Three years ago today a judge sitting in his chambers finally put his signature on a stack of papers that had been sitting in his inbox for more than a week. Of course for the better part of that time, the judge had been on vacation, so I suppose in hindsight I could cut him some slack for taking his sweet time in finalizing our adoption!

Roughly three times a day, for roughly two weeks my voice was a fixture over the phone lines at our local courthouse, desperately wanting to know if he (the judge) had put his signature at the bottom of our paperwork, making our adoption official, all of the woman who worked at the office had come to know my voice, and after a few days I no longer had to introduce myself before they would politely tell me that he still had not signed our paperwork and brought it out of his office to be filed.

Then finally, three days after he had actually signed them, he brought them out of his office, and after the woman got back on the line after putting me on hold so that she could check 'one last time' for me, she excitedly told me the good news, congratulated me, and hung up, most likely relieved that I would no longer be calling and bugging them every few hours of the day. Seriously I was a pain. I knew our case number by heart, the judge's name, every office employee's name, the courthouse phone line numbers, all three of them, the department extensions, you name it, I memorized it!

Tonight we celebrated our Forever Family Day, by having a relaxing family dinner of pizza in front of the television while engrossed in the Disney movie, Meet The Robinsons. It was a cute movie, and both boys seemed to enjoy it. It definitely wasn't Disney's best movie, but it was cute nonetheless. We had originally planned on going out to dinner this evening, but the cold, driving wind persuaded us to stay inside and let dinner come to us.

It's been a great day, and we had a lot of fun sitting together as a family and watching a movie. We usually do not eat with the TV on, so getting to sit downstairs in mommy and daddy's room eating pizza AND watching a movie was just pure heaven for the kids! Now they are quietly munching on their special cookies that daddy picked up for them before heading off to bed, and I have a moment to steal away for myself and reflect on how lucky I am to have such wonderful kids, and that I am truly blessed to be able to be a mom to both of them!