6 Month Familiversary

03/28/2012

Typically not long after a new baby is born at the hospital, a family photo is snapped. When a new child arrives through foster care, things aren’t so … picturesque. The night Precious came home was a bit chaotic. I called my sister-in-law Ginger before she arrived. “How much does a 2-month-old baby eat? And how often? What kind of bottle should we get? How much will she sleep? What’s a typical sleep schedule for a 2-month-old?” After the frenzy of questions and some encouragement from my sweet sister-friend, I bolted into a flurry of last minute nesting. I put a clean sheet on the crib, found a package of wipes and the box with infant clothes, set out blankets, found a nightlight. We had an hour to prepare. Once Precious was in our living room and the case worker was driving away, we fed her a bottle—she had come with one and a container of formula. My parents came by to meet her and see how they could help. We took off her cigarette-smokey sleep gown and put a clean shirt on her. It’s one Jason and I had purchased a full year before Precious was born, just because it was cute with two little birdies on it. For our future daughter. We washed her gown along with all the rest of her clothes. Then we went to Target. Our first shopping excursion as a brand new family of three. I carried sleeping Precious in a baby carrier and kissed the top of her stinky head as we tossed diapers, bottles, burp cloths and pacifiers into the cart. We got home at 10 pm and put our sleepy baby girl down in her crib. An hour later Jason left for a 4 day trip. I turned on the baby monitor and tried not to think so that I could get some sleep, assuming I’d be up a few times during the night. My first night at home with an infant. A stranger in the room next to ours. She slept like a champ, not waking up until 5 am and then going back to sleep until almost 9 after a bottle and a fresh diaper. The first night:

Precious arrived on a Wednesday night. The following day, my mom babysat so I could go to work.

The next day, my mother-in-law babysat. I was so thankful to have our moms close by and willing to jump in and help!

Precious has been a great sleeper since the beginning.

And so full of joy, too!

Here I am looking a little tired, but it’s the first photo I have of the two of us on our third day. She was so tiny!

When Jason got home, I took this first picture of them together.

It’s hard to believe that was 6 months ago. Last week we celebrated our half-year familiversary, six months since the day Precious became a part of our family. We’re looking forward to finalizing her adoption in the next few months, hopefully before her first birthday in July.

I just noticed we put the same shirt on her for our ice cream familiversary celebration that she wore on her first full day with us. (Second picture from the top.) She’s filling it out a bit more now!

Happy Familiversary, Choongie! We’re so thankful God brought you into our family. I can’t imagine my life without you. Thank you for bringing us so much joy and love everyday.

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Posted by mahlbrandt

My Lovely Girl

03/15/2012

Everyday I’m in awe—not just with how stinkin’ adorable my daughter is (of course, I’m biased)—but that I get to be her mom. I’m fully aware that things could have turned out very differently for us all. Thankful doesn’t seem like big enough of a word.

This journey hasn’t been easy. We had some really trying times back in October and November. But everything now is so…easy. And fun. Do you see that giant smile? Everyday we get to soak up that joy that oozes out of her and we could almost forget how difficult things were at the beginning with the DCS drama. And like her older half-sister, she could have been bounced around from foster home to foster home before being adopted. But we are thankful for the way this chapter is turning out. We are thankful for her. And thankful for this season of fun and easy.

I’m eager to get back into foster parenting. Having our home “closed” is hard. Even though it’s the easy road. It’s hard because we signed up for the challenge; and now we’re not doing it. I suppose in a way we’re still doing it. Precious came to us through foster care (though she ended up being removed from state custody and put into our custody) and we still haven’t finalized her adoption…but it just doesn’t feel like we’re doing enough about the foster care situation. There are so many kids still out there in our city that need good foster parents. And I want to help.

I probably need this forced break more than I want to admit. It’s time for the three of us—me, Jason and Precious—to bond as a family. We were still reeling from the situation with Ladybug in a lot of ways and this break from foster parenting gave us time to process all of those feelings. By the time our new home is finished and we’re ready to reopen (late summer or fall, hopefully), Precious will be over a year old. We will be a very different family than we were last July (when we were first certified) and it was just Jason and me. There are a lot of things to think about and different ways to prepare this time. We have our daughter to think about now—what is healthy and safe for her—when we consider welcoming new kids into our family.

Sorry for the rambling. I’m sleepy and I was just going to post pictures to publish in the morning. Then I decided to pour my thoughts out and try to make sense of them here. I don’t have a neat little conclusive bow for this. I’m very thankful for our daughter and I’m thinking a lot about our future as foster parents.

