A Christmas Celebration

We celebrated Christmas with Brandon (Tate's birth father), Marsha and Gary (Tate's birth grandparents) last night. It was SO SPECIAL and memorable! Tate is so blessed to have these amazing people in his life! We had dinner, chatted, played with Tate, opened presents and ate some more. Dinner was fabulous and we were all spoiled with wonderful gifts! We are so grateful for these unbelievable people and their loving hearts. They are our family.

It is always so awesome to see Tate and Brandon interact. Brandon is so amazing to him and we love seeing the special bond between them grow stronger each time we are able to get together! They love each other so much and Tate has so much fun playing with him! It's also so special that Marsha and Gary are such an important part of Tate's life as well! What a blessing it is that Tate has the love of a father from 2 men and the love of 6 grandparents!!!

It is so indescribable how we, from the moment we met Brandon and his family, were comfortable. It was just "right". We have never felt anything but comfortable around them and are able to enjoy our times with them without any awkwardness at all! It's truly amazing!

Tate and Brandon played together for hours! Tate had a ball!!!!

Brandon helping Tate open one of his MANY wonderful gifts!

SO sweet!!!

Tate and Grandma Shingledecker

Tate and Grandpa Shingledecker

THANK YOU BRANDON, MARSHA AND GARY FOR A GREAT NIGHT! WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!

I know I repeat myself often when referring to the times we get to spend with Tate's birth family. I know I say how special these times are and how they will make amazing memories. I say time and time again how I can't put into words the gratitude that we have for Tate's amazing birth parents and their families. The thing is, I don't know what else to say. It's just so amazing how God allowed us to be a part of the wonderful blessing of adoption! Words diminish our feelings. They are not and will never be enough. It's a helpless feeling to have. I feel like I don't know what else to do in order to express to Brandon and his family how grateful we are for them. I will never forget the feeling I had when we drove off with Tate after meeting him. I will never forget how helpless I felt just being able to say, "thank you" to Brandon and not knowing how else to show him how I felt. Thank you? Thank you is not sufficient! It will never be enough! I still have this feeling every time we are with him and his family. I want to do more, to be able to say more. I will never be able to say more. And to not be able to show Tate's birth mother how we feel is an even more helpless situation. All I can do is write words to her to express our gratitude and words aren't enough. We completely respect her privacy and want for her to do whatever she needs to do in order to move on feeling good about the decision she made. I do not at all blame her for deciding to deal with this situation in a more private way, but I just hope that she is able to feel our gratitude through the words that we write to her. I am so afraid that she will never know how amazing we think she is, how much we love her and how much gratitude we have for her. Even with the relationship we have with Brandon and his family, I fear that even they won't ever know how much we truly love them and how blessed we feel to be able to call them family!