A Year As a Family

How has it been a year?

A year filled with 365 beautiful, hard, complex, emotional, happy, grateful days.

Were we to do anything over in this last year, I think we would have given ourselves a little more grace in the first six months.
After Million came home, I stayed at home, and it took seven months for Michael to start his new full-time job.  Those were very very lean months.  Expressing thanksgiving when we had little food in the pantry was hard.  Parenting was hard.  Everything was hard.

I've compiled ten of the most honest and heartfelt posts about adoption and parenting that I've written in the last year.  

There were many days that flew by, happily.
There were many walks and talks and snort-inducing laughs.

These were hard posts to go back and read.

But they are true posts and a very honest depiction of the many thousand emotions and lessons we have learned in our adoption.

1. How Very Alike We Are

2. Lessons from a Familiar Song

3. Parenting is Really Just a Trump Card Game

4. To My Son At Christmas

5. Delight

6. Racism and My Filthy Heart

7. Six Months Behind, A World Ahead

8. Race Revisited

9. To My Son on His 2nd Birthday

10. Some Exciting News From Our Family

Tonight, we are celebrating with my sister at an Ethiopian restaurant.  Tomorrow is Michael and my wedding anniversary, so we chose to celebrate Million's "family day" a day early to keep the days separate, even though they happened on the same day.  


We are so grateful at how blessed and changed and stretched and grown we are as parents, as individuals, as a couple, and as a family.  I wish I could sit down and tell you story after story about how adoption has etched beautiful lessons into our hearts that I'm so grateful we had the chance to learn before expanding our family through pregnancy.  Adoption has been one billion percent hard work.  But it's also been one trillion percent worth it.   It's a beautiful thing.

Ecclesiastes 3:11a He has made everything beautiful in its time.