5 wonderful years!

Five years ago today my husband and I set eyes on our beautiful daughters for the very first time. Alley was brought in, holding a caregiver's hand. I have to be honest and admit that for a split second I was sad. As beautiful and perfect as she was, I thought she was the "baby" and was a bit disappointed that she was as big as she was. She was placed on my lap and was all smiles, touching my face, looking right into my eyes. I fell in love immediately. Then Kat was brought in. Teeny-tiny Kat. I was relieved at that point. Our baby was truly a baby. She was placed on LDP's lap and was a bit apprehensive but soon seemed very comfortable.

Alley was just eight days shy of 4-years-old and the size of maybe a typical 2-year-old. Kat had just turned 2, but appeared to be quite a bit younger than that. Alley wore size 2T, Kat was in 12-18 months.

We presented each girl with her first kukla (doll) and they played with them on our laps, making them dance, identifying their body parts, and just plain being silly with them. We talked with the director, educators, and caregivers of the baby house. We all laughed and had a very relaxed time with the girls. We visited for about 45 minutes and got as much information as they were willing to share with us at that point. We were then given a time frame of 24 hours to decided whether we were going to go forward with this adoption or not.

As the caregivers were saying goodbye and walking the girls out of the room, Alley turned to her caregiver and said, "Next time I will go by my papa." When we were told what she said, we both just melted. There was truly no way in hell at that point we could say no to them and not welcome them into our cozy little family. We still sent their info. to our IA doctor that night, but no matter what he said about them, they were, in our hearts, already our daughters.

And the rest, as they say, is history! Or, HERstory? ;)




(I hope to post a picture or two from our first meeting, but at this point, I can't find them. I have hard copies that I could scan, but I cannot find any pictures on any of our computers and it makes me sick. We couldn't find them for a while and I kept putting it out of my mind. There's an album for the day we think we probably downloaded (uploaded?) them off of the camera, but the folder is empty. I still have to check in a few other places, and hopefully I have a disc that I may have gotten from the Wal market at the time, but I'm not sure where that would be. Thankfully we have lots of hard copies, but we never printed out all the pics we took at the time. When I get a chance to get to the scanner, I'll try to post our first family photo.)