Friday was the one year anniversary of us landing in St. Louis and having the airport moment we'd all been waiting for. Finally, the long awaited photo of our family of 6 on one continent.
Together.
A beautiful thing.
Look at our cuteness.
What you can't see is the absolute chaos that was ensuing behind the scenes. And literally on my children's heads.
We arrived home on Thursday night. We drove through to get McDonalds to celebrate being united with our bio kids. Hoping David would eat a bit of that or the grapes they had brought along. We thought things were going well. We handed him bites of chicken nuggets and french fries and to our shock he was eating them! Then we got home and found EVERY SINGLE BITE stuffed underneath him in his carseat. Oh well.
Before we left for Africa we were afraid that our oldest child had lice. This is kind of my arch nemesis of paranoia because we had them (all of us!) when I was pregnant with my third and it was a nightmare. But after the school nurse and my experienced eyes couldn't find anything despite her consistent scratching we concluded she was having issues with dry skin on her neck.
As we piled high our luggage in our kitchen and tried to shuffle off everyone to bed while fighting through being up for most of 48 hours I glanced and thought I saw something in said child's hair. And then God spoke to me in the closest thing I've ever heard to an audible voice, "Go to bed." (Kind of wish the audible voice moment was a bit more spiritual, but you get what you get and you don't throw a fit, right?)
So we went to bed on the floor of our boys' room. Because we had run out of time and hadn't figured out a mattress to sleep on. We got up the next day sent our girls to school and stared at each other in this weird, "I'm in a dream" feeling as our boys tried to play together.
That night as we watched a movie my second daughter told me she had caught her sister's itchy neck.
And I knew.
My inspection confirmed that both my girls had a massive infestation of head lice. So I got to call our blessed family who had kept our precious ones while we had been gone (3 different houses worth) and tell them they might have head lice. And we went to bed.
We woke up early the next morning to begin the process of trying to delice our girls' hair before we made our "big appearance" at our homecoming party. I was in the bathroom as they screamed and fussed up until 10 minutes before we HAD to leave because we were late to our own party. It was a horror movie come to life in our own home. (okay maybe a bit dramatic but it was not pretty)
This was the beginning of a month and a half battle to completely eradicate head lice from our home.
And speaking of our "home" it felt more like a disaster zone as well. The day before we left our sink started raining water into our finished basement. We came home to a big chunk of the wall/ceiling missing.
We were also in denial about the fact that carpet in our bedroom was very damp (aka practically squishing). We figured out it was all connected which resulted in not having a working sink for at least a month, our bedroom/finished living room being mostly gutted, and having to put a big chunk of our stuff in a storage unit.
We were sleeping on the floor of our boys' room (now on a borrowed mattress!) We had no closet and were still living out of our "Africa" totes. The bottom half of our house was a red hot mess of disaster. And we had a child who wouldn't eat anything and couldn't communicate who also helped our toilet be out of order for most of a week. Basically life was storybook perfect. ;)
I got a short reprieve from cocooning to run to WalMart for another head lice treatment and groceries.
(Because did I mention our Aldi where we do 97% of our shopping was closed...for a month?)
I saw this on clearance.
I bought it and brought it home. I declared that it was our victory drink. I was declaring God WOULD have the victory. That I had faith despite these somewhat challenging circumstances we would survive. Ever try to act your way into a feeling?
Eventually we would have a bedroom again. Eventually I would be able to do dishes and we wouldn't have to eat off paper plates. Eventually we would have carpet and drywall again. Eventually I wouldn't lay awake at night obsessing about wether I had head lice. Eventually our child would speak English and American food. Eventually we could shop at our precious Aldi again.
It would happen. And when it did we would celebrate. I stuck that drink on top of our fridge.
Where it gathered dust for way longer than I had planned.
Jeremy ended up having to run all new pipes to our sink, but eventually our sink and even our dishwasher started working again. While Jeremy was gone to Africa in April we finally fixed those holes in our drywall and while I was in Texas in June he repainted our walls. In September we moved back to our own bedroom. In November we finally broke into our storage unit (after we lost the key) and brought home all our stuff.
In December we put it mostly all away.
And On January 1st we spent the night in a hotel to celebrate our son's "Gotcha" day!
He speaks English like a champ and loves him some American food!
We ate pizza...
(that got lost, was an hour and half late, and was the wrong order- but we ate in anyway!)
and drank this.
If you had told me it would take a year to bring back the sanity I would have died. But we survived by the grace of God, and even had moments through it all where we thrived.
Or at least laughed at the irony of it all.
There might be a little dust on the bottle
But don't let it fool ya about what's inside
There might be a little dust on the bottle
It's one of those things that gets sweeter with time
Isn't it true that the victories that are real struggle, the ones we really have to fight for our the ones that are the sweetest?
**To all my adoptive mama friends if I could I would send you each a sparkling bottle of something for you to keep your eye on that first year home. God will have the victory-it just might take a little dust on the bottle! ;)
