Meowy Christmas

our Santa cat was surprisingly not thrilled with his duties and boycotted the holiday shortly after this photo was snapped

The holidays are typically the best time of the year for me, or at least the only good thing about winter. And while I am excited to see all of our family for Christmas and eat all of the delicious snacks, there is definitely something really hard about the holidays this year. Based on the timelines for others we had been seeing, I thought for sure there would be three of us to celebrate this Christmas. That we would be preparing for Santa to visit and buying matching Christmas Pjs in size small, medium, and, well, probably medium (Ryan has been running a lot lately and would be swimming in a large). The realization that this will be another Christmas with just us two has made this time of year bittersweet to put it gently. I am still excited to do all the festive preparations and go to the parties to enjoy time with friends and family, but there is a part of me that wants to curl up in bed and miss all the holiday hootenanny. It hurts to think of our son spending another Christmas without a home and ringing in another new year without parents or a family that loves him. It is especially hard to talk about the process this time of year. But we're try to stay thankful that our process is moving along instead of being upset that we have hit so many delays. So I ask for you all to stay patient with us as we put on a brave face this Christmas, when our thoughts and hearts are very far away.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a depressing journal entry so I will move on to a brighter topic; we did get to send our son some Christmas presents at the orphanage where he lives! It was really fun to pick out what to send him. And thank goodness for Amazon India; our gifts were delivered just a few days after being ordered for only 1,600 rupees! (Rupees make me feel rich with the sweet 70 to 1 exchange rate…) We ordered a few books, some clothes, and a toy. Our case manager was worried that the gifts wouldn’t go to only him as everything gets shared in the orphanage. But, if that is the case, at least someone will get some joy from it, and more than just our son will benefit from these gifts. Being able to send him something really felt special.

You may have noticed that I have foregone the gender neutral pronouns we usually stick to. I am happy to share more information about the child we matched with back in March. We are adopting the cutest (not so) baby boy! He will turn 18 months on Christmas (extra heart pang) and he was just bitty baby at 8 months when we first saw his picture. We do have several pictures of his squishy face and sweet bowl cut hair, but, until we have passed the court process and legally adopted him, we are not able to share any photos online. We have been calling him baby G for ages but his given name is Gaurav. We're planning to keep it as his middle name when he comes home.

Also, in the process of writing this blog post this morning, Ryan discovered that we have been registered for court and the first hearing for our case is 1/21/19! I am so excited that we are moving on to the next stage but I can’t lie, I wish our first hearing was much sooner…. There will likely be multiple hearings so we aren't making travel plans yet. We will be anxiously awaiting our first hearing and in the meantime, will be figuring out what the court process entails and hopefully brushing up on our Hindi lessons that we have been slacking on! (The only things I can talk about in Hindi are cats and food, so, much like my English) We hope that you all have a great Holiday and that Santa slips some Brandy in your nog :)