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Posted by mahlbrandt

Hanging Out: Spring Swings and an Adoption Update

03/06/2012

We took Precious to the playground for the first time last week since the weather has been reaching into the upper 60s and low 70s more frequently here in Nashville. She seemed to really enjoy the swings. Not much reaction to the slide and that’s about all she’s big enough for yet. So lots of swing pictures pictures…

I haven’t given an update on our adoption situation in a while, mainly because not much is happening. Later this month we’ll be celebrating our 6-month familiversary (a term I got from the Foster Parent Podcast) and Precious will be 8 months old. We were anticipating being able to finalize her adoption around the 6-month point but now it seems we’ll be waiting two more months…until the beginning of May. At the earliest. We did everything we were supposed to do. Got our home study done in less than a month and our attorney submitted everything to the court. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, the judge’s clerk got back to our attorney to let us know they would start the process of publication* in order to terminate Precious’ biological father’s parental rights. This week. And the process takes 8 weeks. It feels like the papers were just sitting around in a stack in the courthouse for over a month. It’s frustrating to be stuck in this waiting period—just hanging out in limbo—for an indefinite amount of time.

But we could be in such a different situation that we’re in right now, and that perspective keeps us in thankful mode rather than impatient mode. We have full custody of Precious, she’s with us everyday, we’re her parents, we’re not in any real risk of losing her—we’re very blessed. Situations don’t often turn out this rosy. But that finalization is going to feel so good. Everything will be permanent and official then. We’ll get a new birth certificate for her with our names on it as her parents and a new name for her—which I plan to reveal here once it’s a done deal. She’ll take our last night, get a new middle name and keep the same first name. We’re just changing the spelling of her first name slightly because her biological mom gave her a beautiful name and we’d like her to keep it. But a little modification will allow us to incorporate in our favorite family name as well as honoring her original name and her history.

*In case you’re really interested in adoption and foster parenting technical processes, here’s an explanation of “publication” as best as I understand it here in Tennessee. When a biological parent is unidentified or his/her whereabouts is unknown, every effort needs to be made to find him/her. There is a Punitive Fatherhood Registry in Tennessee where a father can post that he is looking for a biological child. A child’s information is submitted and if it matches a father on the list, more information/testing can be done to see if they’re a match. If there is no match there, the next step is to run an ad in a public newspaper for 4 weeks. I think the ad says something like, “If you are looking for your child, born on blank, please contact blank for more information.” Pretty vague for the child’s protection. The parent has 30 days to respond to the ad. If no one comes forward and no match is found any other way, the adoption process moves forward and the biological parent’s parental rights are terminated.

So that’s where we’re at. We’re just waiting. Hanging out. Having fun. Going about our day to day lives with our precious 7.5 month old little sweetie pie. And being thankful everyday. She makes my life much richer, messier and so much more joyful…

4 Comments | Family, Family: Foster Parenting, Family: Precious/Ali | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Hush Little Baby

01/11/2012

Image

Yesterday Jason finished recording his first solo instrumental album, Acoustic Lullabies. It sounds amazing! I know it will be enjoyed by all ages as the guitar playing is just beautiful—a combination of his classical guitar training, finger-style influences of Phil Keaggy and Tommy Emmanuel and probably a hundred other things. He’s sending the files off to the mix engineer today while I’m working away on the CD package design. We’re expecting an early February release.

If you read my post on Thanksgiving, you know that we’re selling one song as a pre-release off the album, “Hush Little Baby,” for a minimum donation of $1 as our one and only adoption fundraiser. A bunch of you—near and far, friends and strangers—helped us out by buying the song with a donation. Thank you so much!

And I hate to bring it up again, but…we’re short. So far we’ve used generous donations to pay for our attorney, filing fees for Termination of Parental Rights/Petition for Adoption, a new birth certificate, publication for TPR of the biological father, fingerprinting (as part of our background checks) and a private home study but we’re about $500 short for all of that.

I may have mentioned before how much I dislike asking for money for an adoption. And now here we are, paying out of pocket for an unexpected private adoption and realizing we can’t do it alone. So, in case you missed it the first time around, here is another opportunity:

Click here to purchase “Hush Little Baby” from Jason Ahlbrandt’s forthcoming instrumental guitar album, Acoustic Lullabies, for a minimum donation of $1. Include your email address when you purchase and I’ll send you the mp3 within 3 business days. 100% of the money donated goes to paying for the adoption of our Precious baby girl.

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Posted by mahlbrandt

Foster Parenting on Hold

12/12/2011

Because we are selling our house and haven’t started building our new home yet, we had to put our home on hold with DCS. That means we won’t be accepting any new foster placements for a while. It could end up being almost a year, which is hard because we feel really burdened for the kids who need places to go and parents to love them, especially around the holidays. It breaks my heart to have to say no to a call…and we had been getting a couple calls a week before we asked our case manager to take our name of the list for now.

