Birth Certificate

It’s simply a piece of paper.  A piece of paper that lists your child’s legal birth name, your name and their date of birth.  To be honest I really had not thought too much about it.  It was neat to hear them tell us that once the adoption was finalized we would receive a birth certificate, but I guess with everything else going on, I kind of forgot that we didn’t have one.

That is until it arrived in the mail on Wednesday.  There was just something really cool about seeing Nolin’s full name along side Jenn & I’s name….it’s official!

One of the neatest things I have found in the adoption process is that along the way you keep hitting these exciting milestones.  Each one is exciting and always surprises me.  The one I don’t think I could have imagined while we were sitting in the hospital is how quickly Nolin’s personality would start coming out.  He really knows how to work a crowd.

He loves to laugh (hopefully it is with me and not just at me, but either way I will take it) and he loves music and all the stupid songs that I make up.  He is also now very interested in learning and figuring things out.  It is kind of crazy to sit back and just watch him discover everything around him.  You can almost see his thought process as he picks up new things and usually puts them in his mouth.  Apparently trying to eat everything is the most effective way to learn.

As we’ve introduced food, I’ve also discovered that he is quite the drama queen.  Upon his first exposure to sweet potatoes, his mouth dropped wide open and he began trying to gag himself.  Then he just started laughing & squealing and opened his mouth waiting to get more.  As soon as he got the next bite…back to gagging, laughing and wanting more.  I have to give him credit, when it came to sweet potatoes I was still gagging myself until I was about 26 years old…so I guess he is pretty adventurous.

My days have changes dramatically since Nolin came into our lives.  I’ve started finding a lot of joy in the little things like Nolin giving me a high-five.  It’s hard to imagine that things were as much fun when he was not a part of them.  It may simply be a piece of paper, but it is definitely so much more than a document with your child’s legal name.