I hope you did not miss our awesome post from yesterday about our new little girl, Rihanna! Our blog website lost a bunch of posts from all over the place and really, can a new mother of 3 be expected to re-create what was lost??!!
Anyways, this is day 3 with Ri (or Ri-Ri, as she calls herself...or Ri-na-na, as Will calls her). We are doing some "cocooning", as my caseworker calls it, trying to stay together and home a lot so that Rihanna feels safe and taken care of, and so she is not afraid of us going anywhere or giving her to another family. She is really enjoying having a brother and sister, except when one of them is playing with a toy that she wants! I am doing a lot of role-playing and coaching to teach them how to handle these situations. This has been 3 days of intense mothering, and I am so thankful for my small group (from church) who came and cleaned our house and brought us meals this week.
The hardest time for Rihanna has been bedtime. Either she just doesn't like bedtime in general (like most kids) or she may be afraid of Troy and I leaving her alone, although she still has Cate to keep her company. When we leave the room for bedtime or naptime, she screams until I return. I have to scratch her back to calm her down and then she falls asleep.
I keep looking at my THREE kids and thinking, oh my gosh, this is crazy! We know up's and down's are coming, but I have to say that it feels so good to know that we are giving a real home to a girl who did not have one. It makes me think of the Bible verses, "God defends the cause of the fatherless" and "he sets the lonely in families".
As Cate Burwell would say, "We got our girl!"
We are so excited to announce that God has already answered our adoption prayers and brought little Rihanna to live with us. We heard about her situation a few weeks ago and started praying that we might become her "forever family", as they say in adoption world. We met her on Sunday and she and Cate and Will just fell in love with each other right away...as Troy said, "it was like they were separated at birth and are finally back together!"
Rihanna is a newly 3-year old. She is tall (Cate's size or taller!) with long legs and long fingers that seem made for playing basketball, if you ask me. She has a great, huge laugh. She calls us "Mama Cathy" and "Daddy Troy" and hopefully at some point will naturally shorten that to Mama and Daddy. She is bright, loves to sing, loves to ride her bike and play ball.
She moved in with us yesterday, and as a new mother of 3, I am already WORE OUT! It is kind of like kid-training...teaching Rihanna how our home works, and teaching Cate and Will how to respond to this new sister. We are trying to lay low and stay home a lot over the next 2-3 weeks so that we can all get used to this new life. Pray for us when you think about us! We have felt that doing something like this has been a "calling" that we have both had since before we ever even met, but that doesn't mean it is going to be easy, right?! Anyways, IF we ever make it out to a nice restaurant again (??!!), that will be our line... "Burwell, party of five!"
On April 1st, Troy and I celebrated SIX glorious years of marriage! oh my word, I adore this man. Too good to be true. But I live with him, and he IS. I still can't believe God has given me this awesome gift, and sometimes I wake up and think that i am still single and forget that--oh my goodness! there is a gorgeous man in my bed! And although he has the hottest calf muscles you have ever seen, it is his HEART that I still love the most.
Every year we do something so fun to celebrate our anniversary...10 yearly predictions. (I adapted this idea from something that they do on the "Bert Show" every January 1st.) We go out to eat, and then we pull out sealed envelopes that contain 1o predictions that we made a year ago on our previous anniversary, things that we thought would certainly happen in the next year. By a year later, I have usually forgotten most of what I predicted. We read the predictions to each other (we make separate lists) and give each other a point for every prediction that came true. They must be somewhat detailed and two must be about "world events". This year, I won! I got 8 out of 10...wow. Troy has won 3x and I have now won the past 2 years. Then we each write out and share our predictions for THIS year. It is too fun! One prediction that we both have...plus hope and prayer...is that by next anniversary, the Lord will have brought us a new baby for our family. We will see if we called that one correctly.
Oh, and I must give a shout out to Troy's sister "Aunt Lana"...bless her awesome heart, for the 3rd year in a row she has kept the kids all weekend so that we could have a weekend to ourselves for our anniversary. I do believe that, before last weekend, the last night that we got kid-free was last year when she did this for us! What a HUGE gift this is to us and to our relationship, and we prayed that God would reward her BIG TIME for what she did for us!!
