Step #5,637 and Birthday Day

I'm not sure how many steps there was to our adoption. At times it felt like it was thousands of them. I'm using the totally ficticious number of 5,638 steps. If that is the case we are finally at our next to the last step of getting all the legal paperwork wrapped up. We got Camryn's birth certificate yesterday!!! That means the last step is applying and receiving her social security card. After that we will have all of the paperwork part of her adoption done. I'm ready to get it all done and put the file that I've started on her away. I realized today that we got the birth certificate on the 20th which is one day shy of her 6 month finalization anniversary. At finalization our attorney told us it would take 3 months to get it. Apparantly after the first of the year the department that sends out birth certificates came to a screeching halt and they got backed up. So if the same thing happens at the social security office maybe we will have her card by the time we reach the 1 year finalization mark????
I'm just glad we have it and feel somewhat normal. When we first started discussing our vacation plans, heading North, we briefly talked about crossing over to Canada. Once we realized how many hours drive time that would add we quickly nixed the idea, but we also didn't think we'd be able to get a passport for Camryn. We aren't going to Canada but at least we could if we wanted to! 

I've also needed to post about her birthday day for awhile.  It was the day after the county fair.  We decided that morning to get in the car and do some driving. After we I got a picture of Camryn with me and her Lambie cake.  We had missed doing that at her party.

   We splurged for lunch at Red Lobster.  Not that it was necessarily Camryn's favorite place to eat but it is ours!  If we ate at Camryn's favorite place we would only have had bottles of milk!  After lunch we wanted to possibly do some wading.  We ended up driving to Rockaway Beach which is close to Branson.   I envisioned a quiet day pretty much just our family around.  Instead we end up with several other people watching these high speed boat races.  It was so loud it really hurt my ears.  We couldn't even hear each other talk.  By the time we made it back to the car Cade and I were a bit grumpy.  He was mad because he didn't get to wade and he was bored (I get so tired of hearing that!).  I was irritated because the day wasn't going like I hoped.  We drove around a bit trying to decide what to do.  Then Jay called a former student who has an in on Dixie Stampede tickets.  He was able to get us 4 tickets at a much much reduced rate.  We ended up seeing the 5:30 show that night.  That redeemed the day for all of us.

Camryn liked the show for the most part.  The animal's held her attention pretty well considering her age.  I did finally take her out of the arena part and she climbed up and down a flight of stairs.  That might have been a mistake because when we were leaving and she saw the stairs she had a breakdown because she wanted to climb them herself.  I have a feeling she's going to be much more independent than Cade is. 



How funny is it that Camryn matches the butterfly out front since we had no idea when we left the house we'd end up there?

On our way back we stopped at Krispy Kreme in Springfield.  Camryn didn't get a cake on her birthday but she did get a birthday donut.  She liked it.

It was a fun spur of the moment day.  The ride home did make us wonder if we should rethink our vacation plans....

I did think about her birthparents a lot that day - more specificially C, her birth mom.  I wondered if she was thinking about it or trying not to think about it or a little of both?  I just pray that they are doing ok and are at peace about their decision.

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