One particular call was so hard to say no to. Usually the placement worker starts off with just the child(ren)’s age(s) and gender(s) and that’s as far as the conversation goes unless we say we’re interested. But as we were driving home from Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania, I got a call and the worker went straight into describing the situation. It was for a 6 year old boy whose mother had been shot by her boyfriend the night before. Their only family was in another country. Our hearts were so broken for that boy and we really wanted to say yes. Jason, my dad and I took a moment to pray for the kiddo, poor guy. (My mom was napping at the time.) It was even more heartbreaking to hear about the story on the news in the following days and to talk to my friend who is an ER nurse at the hospital where his 8-month pregnant mom was taken. The baby also died. So sad.

But, we don’t want to say yes, welcome a child into our home and then have to send him or her off to another foster just because we’re moving. It wouldn’t be fair to the kid. We want to be available for as long as we’re needed for the child—forever, if that’s how the situation works out. We’re building a bigger home so we can have room for more children but in the meantime, it’s difficult to not be able to do more to help. I’m afraid I might just have to become a foster parenting advocate and try to recruit more people to become foster parents.

You should do it. Seriously? What’s stopping you?

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Posted by mahlbrandt

Birth Parent Visit

12/08/2011

Precious’ mother requested two more visits before she surrenders her parental rights to us. I really wasn’t sure what to expect from our first meeting. We met her mother—let’s call her Brave, because she is—once before at a meeting at DCS and it didn’t go real well. But at this visit, the interactions between Brave and Precious were much better than I expected and for that I’m thankful. As awkward as it was and considering what a mess this all is, I realize now how truly valuable an open adoption can be.

Because we love Precious so much, I find it impossible to not care about Brave. Even if we’re angry about things that happened to Precious in the past, I see so much value in Brave. She holds a wealth of information about Precious’ family medical history, her ethnicity and heritage, her biological half-siblings, etc. The most valuable thing to me is to witness Brave’s love for Precious. There is no doubt that Precious is loved and wanted.

I call her Brave because what she is doing requires so much courage. She’s obviously a smart woman who has made some really bad choices. And she knows it. She openly admits that she made mistakes, putting her vices before her children. Brave is working hard to get her life back on track. Even so, she wants to release Precious to us so we can adopt her because she believes it’s what’s best for her and for us. Now that takes a lot of strength.

As much as God loves adoption, He loves restoration. I would love to see Brave’s life redeemed. And I am so thankful for the gift of Precious. It’s far from a picture-perfect story but I’m thankful Jason and I could be available for Precious when she needed us and to hear Brave say she’s thankful too—that means so much.

Could you imagine loving your child so much that you would willing let her go? She’s very brave. We’re eternally grateful.

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Posted by mahlbrandt

This & That

12/05/2011

• Last week I was “in” court by speaker phone. That’s the third time I’ve been in court in the past month. Oh, how my life has changed.

• Precious had her first “solid” food this weekend, if rice cereal counts as a solid. She seemed to like it but learning how to swallow it will take some time.

• My mom was asked to testify at a brunch for her bible study/prayer group this week, about the miracle God did for us and Precious. She asked if I’d say something afterward. I wrote a 5 minute speech and I’ve rehearsed it in front of Photo Booth five times because I get nervous speaking in front of groups. But I have a lot to say. (In case you haven’t noticed…)

• We had the first of two court-ordered, pre-TPR, supervised visits with Precious’ birth mom last week. It felt so strange going into it—it’s a mess and the situation is unnatural in so many ways—but it went much better than I expected. That’s a whole blog post in itself.

• I’m really thankful for the adoption attorney we found. She seems super amazing and her price is great.

• Thank you to all of you who have donated to our adoption fundraiser! Just through this blog post, we’ve already collected over $500. We are blessed and amazed. You guys are the best!

• I keep finding money lately. Mostly quarters. In random places.

• I helped my parents put up their Christmas tree on Saturday and then on Sunday my mom helped me with ours. (Jason is in Texas.) Precious loves how shiny and sparkly it is. She’s gonna make Christmas so much more fun this year.

• Our house, our beloved MCM ranch, is officially on the market now. I’m sad because I love it but I’m also excited about the new season we’re moving into. I am not really looking forward to keeping the house clean ALL THE TIME…

2 Comments | Art, Art: interior design, Family, Family: Foster Parenting, Family: Me, Family: Precious/Ali | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

I Told You She’s Precious

11/24/2011

Thanksgiving 2011. I can’t think of a better time to share the sweet face of our little Precious girl. Getting full custody of her last week was an unexpected gift and wonderful blessing. God is so good!

