HOORAY HOORAY its adoption day!!!!!

February 14 may be Valentines Day to most people but in our family it is now officially known as Adoption Day. Finally after a bit of procrastination with the paperwork late last year and eveything closing for the Christmas/summer period we finally got our 5 minutes with the Chief Justice of the ACT who signed the papers witnessed by family and friends. Mario John Nestor really truly and forever became ours and is now a fair dinkum Aussie!!

What a wonderful moment in all our lives. It was so nice to be able to have the grandparents around to share it and have friends take time out of their work and busy days to be part of it as well.

Our celebration was a lovely morning tea where Mario ate a delicious looking and rather large biscuit covered in M&M's. He was just so happy. Not that he seemed to really know what was going on except he was the king for a day. and that he was wearing his favourite colour (orange!)

Here we are as one little happy family! Celebrating on such a lovely summers day in the middle of our beautiful city.

I decided to celebrate the evening with a traditional Filippino meal - pork and chicken adobo and lovely sticky rice followed by a slightly modified version of halo halo (as I couldn't locate all the ingredients). Delicious.

So now life continues and we continue to grow and learn as a family. It was such a special day and with the help of Dad there are plenty of photos to remind us. Of course Charlie couldn't miss out on the action!

Marios 1 year anniversary

7 February 2007 was a day of celebration as it has been 1 year since Mario came into our family as a son, nephew, cousin, grandchild and friend. Yes there are days that have been hard and a real struggle but these can pale into insignificance when you have so many days of bright cheery smiles and a little boy that is so active it is exhausting.

We celebrated the day with his mates in our usual Wednesday morning playgroup with a swim and a play and some eats. Our evening meal was nice and simple - chinese followed by an ice cream cake. To end the evening the photos and the video came out to remind ourselves what an amazing year it had been.

The photos at HMV show this dear little boy with the saddest look in his eyes. He was also an impish little boy running around with a biscuit in each hand and would stop for a drink of pineapple juice and would be off again running with his little mate, Judah. I remember the tears in my eyes, the tears in the sisters eyes and driving away. I didn't know whether to be happy or sad. After that we were in for a rude shock as we were completely in the dark and had no idea what we were doing. Probably still don't but we are getting better at it and just moving with the flow.

So dear Mario was a wonderful year and a wonderful life we are all sharing together. There are lots more to come.