The next big thing

"Caps for sale!"

A week or so after Naomi and Joanna had come home, Ryan asked, "I wonder what the next "big thing" will be?"  At the time he was wondering what benchmark we were waiting for, what major thing wold we want to report on, what milestone would be so demonstrative of growth that we would mark it and share it with others.  At the time, I did not have a ready answer for him.  I was not sure what we were waiting for.  For two and a half years we had been waiting for the girls to join us. We knew exactly what we wanted to be able to report out.  We wanted to shout from the rooftops that they were coming, or they were here.   Each day we prayed for them and hurt for them and anticipated them being here. It was a long haul.  We got tired of waiting.  The hurt of that time has not gone away.  The very real daily sadness and feeling of slogging through a journey that had no end in sight will stay with me for a very long time.  Getting to the end of that was a HUGE benchmark n our lives.
So, what do we report out now?  There was nothing exceptional about our weekend.  While the boys went to baseball practice the girls bought tap shoes and tights and snacks to take on our beach trip.  We did chores, watched a movie and snuggled on the couch.  We went out for dinner and played at Gram and Grandpa's house. Nothing to report there.  Little things of interest that we noticed this week include the fact that the girls don't speak to each other in Creole anymore, they are willing to eat appropriate fruit peels (previously they ate only the insides of grapes, apples, peaches), friends in the U.S. are spoken of more often than friends in Haiti, and they now talk about "their" church and "their" home.

I am not really sure what major benchmarks we are looking for.  I guess the next big thing might be the absence of a big thing.  We are just doing normal life now.  (Don't get me wrong-we are still in the mode that speaker and blogger Jen Hatmaker refers to in her adoption blogs--that stage where our life is prone to spin out of control at any moment for no apparent reason, and most likely it will be at the point where things were moving along perfectly and as a result you let your guard down for a second to relax and take in the beauty of this thing you call a family and then WHAM!  you hit a wall and no one knows why and just to improve things the dog is throwing up, the phone is ringing, someone cannot figure out #15 on their math test and lunch is burning on the stove.)


I guess the next big thing is that things are starting to feel "normal."  English is flowing freely,  the routine is known and we are on a countdown to the beach.  Everyone smiled for a picture today-that is a pretty big thing!!!