Happy Birthday Cameron!

Today is the big day, my baby boy turned 1 today!! I cannot believe what a big boy he is now, and how he's growing so fast! When he is feeling tired and clingy and wants to cuddle up to me though, he reminds me that he's still my baby boy and he needs his Momma love from time to time...you just can't beat that feeling! But with that, of course it's impossible to let the day go by without thinking of his birth mother and saying a prayer for her. I hope she knows that her baby has found a loving and happy home with us. I could never thank her enough for allowing us to be Cameron's parents. What an incredible gift and blessing we have been given by this woman who we have never even met. People always tell us how lucky Cameron is to have come to live with us but I know that WE are the lucky ones!

So now his official birthday party with our family isn't until Saturday, but we couldn't let the actual birthday day go by without some good old cake smashing! We had made cupcakes to bring to daycare today and had some leftover to enjoy tonight, so we let him go at his very own cupcake and boy did he make a mess! Here are some pictures...and thank goodness for digital camera's or I would have used up an entire roll of film just on this event! Here are the highlights, I won't give you all 15 pictures!

Checking In

Ok, yeah...I know I've been a bad blogger lately. For those of you who do still click on this page once in a while to see if I'm alive, thank you for caring and yes I am! I've just been very busy and lately I've felt I didn't have much of interest to say. I still don't really, but I'll give it a shot.

So what's been happening in my life? Well one of the biggies was our readoption hearing on October 24th! I don't know how this process runs in other areas but for us in our state and county it was a piece of cake! The actual hearing took about 5 minutes, during which the judge told us about some of the wonderful things our social worker wrote up on our post-placement report and asked us a couple of questions like did we understand that we were taking on full responsibility as parents of this child, which of course we already had been for 3 months, then we were done! Afterwards we were able to have our picture taken with the judge and just had to sign some papers and we were out of there! So now Cameron will have an official WI birth certificate (or I guess a "birth facts sheet") and we can go get him a social security number and we'll be pretty much done with the paper chase! What a great feeling!

Then of course we had Cameron's first Halloween! Halloween happens to be one of my favorite holidays and I LOVE making costumes for it. I swore that when I had a child of my own they would NEVER have a store-bought costume but...time got short and suddenly this cute little dragon costume from T@rget looked awfully cute and in the cart it went! He ended up only wearing the costume for a couple hours at his daycare party and less than an hour on trick or treat day so I was glad I hadn't put a lot of effort into it! He was darn cute in it though! (Here he is with his Grandpa.)

Now we are gearing up for his big FIRST BIRTHDAY!! I can't believe my sweet little baby is going to be a year old already, it doesn't seem possible! Of course it seems to have gone even faster since he wasn't home with us until he was almost 8 months old! Looking back though, all the pain of waiting for him seems like it's in the distant past...but truly it's only been 4 months since he was placed in our arms forever! I admit that I felt a lot of insecurity about being a mom at first, and even though I loved my little boy from the first moment I saw him in a picture, that true love and bond between mother and son took a little time. Now I feel the bond so strongly that I cannot imagine loving anyone more than I love my son! What an amazing gift he has been in our lives! But enough of me being sappy...

So what's Mr. Cameron been up to you ask? He's not walking on his own yet...everyone keeps asking me this as though he SHOULD be but the dr. told me the average child walks around 14 months so simmer down people! ;) He gets around pretty well with his walk behind car and he's a pro at crawling and can get around very fast on all fours! He does cruise around the furniture really well too, and his balance is definitely improving. I don't think walking is far off, but we're not pushing him. It's hard enough to keep track of him when he's crawling, I'm going to have to sprint after him when he starts walking! He still hasn't said a first "word" though he speaks in gibberish as though he's having a conversation with himself and knows exactly what he's talking about! It's too funny! He's also learned how to gesture towards things when he wants something and usually we can figure out what he's getting at, though sometimes it seems like he's just pointing at anything and everything because he thinks it's funny to watch us try to figure it out! And yesterday he suddenly started to clap on his own! I had been trying to teach him how but he wasn't really getting it yet, then all of the sudden he started doing it last night! Now it's our new fun thing to do all the time...next we're moving on to pattycake and waving "bye-bye", advanced lessons!

Anyway, I could go on and on but it's getting late and I'm tired. We have been having some sleep issues from time to time and the last three nights were rough! He will go a week or more straight without waking up at all during the night then suddenly every night he's up several times. I'm hoping tonight we can all get back on track but we'll see...wish me luck!