An Olive-style Christmas

Baby girl, something you'll learn over the years is that I love christmas.  In fact, I could have been one of Santa's helpers  - for sure one of my top ten jobs if I had to list them.. But now that you're here.. it's a whole different ball game all together!

Of course it all starts with the tree.  We have a lovely tree with beautiful decorations & lots of flickering little lights.  I'm glad to report that @ 18 months you LOVE them too.  You coo every night when we switch on the ligths & you've redecorated the entire bottom part of the tree & ofcourse there was no stopping you when you discovered that some of the decorations are actually edible!  Needless to say - none of the edible little chocolate decorations are left on the tree. 

Naturally no decently decorated tree goes without matching christmas socks.  For a lack of a chimney we've put them on our bookshelve & you stand there admiring them like their art work displayed in the Louvre. 

One of my favourite things at christmas time is the music. I know, I know.. It's cheesy!  But I love it!  In fact, every year I add to my collection of christmas cd's. Much to your dad's disgust!  I play them every chance I get & sing along to the tune of christmas.  It's just heavenly.

Then there's Ouma Malie's oats cookies.  As a child the baking of those cookies announced that christmas was on it's way and it's a tradition that I've kept alive, one that I hope to pass on.   You helped bake them this year, as much as an 18 month old can assist in baking.. I suppose your real assistance will be with the eating part - seems you've got no issues with the taste or texture of these particular cookies.  Ouma Malie would have been proud baby girl!

Where's the gifts you ask?  Well, apart from the one's that you've already opened.. the others are under our tree.  You've been promised a good pakkie slaai if you open another one of them but you seem content with what you've gotten so far & have been making us pretend tea in your little pink tea cups all week.  The rest of your pressies will be packed in when we leave for holiday & you can open them on christmas morning.  Oh, I look forward to seeing your little face when you open them!


There is a book - my favourite one for this season but you don't seem to mind too much that we're reading it every night.  It tells the real story of christmas, complete with carols & nursery rhymes, poems & everything christmas.  We read from it each night, sing & dance - and yes even daddy sings.  

I hope that you will love this time of year as much as I do, growing up & when you have a family of your own.  But more importantly I pray that you will understand why we celebrate this time of year.  You see, allthough it's not literally Jesus' birthday, its the time of year when we celebrate that he came to earth for us.  It's a time where we celbrate having a Godly father that loves us.

Merry christmas baby girl.  Mommy loves you! xx

Our first day as a Forever Family

So the upcoming anniversary of the day our daughter was placed with us has left me emotional & exceptionally nostalgic.  The celebration of her birthday was exciting & filled with party planning & prep.  But her gotcha day is something completely different & to me in some ways even more special & now I find myself thinking of everything that we've done, haven't done, should have done & perhaps should not have...

The Sunday before we fetched her felt like it was never going to end.  I remember that we prepped her room until late that night & when both of us were lying in bed exhausted, we were thinking 'did we do enough?'  ' Are we ready for this?'  I suspect pregnant parents feel the same before going in to hospital.  We woke up bright & early, fetched Nanna & Auntie Sonia & showed up @ the adoption agency all bright-eyed & bushy-tailed to fetch our baby. 

Naturally there were papers to sign & speeches from social workers - nothing that I can remember, to be quite honest.  And then it was time for us to meet her..  Her caretaker, auntie Cindy, brought her in & gave the most awe-inspiring handover speech.  I was stunned at the time, incapable of even crying.  She explained to Danielle in such a loving way that we were going to be her forever family that I'm convinced our, then five month old, daughter understood every single word. 

And so with a short speech & a kiss on the cheek she was handed to her daddy.  He took her in his arms, kissed her & did - what I now refer to as his Mustafa-thing - whilst saying a not-so-silent prayer to God for answering all our prayers. Then it was my turn to hold her & I remember looking at this little girl thinking, ' ok so we've got a baby now.. what now?'  I noticed that she was hungry & gave her a bottle, something that thank goodness her caretaker had brought - It had not occurred to me to pack milk & a bottle!  But she had toys to keep her entertained in the car! :-) 

We had a good little photo session with her, us the social workers, care takers & Nanna of course.  She kept her cool, but I realise now how totally strange it must have been for her & how scared she must have felt.

It was a struggle to get her into the car seat, must have taken us at least 15 minutes & I suspect that the social workers had a good giggle @ us!  The drive to our home was filled with smiles & playfulness.  Once home the celebration meal had to be cooked.  You see my husband's family is Portuguese & an event is nothing if not combined with the perfectly prepared meal!  However I didn't get to eat any of that specific meal that day as the day had turned out to be waaaaayyy too long for our little bundle & she started to make her feelings heard.   Neighbours had heard of the little one's arrival & started coming to see her. With even more unknown faces now around her she raised the bar of making her voice known to us & Paulo quite literally escorted people out of the house so that she could have some breathing space.  Yet, she kept crying & was unable to sleep so we drove home, only a short distance away from Nanna's house. 

We have a cool printout against our fridge that in short describes how to love a child - one rule on this printout says: 'When crabby, put in water".  So we decided that she probably needed a bath to feel better.  WRONG choice!  She screamed throughout the bath & even more when we started dressing her.  Until eventually, after two hours I had reached my breaking point & started crying with her.. She stopped & looked at me with a face that said: "O crap, they've put me with retards!  They don't know how to look after babies!"

We put her in bed with a bottle & a prayer, and just like that it was the end of her first day with us.  We went to bed still in utter amazement that someone had actually given us their baby.  Other than Jesus dying on the cross for us, it will Always be the most amazing gift we both ever received & we will remain forever thankful. 

343 Days & Counting ...

We've all experienced a moment like that.  A moment long expected.  A moment dreamt of  for days, weeks, even years.  A moment envisaged not only by yourself but by the ones closest to you.  343 Days ago my husband & I had a moment like that.  One seemingly average 'normal' day we got a phone call from a lady, whom we hadn't known until 9 months previously, saying that we could come fetch the new addition to our family in a week's time.

You see, our baby girl didn't come in the traditional way.  There were no pee-sticks with little pink lines for us.  No first scan where we both cried when we saw our little blob.  No suitcase packed for a middle-of-the-night dash to the hospital. 

Our path to growing our family was challenging.  Filled with doctor's rooms, injections, charting cycles & most often just downright painful.   Even when we changed direction & focus, our path was filled with interviews, psych evaluations & even written marriage tests..

Ultimately however, our path lead to our baby girl & that phone call was the start of it all.  The social worker phoned Paulo, my husband.  He in turn phoned me after receiving a picture on e-mail of what she looked like.  He called & said : "She looks like B" (A friend's little girl).  I was stunned! Didn't know how to react or what to say.  Nothing really prepares you for those moments - even if you had envisaged them a thousand times!

I remember walking into a friends office & telling her the news a couple of minutes later.  She started crying & I just stood there looking at her still too stunned to have 'the expected' response.  That was the start of a frantic week trying to prepare our home for a little baba.  It was also the start of our journey to being the family we are today. 

We both printed that photo of hers out & we must have looked at it a million times in that week.  One was displayed in a frame in our lounge that same night & we showed all our friends what our baby girl looks like.  Friends started arranging an Emergency Baby shower of note & there was excitement all around.

It was an unforgettable day, such a special week but we were just being prepared for what was to come when that baby girl was placed in our arms.