While everyone was coming up with questions for our
Open Book Challenge we were in New Hampshire for our annual summer trip. Today I heard Kyle explain it to someone as our “trip to MorMor and MorFar’s House and Cottage.” Precisely. My parents still live in the home where I grew up in the
Mount Washington Valley. My parents built their house and it is absolutely beautiful. My mom’s side of the family also has a summer cottage on
Lake Winnipesaukee. My great grandfather built it and Kyle and Owen are the 5th generation to love it.
And man oh man, love it they do. I didn’t think anyone could love “the cottage” (as we call it) more than my mother or I (my mother grew up spending summers there and she adores the place immensely; I have a special love for the place too — amongst other things, Braydon proposed to me on the dock there). I now realize, however, after seeing my boys there for their third annual summer visit, that it is very possible that my boys love it even more than any generation before them. I am so happy about that. We had a wonderful 6-day vacation, we took tons of photos, and I’m going to post a lot of them here. Hopefully the pictures will do justice to how special this annual pilgrimage is for us!
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Highlights this year were~~ the airplane rides to-and-from (I can’t even explain how much K & O
love everything about air travel — including the chance to get a rental car); swimming in Loon Lake; MorFar’s tractor; homemade pizza cooked in my parents’ new earth oven; K & O’s second annual trip to
Story Land with their cousin Sadie (Kyle’s favorite ride: the Flying Fish, Owen’s favorite ride: the Bamboo Chutes); lobster & steamers on the picnic table at the cottage Friday night; many, many rides in “MorFar’s Boat!”; K & O “driving” the motorboat with MorFar (Kyle was completely obsessed); spending time with Stina, Tim, and Sadie (Auntie Stina is
always a huge highlight for K & O!!!); being in NH for my Aunt and Uncle’s 40th Wedding Anniversary party on Sunday; fresh veggies from my mom’s gardens; lots of swimming and playing in the water; kayaking; walks along the dirt roads; K & O throwing rocks — still their favorite pastime anytime they are anywhere near a body of water; a special motorboat ride to
Wolfeboro for ice cream; beautiful sunsets; fried clams, etc. from Sawyers Dairy Bar on Monday night; coffee by the water every morning and every afternoon; K & O’s first time fishing; a lot more sleep than usual for Braydon and I (thanks to my parents for taking the early morning shifts with K & O!); a special visit from Mrs. Peterson on Friday night and a special visit from Ed & Andrea (and Morgan) on Tuesday; lots of laughs with/at K & O; lots of quality time with MorMor and MorFar.
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Our family loves to travel. Being able to go to such a special place (my home, our family cottage) is especially awesome for us. It is crazy, crazy, crazy to travel with two rambunctious three-year-old boys. And it definitely has its ‘moments’ — Kyle got sick from eating too many pepperonis on pizza night; Owen threw some seriously nasty tantrums each day; Kyle fell off the dock (fully clothed) and almost drowned (literally) and I (Heather) had to jump in (fully clothed) to save him (literally); our flight back to Philadelphia was delayed for two hours; both boys came home coming down with cold/flu bugs; the packing and unpacking is a drag, etc, etc, etc… but… all in all — the bottom line is that we love it. All four of us. We just love going on family trips. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. Don’t get me wrong, we love to come home too. But there is nothing that cements our family more than a little vaca. Hope you enjoy the photos!~~
Dear my dear readers,
We have opened up quite a can of worms here now haven’t we?! I had no idea we’d get so many questions when we posted our End of Summer Open Book Challenge. I suppose I should have known. Braydon did tell me recently that we currently get something like 300+ people looking at this blog every day. However, I guess I just didn’t think it all through. Ladies and gentlemen, you are going to have to be patient with us while we sort it all out, tally it all up, and come up with a game plan for answering all these fabulous questions you’ve posed. Don’t worry, we’re working on it. It is just gonna take a little time to wade our way through. We love seeing what you’re all curious about. And we’re very excited to share our reactions. We’re already having lots of fun chatting about our answers to the questions… keep checking in here for our official answers.
Sincerely,
Heather
In my post yesterday I said that our life is not an open book. It is not. However… it is pretty darn open! 
Over the past couple of months a few of my blogger friends have challenged me to the “Open Book Challenge.” I have been putting off doing it. But I think now is the time to step up to the plate! So, my dear readers, here’s the deal:
We have a certain style of writing on this blog. You may or may not have noticed this, but, unlike many bloggers, we do not normally pose open questions to our readers, or crack open the door for lots of conversation in the post comments sections, or encourage our readers into dialogue with us. The brutal truth of it is that we don’t write this blog as a way to converse with folks and we don’t compose our posts in an effort to accumulate comments. Another truth is this: We never in a million years would have imagined that so many people would be reading this blog. It never would have even occurred to us. But now, after 10 months of blogging, we do realize that there are some things about our family that actually interest others. Who woulda thunk it?!! And we also realize that the things that we find interesting about our life aren’t always the things that our readers find interesting about it! LOL!
