concept, and us adults having to explain in a manner that makes sense to a kid. I am not sure how well we did with the explanation, but I do know now that an insanely complicated situation is really not that difficult when put into perspective. The whole thing boils down to love and selflessness. That is it.

This eye opening experience led to others for me as well-boys sure are different than girls. Duh, but they can be so creative. Steph's boys and I made parachutes out of fabric and dropped stuffed animals over the upstairs balcony, we played guitar hero and Wii sports, we had popsicles, I broke up fights, and I learned that small storage rooms make great "hideouts."

Ahhhh....Fun stuff