At roughly 9:45 CDT this morning, a judge signed the adoption decree, officially making what was a family of three a family of five! On hand, in addition to those necessary for the matter to be heard, were my mother’s sister and brother, and their spouses.

Afterward, we celebrated with our attorney, social worker and the kids’ foster mother. We went straight from that celebration to another given in our honor by the Christian adoption agency that handled the adoption. Though the spellings are a little wonky, I had to share this picture of the cake. It’s yet another one of those God-ordained things that has marked this whole adoption process – this decoration appears on our thank you notes and return address labels – unbeknownst to the woman who created the cake!

We came home for “Quiet Time” for a couple of hours. Some napped, and some just engaged in a quiet activity so as not to disturb the nappers. We knew that having such an exciting day today (the kids were up before 5am – which is 3am back home for me!), we would need our batteries recharged. Even with such a full, exciting and meaningful day, there were very few behavioral issues needing to be addressed and none requiring the loss of privileges or that carried any negative consequences! I think knowing that we are, indeed, now a “forever family” has helped on some psychological level for some things – others will still need to be dealt with in therapy, and we’ve been blessed to have found a wonderful woman with significant experience with children, whom I believe will be able to help with that.

Then, tonight, we spent time with even more family – my favorite cousin and her two children, both of whom are bi-racial like my two children. Though I was thrilled to see my cousin just because I love her, I was happy that my children would be able to see that in our family there are several bi-racial people, just like them.

Lastly, we swung by an ice-cream parlor as a reward for last night’s “Success!” It should come as no surprise on this really special night, that we had repeated “Success!”