Adoption Day!

On July 3, 2012, Anthony officially became part of the larger Torbeck family.

 

Check out that silly face.  He's going to fit right in!  

But what makes this family?  Let's go to the archives and find out!

September 2, 1972

These are my parents, Keith and Diane when they got married 40 years ago as babies!  They were 19 and 20!  But they were crazy about each other (or just crazy-we can't decide) so they got hitched, finished up college and lived in a teeny tiny trailer in Carbondale.  Like I said, crazy people.

Along came my sis Kim in 1977 and along came me in 1982 and we were a happy family.  

Until.....

September 14, 2002

Kimberly married Patrick 10 years ago.  No, that was actually quite a happy day and while Patrick did bring some new weirdness to our family, he really just fit right in.  Patrick and Kim met while working together and Patrick's initial reaction to my sis was "I have to work with this hippy".  Kim's not a hippy, she was just wearing a tye-dye shirt.  It wasn't exactly love at first sight, but they are pretty great together.

Patrick and I are actually having a gift feud over flamingos.  We get each other random flamingo stuff for Christmas.  I'm winning right now because last year I scored him these for half price at Dollar General.

Yep, pink lawn flamingos.  And that's my dad's sis Roxie in the background laughing like a hyena.  She's odd too, so it all works.

Anyway, back to the family tree.  We added Patrick to mix things up, because if you go back a little farther, my family tree actually curves back on itself, but we'll discuss that later.  Things were good.

And then...

April 4, 2009

 

I married Doug.  He's also quite strange, so he was a good fit. I'll share the details of how we meet later.  But the short version is we met on eHarmony.  Not really.  That's just less embarrassing than the real story.

So, big happy family, but no kiddos yet.  And that's where Adoption Day comes in.  Kim and Patrick had been trying to adopt for years.  Sixish to be exact and it is a long and heartbreaking process.  They would find out about a child, then hear nothing, then find out they weren't getting him.  They even had two boys placed with them only to be taken away.  Like I said, heartbreaking.

But then came Anthony!

 

He was perfect!  He's very silly, loves to give silly kisses and hugs.  Like animals and being outside.   Loves the farm, fishing, dogs, bow and arrow, everything.  Plus at random he'll just stop what he's doing and say "I love you guys."  Only in Anthony talk it comes out "I wuv you guys".  Melts your heart.

All in all the process with Anthony went pretty well, but everyone still prayed and prayed that he would be fully adopted soon.  That day finally came, and honestly it was a little anticlimactic.   I don't know what I was expecting.  Actually I know exactly what I was expecting.  I thought we would all be in the courtroom and that Anthony would take the stand (as a 4 year-old mind you) and say how much he loved his family and we would all cry, and judge would bang his gavel and we would all cheer and Anthony would run down from the box thingy that you testify in and jump into my sister's arms and then there would be confetti.  Something simple and understated like that.

Instead, it was super fast.  We all walked into a conference room with the judge, attorney, social worker and adoption agency rep.  Kim and Patrick were asked a few questions and the judge said done.  He didn't even have a gavel, which kinda bummed out Anthony.  And then we were back on the road in about 15 minutes.  It was like a drive-through adoption.  

But you can't argue with the results!  Let's just close up this post with a bunch of Anthony pics, shall we?