Cupcake Calendar: February

Yeah, yeah, I know. Last month I promised to get this month's calendar page up on time, and I didn't. Epic fail on my part. For those of you playing along at home, that's 5,368,941 promises that I made on this blog broken.

Anyway ... here is the February calendar page. These pictures were taken the first weekend that Shae lived in our house. Nobody slept for a few days. She was in a new place, with new people and new sounds and new animals and new routines, and we are all, "Holy shit! There is a BABY in our house RIGHT NOW."

When she moved in with us, we didn't even have her room finished. We literally went from zero to parents in two weeks. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Before she moved in we spent almost every evening with her at her former foster family's house, and then we would come home and root through boxes and throw stuff away and assemble furniture and panic and maybe eat if we remembered.

Then when she got here, we were afraid to move. She's never been fragile, not exactly, but she was so small, so foreign, a tiny little alien being for us to observe. We watched everything she did as much as she watched us. I could never -- still can never -- get enough of watching her sleep. Her strength and smarts continue to amaze me as much as they did then.

Although we still live in fear that something could go horribly, terribly wrong, right now we are speeding towards the Big Day when things will become official, when all the rest of this will be just a memory, those days before she and we found each other floating through space, a parentless child and two childless parents, on a collision course with destiny. BOOM!

But I still remember that first weekend, when she had no switchplate on the wall in her room, but otherwise, our lives had never been so complete.