September 12th 2005

I'm so totally proud of DH right now! I definitely married the right guy and I just had to write about what he did. He forwarded an email he sent to several people at his work about our visit with Tara and a couple of their replies back to him. He wrote: "Hello all, The visit with Tara went great! She seems to be a happy, healthy teenager. Sorry, but we don't have any pictures yet. Our camera uses that old fashioned film stuff and we haven't had the chance to have it developed yet. We went to her foster home Saturday morning and met with her foster family and spoke with them for quite some time. Tara just turned 13 last week and she bought several disposable cameras with her birthday money so we gave her a photo album and several photo trees so she could keep the photos of her foster family organized. The unwrapping was very funny! My wife packed the items in a box for a small coffee pot and Tara was kind of confused when she first removed the wrapping paper and thought that was what we had given her. We then took her to eat at a restaurant my family eats at quite frequently. Her foster family lives about 45 minutes from my parents home in Oklahoma so it makes the trips a little easier since we don't have to stay in a motel. She lives in a very small town out in the country so it took a little while to get to the restaurant so we had plenty of time to talk before we got there. On the way there we gave her a scrapbook that my wife and I made to show her our house and our animals and her bedroom and bathroom and the school she would be attending and some of the fun things to do around St. Louis. I noticed on the way there and on the trip back to her house she kept looking through the scrapbook which I thought was great! We talked about a lot of different things and she opened up and spoke with us like we were good friends. When we got back to the foster home we spoke with the family a little more before we left and all of the kids seemed very happy and very well cared for. Our next visit will be in a couple of weeks when we will pick her up and spend the entire day with her and introduce her to my family at a fall festival near my parents home where she won't feel overwhelmed surrounded by my family. If everything goes well, 2 weeks after that we will go down and pick her up for an overnight stay at my parents home where she will spend the entire weekend with us and hopefully soon after that she will come here to live with us!" It was so nice to read this and reminded me of several other things that happened with Tara that I did not mention last night. I'm glad he was happy about the visit and is taking such a big interest in our soon to be daughter. He's not usually this open or excited about things and I'm so happy that he is this time. He's gonna be such a great Dad!