Happy Belated National Adoption Week!!!

So much to say! First Isaiah had a fight with a drawer on Sunday night...the drawer won, and we earned a trip to the ER...and 3 stitches later... I have a feeling he is going to be that kind of boy.

Sunday night:

Monday morning:

Monday night:

Tuesday morning:

When I'm holding other people's children down while they scream bloody murder, so that we can do a procedure is quite a different story than holding your own child down. He was in quite a bit of pain, but we opted to not give him drugs because...(in mom's experience), the trauma from un-peds-experienced ER nurses putting in an IV would be just as bad if not worse than just stitching up the wound with some lidocaine. Mommy was a very cranky nurse 'patient' with the triage nurse who was insisting on getting a tempurature and heart rate before taking him back...3 times it took her to get an accurate temp reading, all the while Isaiah's hematoma was getting bigger and bigger with all his screaming. I was more than a little upset with the nurse...she thought i was kidding when i told her to make something up...NO I was not...put down 34.5 for all I care. And then she said she needed a heart rate...oh, yes, after he's been screaming...that's worthless. Sometimes being a nurse can make occasions like this doubly frustrating.

BUT my little warrior did great, and the next morning it was if nothing at all had happened, and he was in a great mood. Daddy says, it might give him a pretty cool scar...(but mommy's hoping not).

IN OTHER NEWS: Happy Belated National Adoption Week (last week of November)

When I started this blog, I called it 'Little Lads' for a reason, we had just started the foster/adoption process, and we were soon going to be the parents of more than one lad. Well, 9 months down the road, and I am happy to say that we officially turned in our last piece of paper work on monday! Hip Hip Hooray!
Friday we will have our last home inspection and we should be recieving our certification at that time. I knew the process would be long, but I really didn't know it would be this long, and this final piece seems to be taking forever. But I am finally allowing myself to get excited. From here, we are telling people that we could have another child in a couple weeks or in a couple months, we are just not sure yet (although my secret wish is that it's before christmas). This last part has been the most frustrating for me. It required so much paper work and bits of information that we had to collect from all corners of our world. But everyone says once we are holding that child all these little frustrations won't matter. I have been meeting all kinds of people now who are experienced in this process and they have all been very encouraging.

Let me leave you with a bit of information to chew on, I will be writing more on this in the future, but for now, maybe you and your family could be thinking about this over the holidays. During any particular year there are approximately 800,000 children in the foster system here in the US....almost a million children that's situations were deemed bad enough to be removed from the home (and let me tell you, from my experience with the system...it's got to be pretty darn bad, and pretty well documented...no proof...no removal). And amoung those...during any year there are 130,000 children that are waiting for adoption into permanent homes. This is here...today...in our own country. Just in Calif...we have 80,000 children, 10% of the nations children in need of homes.

It gets me close to tears when I think about it, think about the need. To say that this is a passion of mine is an understatement. I have been talking to God about this from the time I was a child and I learned that there were children out there that were not wanted by their parents. I have little bit of a clearer picture about my role in all of this, but I don't think I've yet scratched the surface. My journals for years have been in request to God about what he wants me to do with this passion of mine.

For now, for me, the first step, in order to be an advocate of change, is to be the change I want to see. Like I said, I'll say more in later posts, (I already have hours of speeches for speaking tours outlined in my head...you never know).