Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s hard to believe it’s Thanksgiving again here in the States. It’s hard to believe yet another Winter is upon us. It’s hard to believe in 4 months, a little over 4 for Eva, our girls will be THREE! I have never been one for saccharin sweetness or the type that immediately launches into a litany of what I am thankful for. Others, such are far better at that than I and a heck of a lot more sincere. For me, well, it just makes my skin crawl.

However, I recently, I read through a powerful post of one of our fellow bloggers that made me stop and realize just how thankful and lucky Mike and I are. His post was a touching, incredibly well written, and deeply moving expression of the love and richness his children have brought into he and his husband’s life along with their gratitude and thankfulness to their children’s birth mothers. It was titled Dear Birth Mother from Mark over at Our Simple Lives. Warning, if you are even the faintest bit emotional, grab a tissue before you read it.

The circumstances and the adventure that brought our girls into our lives seem so far away and yet as vivid as if it happened yesterday. So tomorrow, as we awake to Thanksgiving day, Daddy will be running around cooking and preparing the house. Baba will be keeping the girls out of the way and assisting where he can…which may mean getting out of the house to the playground with the girls. Eventually, Granny, Aunty, and our Niece Hannah will be over to share Thanksgiving dinner with us this year. This year will be really special as now the girls are at an age where they begin to fully comprehend and enjoy these special events.

This was very evident over Halloween which was just a hoot. The quickly caught on to the whole trick-or-treat shtick and managed to con all the houses we visited into gobs of candy by their sheer cuteness. Thankfully they are also still at the age of short-attention-span which allowed us to HIDE the gobs of tooth rotting, hyper inducing sugar treats and only dole them out on special occasions…you know, like a distraction so they won’t have a meltdown in the store.

So before the start of T-day, let me wish everyone who honors the holiday a happy Thanksgiving! For us, we are thankful for our daughters, our new positions in the company that hired us, Aunty who takes care of our girls with so much love and A LOT OF PATIENCE, for the people who supported and helped us through our surrogacy journey, and most of all…we are thankful to now have our own family.

Some photos, it's been a while since I've posted any.

October at the Apple Picking Farm

Rose is an Apple Fiend. She LOVES apples. So you can imagine her delight on this day. It was marked by wide grins and a trail of nibbled and chomped on apples as she went from one apple to the next. This isn't to say Eva didn't enjoy herself, she also had a blast...but Rose was just in Heaven. 

The aftermath of it all? Daddy made an absolutely delicious Apple pie from the apples we picked which was promptly gobbled up by all.

LOOK BABA...AN APPLE!

Victory...slurp, chomp, slurp...is mine!

I picked it!

Daddy's Little Helper

Who needs a ladder
One of my favorite photos. The light filtered by the trees was just beautiful.

So cute

Done being cute, eating apple now...

Our intrepid apple picker knows no fear!

YUM!

Uhm hello? Can't you see I have an apple to eat here?

Halloween

Sadly, I did not get many Halloween photos. Trying to chorale them and take pictures while they were so excited about trick-or-treating proved to be challenging to say the least. 

Pumpkin Carving at Granny's with a Bumble Bee

Daddy's one-eyed Ogre head.
When I met Mike B., I had learned how to make large puppets for special events in college and I showed him how to make them. He created this for Halloween last year.

Candy Corn Witch Eva!

Bumble Bee with a Bear...give me a lollipop or the bear gets it!

Daddy and the girls
Daddy had to lift the mask off to assure the girls it was him.

Our Indian Princesses

These are not the greatest photos, I'll need to get better ones. Our friends Tricia and Rob in Singapore sent us these dresses. They used the same clinic we did and trailed behind us by several months. We began communicating before our girls are born and Tricia even scoped out hotels for us in Mumbai when she and her husband were out their for a business trip.

Their twins, a boy and a girls, had recently celebrated Diwali at their preschool/daycare and Tricia sent me photos. I commented on how lovely the traditional Indian outfits they were wearing were. She went out and got us two. A big thanks to them. We'll be showing up at Christmas Eve with our Indian Princesses!

Tried to get one just of Eva, Rose was not about to be left out of the picture!

Princesses with a cookie.

Cookies good...

Obey me peasant