Family Vacation

To reward ourselves for finishing four long years of medical school, we went on a family vacation to visit our good friends the Morgans in Virginia. While we were there, we went to an indoor water park. It was soooo much fun. I totally recommend visiting if you are ever in the area. It's called Great Wolf Lodge, and there are about 10 in the country. You can google it to find out all the locations. So much fun! It is all indoor and has a hotel so you can stay the night there. We got there around 1pm, swam all afternoon, spent the night, and woke up and spent the whole next day there. It was so nice not to worry about the sun all day and have a place to change clothes and shower. Alysson loved it and still talks about it every day. The whole place is totally designed for a family with young children. There were only 2 rides that Alysson couldn't do. Even Carson seemed to enjoy it. He is such a water baby. I hope we get to go back someday. I finally figured out how to make a slide show, so here are some photos from the trip.

It's Official

Yesterday was a big day for our family. We went to court to have Carson's adoption finalized. In Utah, you have to wait six months before the court will finalize anything. During that time, the adoptive family is required to have two in-home visits with the social worker to asses how everything is going. And the agency has to do everything it can to find a birth parent if they haven't signed anything yet. In our case, the birth father never signed. Then we all go to court with our lawyer and the social worker. The lawyer asked the social worker a bunch a questions about the home studies and what had been done to locate the birth father. Then the lawyer asked us a bunch of questions and the judge read all the paper work. Then the judge signed the official adoption decree, which we took to the clerks office to get a birth certificate re-issued for him. This process signs away the birth father's parental rights as well. It was very exciting! For some reason I was really stressed, but it was so easy. Here are some pictures with the judge and our social worker.