After the first week as Avery’s mom and dad we were pretty much in shock. All of a sudden we had all kinds of people calling us to set up “home visits”. The caseworker has to come and see them in your home once a month. The public health nurse sets up monthly visits. The guardian ad litem, the lawyer the court assigns to be the child’s advocate, comes to visit. The volunteer guardian ad litem comes once a month. We had to set up twice weekly visits with birth family, which is coordinated through an agency. In our case it was Catholic Charities.

I must say that I loved both of the girls who came to pick Avery up to take him on his visits! That was a really trying time for me. It was very tough to send him off to see his birth mom and birth family. Here I am just a woman wanting to adopt her own child. A child that would call me mommy and be my son, not someone else’s son. I  guess I just didn’t want to hear about them so they wouldn’t be real people and mess with my dream! Ah, how life steps in and kicks you right in the butt!

Of course the most important thing was to just try and get to know this little boy who didn’t smile very much. You could get almost smiles out of him but, a real smile that lit up his face wasn’t happening! We just wanted him to know how special we thought he was, and how proud we were to have him as our son. We did everything we could think of to let him know that whatever happened to him before was over! We would protect him!

All these pictures were taken the first seven months that he was with us! Not many smiles at all! I have hundreds of pictures of him, and they rarely show him with a smile. We will just have to keep trying!