Jason has been working on an acoustic guitar lullabies album to be dedicated to our sweet daughter. The whole album should be done in early 2012 but since we suddenly need to come up with several thousand dollars for a private adoption attorney to settle all this mess, Jason has decided to release one song early as an adoption fundraiser. The first song is “Hush Little Baby.” I know I’m biased but it’s a truly beautiful, layered finger-style guitar rendition. Think Phil Keaggy, Tommy Emmanuel, Chet Atkins style. I can’t wait to hear the rest!

Click here to make a minimum donation of $1 and I will email an mp3 of the song, “Hush Little Baby” by Jason Ahlbrandt within 3 business days. It’ll be well worth your dollar, I promise. (Of course, if you’re motivated to give more than a dollar, that would be tremendously appreciated!) Thank you for your help!

12 Comments | Art, Art: music, Faith, Family, Family: Foster Parenting, Family: Jason, Family: Precious/Ali | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Announcing…

11/22/2011

Jaron Isaac! Born 11-2-11 weighing in at 9 lbs 3 oz. Big boy!

You thought I was going to reveal a picture of our baby girl, Precious, didn’t you? Not yet, but… I’m going to post a photo (showing her face) on Thanksgiving along with an announcement so check back over the weekend!

Jaron is the freshly adopted son of our friends Leila and Jeremy. You may remember hearing about their crazy past year and a half… first their house was flooded in 4 ft of Cumberland River water for several days. Then while they were fighting insurance companies to pay out what was owed, their rental house was robbed over Christmas last year. Earlier this year they finally moved into their newly rebuilt home (with a foundation 4 ft higher per FEMA regs!). A month before his due date, they were matched with this little boy through their adoption agency. After all of the above drained their savings they had just a couple weeks to scrambled and come up with $20,000 to bring home their son. At least one of my blog readers donated to their fund. You know who you are, and I sincerely thank you! Jeremy and Leila are a couple of the finest people I know and Jaron is a perfect fit in their family. I’m happy that he and Precious can grow up as friends and neighbors.

Jaron with Uncle Jason, at 4 days old:

Here he is sporting his stripped socks made my Auntie Martina. (They double as anti-scratch boxing gloves.)

This picture was taken at 17 days old the morning after I babysat him overnight to give his mama a much needed solid night of sleep. We survived but I sure am thankful Precious was sleeping almost through the night already when she came to us.

Welcome Jaron! You are so loved, little dude!

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Posted by mahlbrandt

Hundley Adoption Update

11/01/2011

It’s time for an update on our friends Jeremy and Leila’s adoption story. Straight from Jeremy’s facebook wall on Wednesday:

“Hundley Adoption Update: Leila attended the doctor visit with the birthmother on Monday. They did an ultrasound and we got to see his face! He’s nearly 8 lbs and though a bit crowded in there, looks good. This time next week we’ll be at the hospital. WOW. On the funding side, we are at 83% of our goal! If you want to help with our final “push,” please post, tweet, or email the link to our blog: www.HundleyComingHome.blogspot.com. A massive THANK YOU to everyone involved. Just amazing.”

Baby boy, whom they’re planning to name Jaron Isaac, is due today! I can’t wait to meet him and see this sweet couple become parents. They’re going to make a wonderful family. Two Saturdays ago we threw a big baby shower for them at their new home. Apparently I wasn’t very strategic about my photos. I don’t have one of Leila and I have to skip all the ones that have Precious in them. Here are a few pictures from before the party started:

The party theme was “Rock Your Diaper Off!” since we were urging people to bring diapers along with or instead of a traditional gift. There was all kind of yummy food including an ice cream sundae bar, guitar cake, drum cupcakes, punch, cheese, dips, quiches, etc.

I’m hoping Leila’s sister-in-law Mikala got better pictures than me.

That’s my niece Eliza, Leila’s brother Nate and my sister-in-law Ginger.

We had a station set up where kids could decorate bibs and burp cloths with fabric markers. Max did a great job and got some help from his dad Grant.

Jeremy getting lots of practice with Eliza. Baby E loves that plastic chicken. It’s so cute.

We also had a picture matte for people to sign as a guest book and a box of thank you card for guests to write their addresses on the envelopes. After the gifts were opened we had a relay race outside that included setting up an unfamiliar stroller, strapping in a pumpkin, racing around cones, strapping the pumpkin into a car seat, running with it while picking up toys, etc. It was a hoot. I don’t have any pictures because I was in it. Jason and I competed against Leila and Jeremy and friends Grant and Brooke. Leila and Jeremy won. It was a very fun afternoon and this couple is now LOADED with baby stuff. I’m pretty sure they have about 4x as much baby gear as we do and we have enough.

I can’t wait to meet baby Jaron later this week. Yay!

Update: whoops! It’s 5:30 pm and I just realized I never hit Publish on this post! Sorry it’s late. 

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Posted by mahlbrandt

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