why our lawyer is lame

A couple of weeks ago we went to the pool and spent the day letting Jackson explore the water.  Our pool is fantastic.  It has a great adult pool, but also has a lovely fenced in toddler pool.  The toddler pool is my favorite, because it has a zero entry with little fountains and a big waterfall thing in the middle.  I love to sit in the shallow water with Jackson and get some sun and stay cool.  The waterfall feature also drowns out a lot of the noise from the big pool.  It's great.  But I'm getting a little off-topic.

That day we spent too long at the pool and I came home really sunburned.  We were sitting on the front porch drying off and Charlie went to get the mail.  He pulled a large manila envelope out of the mailbox and opened it while walking back up to the porch.  When he got back up to the porch, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes.

"He's ours."

"What?"

He was holding Jackson's official adoption decree.  Jackson's adoption is official and final!!  I picked up my phone and called our case worker from the adoption agency and let her know.  She was so excited for us.

Now, as excited as we were, and we were thrilled, this again goes to show you how lame our lawyer has been during this process.  Jackson's adoption was finalized and we weren't notified at all.  We got the papers in the mail.  They never notified us of the court date, never told us it was finalized.  I think they could have told us.  I think they SHOULD have told us.  Lame.  I've said it before, and I will say it again, we won't use them next time. 

Moving forward, we are hoping to be able to spend time with his birth mother this month, but it is up to her.  She might not choose to see him/us and I guess we have to be ok with that.  We'll see what happens.  We are also planning Jackson's first birthday party, which we are going to have at the pool.  It should be really fun.  I hope.  We have included way too many people, probably, and I hope it isn't too overwhelming.  I'm not really a fan of large birthday parties for kids.  I know Jackson' won't even remember it either, so I'm not stressing myself out about it.  I just want it to be fun.

Well, that's the update from this neck of the woods.