Upon This Rock...: 4 months home!

I can't believe it's been four months already! It seems like just yesterday that this little guy was walking through the airport to meet us for the first time....but at the same time, it feels like he's always been here. The transition has been so much better than I could have ever anticipated. I'm so grateful for the quality of care and huge amounts of love he got in his home country - what that has done for him cannot adequately be described. So very grateful!

Things are plugging along here, just like before. School takes up the majority of our days, now that all of the three big boys are being homeschooled. What little "free" time I have goes mostly toward playing with the rascals...or driving. I do a lot of driving, it seems. We've added to our "extras" curriculum this year and now are doing gymnastics, music lessons, co-op, and French class. My driving time has drastically increased. Theo seems to love it. I've been working on preschool projects with him (mostly arts and crafts based), and he LOVES being with the other kids at all of these other activities/classes. I have to admit, watching him with other kids is one of the highlights that I wasn't anticipating when we started this adoption process. Other kids just gravitate toward him and he brings out such a soft, compassionate, "teacher" side to them that I haven't seen before in some of the kids, especially the young boys. They adore him, and it shows!

He has one therapy evaluation left to go, and it's scheduled for Thursday morning. After that, we should be able to put his plan together and move forward, and the goal for a start date for school is the first week of November. Assuming we can get all of the therapists together before then, we should be able to start him at school a couple of days a week. Our goal for right now is to do the classroom 2 days per week, and then some extra therapy sessions on the other three days. Eventually, we will work up to 5 days a week in the classroom, with the therapy sessions being integrated into his daily schedule. I'm not quite ready to take him to school that many days of the week yet (I think it's going to be harder on me to drop him off at school - even harder than it was with my other kids!!), so this is a good solution, we think. I can't wait to see how he does, but I'm already dreading dropping him off and walking away!!

I need to get back to daily life - Rascal #1 was "teaching" an art class to his brothers and it sounds like they're wrapping it up, but here are some recent snapshots!