Adoption journey update- the girls

     The twins have been with us now about seven and a half week now. It's been fairly easy to adjust from having one child to having three but things seem to take a lot more time. I'm now getting four people ready in the morning and getting four people into the car wherever we go. This doesn't count Mr. Rural as he gets into the car and gets dressed alone thank goodness.

     The girls have had some pretty bad behaviors, especially after visits. They come back from visits loaded up on sugar and rather wild. It takes them the whole day after to come back down from the visit and to get back into our routine and following our rules. That has been a stressing experience and something I didn't count on going into this. In fact, visits were something I didn't count on a whole lot going into this as we were hoping for children already close to TPR (termination of parental rights) or close to it.

     At the last court date for the girls the bio mom was given an additional six months to work her plan. I want the girls to stay with us forever, but it's up to the bio mom and God right now. I'm not very good at leaving things up to God. I'm working on it, but I like having control over things. I definitely don't have control in my life right now. If the girls are supposed to have a doctor's visit, I schedule it. If it's visit day there can be nothing else on the schedule. The day after visit day is also limited. If a social worker needs to come for a visit I drop everything and the county social worker can show up at any time.

     Though it's a rough rode there are some very positive things too. Little Rural is loving having sisters (most of the time) and is great at sharing, reading to them and helping them get breakfast in the morning. We love the girls and feel like they are a great fit for our family. They are improving my leaps and bounds here and their speech is already SO much better than when they first arrived as well as their social skills and level of anger. Also, we have a great support system and are blessed with having an amazing county social worker who has been a very good listener. Our FFA continues to be a good resource for us too.

     So, we wait, we pray, we hope, we dig deep into our emotional reserves. This is going to be a long road, much longer than what we anticipated. We can only pray that in the end we'll have the girls as our permanent daughters (in our heart they already are) and we'll be able to say it was all worth it.