Sometimes......

Wow ! It has been a year since I last blogged. Bad me.
Sometimes life gets in the way.

Quick recap- still waiting for an adoption placement. It takes forever you know. Patience is tested on this adoption journey at every step. Workers go on vacation and you wait for replies. Communication is difficult.
We had a match , and had been doing transition visits but then we stopped and did not move forward.

Now we are back to another match and waiting for information sharing. We hope to have a visit planned sometime in the future. GOD will make a way when there seems to be no way.

Kids are happily back at school. Summer was not fun. We promoted Granna to Glory after her short fight with cancer on July 15. It was a difficult few months travelling back and forth to the hospital and moving her from nursing home to another nursing home. We didn't do anything marvelous for our holidays. George lost his job Aug 29 but has since returned to a new one. PTL.

Norah had been doing so well with having no g tube feeds since June 9. She was only being fed at school and has been eating some foods regularly. She was doing amazing with drinking from her straw until a few Thursdays ago when she woke up crying and not wanting to eat/drink. Off to ER. A chest x ray showed pneumonia, only after the radiologist confirmed it at my request. Norah was on antibiotics for 10 days. I was hoping it was a germ and not aspiration. I contacted our OT at the hospital and we got in for an emergency swallow test. Norah failed. She aspirated using a straw so its back to g tube feeds. When I pulled out her Joey machine she gave it a HUG. I was a crying  babbling fool. I was crying more this moment than at any other time in her life. I learned a good lesson from her during that moment. She is always full of JOY, her circumstances NEVER defines her. My biggest concern is her lack of being able to communicate, especially when it comes to health issues.
She has a supertalker now so we are learning to use it. She is a pro at home but she fails out in public. We have to work on it at school as well.

 Norah in her new ballet costume. Yep she's a dancer.

Family photo shoot - Nov 2012. I was prompted by the Holy Spirit to have Winnie included. I t was a very cold day and she could barely walk because at the time her hip was bothering her.
Photo credit @Lisa Neutel :)

 

The rewards are greater than the stress.... we are growing...

First off, I do so apoligize for being the worst blogger ever. Nov 2012 was the last post and now 6 months we have a new little person, now known as the acronym NLP. Can't disclose name or photos due to confidentiality. BUT she is cute and she fits.

George and I have had our visit, the next week the kidsd had theirs, then 2 days later we had an overnight. Awesome , it went awesome.

Now we have her again, for 3 nights and so every week we will increase it a night until we get to a full week with no major issues.

It blesses my heart to see my family interact with her and love her. She fits, she belongs.

Plus ONE

Here we are the beginning of November 2012

Things are going to change for the Nicol family.

Some you may be aware- or not ! That we are in the final stages of getting a homestudy done from our local CAS. Yep one year ago , we received an email from someone in our church to pray for some kids that recently lost a parent and who were orphans. It stirred our hearts to go down the road to adoption.... again.

When we were trying to get pregnant a second time , we had a CAS worker come to our over the Christmas holidays to get paperwork started and to start the process over 4 years ago.  It was at that time, we got pregnant with Norah and had to call them to cancel that plan of adoption ....again.

Here we are again, me again, BTDT got the t-shirt. In a previous relationship I was a foster parent and prospective adoptive parent but that door closed. Thank GOD !

We are done our homestudy. It is  at the agency ready to be signed. We are waiting for a final walk through so an adoption worker can meet and greet us and give some feedback. We had an outside adoption practioner do our homestudy because the agency had lots of families to get done and they wanted to fast track some of us. So the AP that did our homestudy knows us well. The AP at the agency does not. So they will probably spend some time getting to know us and verifying what is written in our homestudy.

We had and expression of interest in on a child that we met online on the provincial photolisting site but we feel now that it may not the right match for our family so we are open again to being lead. Tomorrow we plan to go to a mini adoption exchange meeting to let the local workers know about us.

Both the kids are excited at knowing they will be getting a new person/siblings in their lives soon.

I will update as we go further into the process.