So, folks, here’s your chance!!! The Open Book Challenge is an opportunity for you to ask me/Braydon/us both any question(s) you want. We may not answer every question (simply because there are indeed things we don’t make public), but we will do the best we can. We blog lots about adoption, about Haiti, about inter-racial family, about twins, about wild-and-crazy-little-twin-boy-antics, about our 2-career-craze, etc. Do you have a question you’ve been dying to ask??? There are also tons of topics that we haven’t covered yet in the life-span-to-date of this blog. Is there something that comes to mind that you’d like us to put out there??? Is there something you’re curious about?! No matter how deep or how shallow… Now’s your chance!
If you think it is nerve-wracking to throw a question out on our blog, imagine what it is like for us — throwing posts out into the blogosphere every day!?!!! — I don’t ask much of you, do I?? So, please, if you read this blog at all, please play along with us — click on “comments” below this post, and ask us a question — we’ll be so bummed if you don’t! And just remember, like your 4th grade teacher said, “No question is a stupid question!” Ask away. Ask whatever. But just do it, please, and do it quick. We can’t take too long of a hiatus before our ‘regularly scheduled program’ resumes and we’ll be back to blogging about whatever the heck we feel like again. At midnight on Tuesday, August 21 we’ll officially shut the door on this once-in-a-lifetime-Open-Book-opportunity. So, my friends, ask away~~~
NOTE: If you absolutely do not want to ask a question (or really can’t think of one), then please just make a comment — even if it is just “hi!” Because, in addition to the ‘Open Book Challenge’ we’d also just kinda like to have a sense of who is actually reading this thing!!!!~~~
In the meantime, we’ll leave you with a couple end of summer photo gems of our two cutie pies with their latest favorite fruit:
http://www.lime-aid.tv/
We adopted Kyle and Owen through an adoption agency in Montana called
A New Arrival (
click here). They have their own orphanage in Port-au-Prince. The same week that we went to get Kyle and Owen, the orphanage they were in was moving to a new location. That was a good thing. To say the least. And from what we hear, there has been
much improvement in the facilities, childcare, staffing, and general condition of “K & O’s” orphanage over the past 2.5 years. We’re not surprised to hear that there is lots of moving and shaking and building and growing going on with this orphanage because the director, Rock Cayo, is an
amazing man. He will forever hold a special place in our hearts because of the incredible role he has played in the lives of Kyle and Owen, and because of how much he did for Braydon and I to help us complete K & O’s adoptions during our week in Haiti. We just got word that a big fundraiser is being held to support the building of a new
A New Arrival orphanage complex in Haiti. Take a minute to check it out —
click here. And please pass along this information to anyone you can think of who might be able to contribute. Thanks y’all!
I mentioned in my post last night a profound experience with Owen. I’ve decided I’m not going to blog anything specific about it because it is too private. It may seem to you, in reading this blog, that my/our life is an open book. It is not. I do blog about many things and I don’t like “hiding”– but there are also many, many things that I purposefully and conscientiously do not blog about. One of the categories of things that is off limits is anything too sensitive/private about my boys’ histories. Before we even met Kyle and Owen, Braydon and I made a decision together that we’d protect certain parts of their life histories so that when they — Kyle and Owen — are old enough, they can choose whether or not they want those parts of themselves to be shared. It is a fine line. On one hand, we don’t want to put a veil of secrecy over anything — it seems to imply that there is something shameful to hide. We don’t want our boys to feel shame. But on the other hand, we don’t want to make public things that our boys may feel, or come to feel, should be kept private. And importantly, we do not want people to look at our boys through the lens of their traumatic past; we want people to see our boys through the lens of their transcendent present. It is tough. Not everyone who adopts has such complexities. But everyone who adopts from Haiti (or a place like it), probably does. We, Haitian (and others like us) Adoptive Families, are special cases. It is different for us because with only rare exceptions, our children suffered trauma. Deep trauma. Unthinkable trauma. Part of living our family lives is knowing that trauma and living a process of healing. In the Johnson-McCormick Family we are always conscious of that. Even though our boys were only 8 months old when we brought them home, their trauma (and their post-traumatic challenges) are very, very real. For Kyle and Owen it is still vivid. They have always expressed it to us in various ways. But now that they are so verbal, they have both begun to articulate that to us with words. Last night Owen told us about a memory that he has from when he was in the orphanage in Haiti. There is no way on earth my three year old boy would even have the knowledge to make something like this up. He’s telling the truth. That takes guts. I’m so proud of him. In my pride for my son I’ve decided to not write about the specifics here. I’ll let him tell that story someday, if he chooses to. Yet it is important to be real — for the sake of all the other adoptive families out there who struggle in some of the same ways that we do (and in many cases, who struggle in ways so much more extreme than us)… so I want to say this: there is trauma and there is healing — all mixed up together — in adoptions like ours. I love my babies with a passion. As you know. So, I can’t help but cry deep in my soul when I let my mind ponder their past. But I am focused on their transcendence and their incredibly promising future. Adoption is a miracle. In my mind, it is the truest miracle I know of or can imagine.
Owen (on left) & Kyle (on right), exactly 3 years ago,in the orphanage in Haiti,
August 2004, age 3 months
Owen in the hotel in Haiti, our first week together, January 2005, age 8 months
Owen on our “Over-The-Hump” Day (same amount of time out of the orphanage as in it),
October 2005, age 16 months
Owen on our first Adoption Day, on the hotel balcony, celebrating in Baltimore,
January 2006, age 20 months
Owen at the pool, last week, age 3 years & 3 months
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