the hardgrave family

Wow, is it great to be home, but man, do we have a killer case of Jetlag!

We’ve had jetlag before. I remember a trip to Europe in college where we steped off the plane after a long transcontinental flight, only to arrive on the morning of the first full day of our choir tour. We were groggy the whole day and slept pretty hard the next two nights.

This was no fun, but it was really more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Jetlag, however, when faced together with a toddler who already didn’t sleep all that well before the night/day “switch-a-roo”, is an entirely different matter. Wow.

Without belaboring the details, our first few days at home, while being at least 95% wonderful just because we are at “home,” have still been a bit rough. While Lily sleeps fine during her mid-day nap (she is groggy most of the day anyways), night time sleep is really rough at the moment. So, thankfully, Sarah and Kathryn are sleeping wonderfully, but nobody else is.

All that said, please forgive us for not being too communicative since arriving home. It’s just about all we can do right now to get meals on the table for the kids without falling over asleep in the pantry. (Side note: we want to send a big “Thank you” to the “Scrap booking girls” at Morningview who spontaneously brought us dinner on Thursday. What a Godsend!) We’ve had every intention of calling folks, even answering some of your calls (we do love you all), but just haven’t been able to get much done.

Well, since I am awake and have a rare opportunity to type, on to “the good stuff” . . .

We were met at the airport on Wednesday by Sarah and Kathryn and all of Lily’s new grandparents. After Lily’s initial shock of being swamped by all the adoring WHITE euro-american family members, she really warmed up to them all pretty quickly and became her normal sociable self in no time. We had a great time over dinner with all of our parents and watched in wonder as Lily got more and more “warm” towards her new family.

After a little bit of rest, Lily, Sarah and I (David) manged to make it out to Cole and Joy Portis’s home for Morningview’s “Adoption Open-house.” It was a great time of fellowship and a wonderful envirnment for Lily to begin getting to know some the church family. She surprised me again by warming up enough, after an hour, to go off on her own and actaully play a little bit. (mostly, it seemed, Jason Wohlford . . . just what is it with Jason and kids?)

Sarah and Kathryn have both been very excited about Lily’s arrival, and while Kathryn is understandable timid about Lily now that the physical reality of new younger sister is setting in, Sarah has embraced her new “keep” like a mother hen. She LOVES being THE big sister and just relishes every opportunity to be a little mother to Lily. Even though we’ve had to gently remind Sarah on a few occasions that she can’t “smother” Lily with her attention, all-in-all, she been really good with her and it’s been really fun to watch.

Despite the jetlag issues, the girls do seem to be adjusting to each other pretty well. As mentioned above, Sarah is taking it the best. She was the oldest before Lily came and is still the oldest. Kathryn was the youngest and is now the “middle child.” (Yes, we’ll be going to all of our three-child friends for advice on this soon!)

We don’t know a lot about Lily’s life with her foster family, but we do that she was in an “only-child” situation with older parents. So . . . while Kathryn is moving to “middle-child” status, Lily is moving out of “only-child” status. As you might guess, we’re anticipating a bit of bumpy road with Lily and Kathryn.

As of this morning (Saturday), we’ve had relatively few issues with the girls having conflict, but we’ve also refereed everything between them pretty closely. As we began to let them negotiate their relationships without us, the fights are sure to come, we just want to minimize them initially in the hope that this will aid the bonding between them. We’ll see . . . .

As our friend, Randy Breedlove, has so often reminded us, going from two to three children is like going from a “man-to-man” to a “zone” defense. After two days of having three kids, I’m certainly no expert, but “kudos” to Randy for the analogy, for this IS a whole different ball game. wow. This is certainly going to be quite an adjustment for Angela and I as well.

All that said, it’s really neat to have all the girls together and the whole family under one roof.

On another note, we would like to make sure that you all know that we’ve gotten every post that you have made to encourage us over these two weeks and are so grateful to you for them and to God for giving us such a wonderful support network in you all.

(Lily in a shirt given to us by our Chinese Guides. The Characters going down her left side are her Chinese name.)