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.

It's been way too long

I am so sorry to those 5 followers who read my blog. So dissappointing , I know.
It's not my life is worth bloggin about. Or is it ? Of course it is.

Much has happening since my last blog post in June.

Let's see Norah is now walking independently. July 26 she was in the kitchen and up she got from sitting and away she went.

This is at Lake Lisgar- Daycare summer party.

Our new front porch- Silver cross. less than $500 for the wood but they charged March of Dimes over $6,000 which did include the chair lift- $3000.

It means we can be outside on the porch with the dog. I call it our outdoor playpen. We still need an auto door opener.

                                                 I did the above photo for last day of daycare .

 Our trip to Southside park. Norah walked around for the first time.

A helping hand from Big Brother Owen.

Our newest health concern. We are going for an ultrasound October 18.

Watching the Olympics.

Dressed for church.

This was a day at the beach. Lake Whittaker.

Cutest Ballerina EVER ! Yep Norah's been wlaking for 5 weeks and is signed up for dance lessons.

 

We spent time at Ester Seals camp for our summer holidays. What a great time that was ! Will post a seperate post just on our days at camp.

great apps

Because we are desperate to win an ipad am linking this site so we can have 25 more chances on rafflecopter.   Check it out. http://www.smartappsforkids.com/2012/06/win-an-ipad-2-its-time-for-our-next-giveaway.html

Norah's first steps- 21 of them.

Finally figured out how to post a video. The lesson, must be saved as a video file not a movie maker project file. If you have been praying for Norah then you better just Praise the Lord after watching this.

and thanks for praying.

You betcha

I do admit I am a terrible blogger. But here I am blogging yet again.
Not sure if I have mentioned it here on my blog before or not, if you follow me on FB
you already are aware that we are in the process of adopting. Yep. US. Why you say ? I say why not .
I have been on this adoption journey a few times before and find myself here again. 3 times a charm right. I don't want to go into details about the match but will tell you that we are excited to be on the journey. We have finished our interviews for our homestudy and are in the home stretch. We have all the other paperwork to get done first. We are not in a rush to get it done. God's timing will be perfect. This girl has many medical issues, just like Norah so we have much to do and plan to have her here living with us. Much can happen between now and then. We had originally planned for a second child ever since Owen was born. When Owen was 3 we decided we had taken enough time to accomplish this and since it wasn't happening we contacted our local CAS and had a worker in house to discuss the process and get it started.At that time we were willing to accept a Sn child.  This was Christmas 2007. The worker tried to fast track us to get into the Pride Class so over the holidays we were to get the paperwork and application into her office the first week of Jan. Well the first week of Jan came and I had to call her to tell her that I was pregnant. I had Norah Sept 4 2008. She is Sn. The thing that has always stuck with me during those grief moments was this..... If you had seen her profile would you have come forward to adopt her....... You betcha is the answer. Hence why the tug to adopt this other little girl.

On the Norah front... I have video of her taking 21 steps on her own. I hope to post it below so please bear with me.

We have trialed a manual wheelchair called a supra. We need a few modifications to make it work for us and our vedor is working on our wish list. We have paperwork to get done to get our funding. Since we get ACSD it should be 100% covered.

School is only 90 days away. We have one more transition to school meeting happening June 19. Norah will be visiting the classroom 3 fridays this month for an hour each time. I know she will be fine as long as they listen to our notes and take the information to prepare the environment for her. Our goals are to be safe happy and healthy. My biggest fear is the communication. At daycare Norah is quiet- non verbal non vocal not active. At home she is a different child. Active, verbal- says a few words and sentences - like yeah, I do it ! Take it, I go . I am going to stop writing now as our OT and PT are going to be arriving for our bi weekly home therapy session and I still have to get dressed and wake the princess from her nap.