Grace

One month ago today, we stood in the Civil Affairs office in Chongqing watching Sarah & Gregg meet their daughter as we waited for Jack.  And then he walked through the door.  Like that, the year long wait was over!  He was with us.  There was one less orphan in the world.

Two intense wonderful weeks in China happened.

Two intense wonderful weeks at home happened.

And suddenly it has been a month and we we have his stocking on our mantle and his name on our tree.  There is one more Harmon in our family.

I told family and close friends how we would need a lot of grace as we interact with them over Christmas.  We may have fighting children, it may be loud, it may be crazy, it may seem out of control.  But I am realizing that it's not just this adjustment time that we need grace - it's long term.  Living life with 4 kids, one of them being a boy coming from a hard background, we just will need your grace.  We need you to love us through our messy parenting as we muddle through it.

Jack is doing really well, y'all.  All things considered, I'm amazed at where we are now.  But, we are still taking things one day at a time. When I think too far ahead, I get overwhelmed.  As we tackle each day one at a time, though, it is do-able.  Sarah (the same one who we watched meet her daughter while we waited to meet Jack) wrote a perfect blog post talking about bonding and how it just takes time.  You can read her post by clicking here.  In short, we absolutely love Jack but our relationship with him isn't as deep yet as with our 3 biological kids.  There is much we don't know about Jack and when he speaks in Chinese we can't understand him.  There is distance between us that isn't there with our biological kids.  And Jack is starting to trust us, but he doesn't fully trust us yet.  He doesn't know for sure who we are or that we will care for him every.single.day. We can see the fear in his eyes sometimes.  And, you know what, all of this is okay!  We have only known each other for four weeks.  We are learning more about each other every day.  And honestly, I couldn't be more happy to be falling more deeply in love with this little guy.

We are learning life as a family of six.  And it is great.  It's also hard and exhausting, but we are so glad to be walking this road.