877 is the number of days that Edric was in Korea before coming home, and on February 15th he reached 877 days home! Crazy to think that he has been home that long already, but then it is also hard to think about what life was like before he joined our family.
Edric has grown so much over the last 877 days and we have all learned and grown as well. His language is continuing to improve and his emotions are steadying out. I love to see his eyes light up when he does something that he is proud of, and he loves to give hugs to those he cares about. We had a long talk a few months back about using our words to say nice things and it is cute to hear what he comes up with. Last week he told me “thank you mommy for coming home from work” and he told Clint “thank you daddy for picking Leighton up from gymnastics”. It’s kind of funny because I will always come home from work and we aren’t ever going to leave Leighton (or anyone) at gymnastics but we appreciate his thanks.
I asked him what he wanted to do to celebrate his day and he told me he wanted to eat at “the ice cream and hot dog place”. We actually had speech for him and Coppelia on the 15th, so he was ok waiting till the 16th to celebrate. Unfortunately when we got to the “ice cream and hot dog place” it was closed (seriously who is closed on a random Friday?), but luckily in our small town A&W across the street was open. I asked him if that was ok, since they also had hot dogs and root beer floats, and he said it was fine.
And so we celebrated with greasy food (or the kids did, I knew my tummy wouldn’t handle it so I waited and ate at home) and just told Edric how glad we were that he was in our lives and our family. We’ve hit a number of milestones with Edric since he has been home and I think we’ve now hit all of them, while the wait for him was brutal, it has been so good to have him home. Not every day is a walk in the park, and many are far from it, but we are all learning and growing and celebrating and learning how this family thing all works out.
Hiking Mommy 