Y’all, I am pretty sure I still have a Thanksgiving hangover! Not because I ate too much food but because I had too much fun and didn’t get any blogging done. But I am getting after it this week. As a side note, in case I didn’t tell you all I am also writing some articles for an adoption website. I will make sure to share those with you all when they become public, but that means these little fingers are just a typing all the time!! But I couldn’t wait any longer to share with you this post.
I don’t remember how it got brought up, if Heather asked or if her mom asked, but shortly after Jamie’s baby shower, we got invited to go camping with Heather and her family. Eeek!! I was so excited. I love camping. I grew up camping. JJ and I camped together with my family as teenagers and we still do!! We took Jackson camping last year to New York. We usually camp at least once a year with my parents. Now, I do have to admit I use to be able to tent camp. But this old body of mine cannot handle sleeping on an air mattress anymore (I somehow always ended up sleeping on the ground because the air mattress would have gotten a hole in it!) I see a chiropractor once a week already, I don’t need any more ways to help him pay for his Tesla! With that being said though, we said YES, we would love to go camping with Heather. And the best part, they had cabins we could rent!
I didn’t know what to expect or exactly how this would all look but I was looking forward to the kids spending time together and selfishly I was looking forward to spending time with Heather. We decided we would go up after work on Friday and leave Sunday morning. That means three days with Heather and the kids! And not just Heather and the kids, but her mom, and her sister and her sister’s family. And we were lucky enough that her dad and grandparents stopped out on Saturday too!
For some reason I am having a hard time coming up with just the right words to describe just how magical it was to be there with them all weekend long. This is when Heather first told me about how hard her year had been. We were able to sit by the pool while the kids swam (Jackson slept on my lap pretty much the whole time!) but we were just able to talk. Which was the first time in a very long time we were able to do that. This was also when I told Heather about the blog idea. I didn’t want to just start the blog and broadcast our life adventures together without her blessing. And thank goodness she thought it was a good idea. It has become a game changer for the both of us and I am so incredibly glad she has been willing to share with you all too as we navigate this open adoption together.
The kids played their little hearts out. They swam in the pool and in the lake. They fished. They played mini golf. They jumped on the bounce houses. They held hands. They played on the playground equipment. They rode the rides. They fed the goats. They woke up to the rooster crowing. It was your typical camping trip, other than we were anything from typical. Can you just picture it. Adoptive family and birth family all sitting around the table together. It may not be typical for the rest of the world and not your typical family setting but to us it’s typically perfect!
One thing did happen that I just wasn’t quite prepared for. Jackson kept asking where his friends went, if the kids (Heather’s older kids) weren’t around. And at one point Marvel said to Jackson “I am not your friend, I am your half-brother.” Oh Lord, I wasn’t prepared for that. We have talked to Jackson about being adopted but he is three, he has no idea what that even means. He will argue with you that he isn’t adopted one minute and say that he is adopted the next. He just doesn’t understand what that means, even though we talk about it often. But Heather’s kids are older, they have been talked to about it and they understand more. But at the same time, they are his friends and I want them to be his friends just as I want Heather to be my friend. Boy will we have some teaching to do in the future, but until then, we loved spending time with our friends!!!
Three Is My Happy Place 
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