June, here we come!

This has been a week of catching up and looking ahead.  June 1st is tomorrow.  I love June!!  I think it comes from years of teaching and the relief that came with June.  It was always the month that was the longest away from the beginning of the next school year.  And now the part I like the most is that it's the lightest month of the year.  I can wake up so early with no problem because of how light it is.  

This June will be one for the books if all goes as planned.  A week from today our daughter Miki and her new husband will be here from Sweden.  We have not seen her in person since she visited with her children in 2008!  I am very, very eager to have them here.  

In two weeks, on the weekend of June 14 and 15, we will be getting all seven of our children and their families together for the first time since Lisa's wedding in 1998.  Sometimes when Miki visited us, Lisa and George got tickets for them to Florida for part of the visit.  Another time Miki and Lisa were both visiting us at the same time, but some of our boys couldn't make it.  So I PRAY that everything works out for everybody, and we will really and truly have them all together.  We'll be going to Lancaster County for that weekend to make it easier for everyone.  I wish we could afford some great vacation spot for this event, but I know we'll have a good time anyway.  

This is the crew,  not in order of age, but in the order in which they came to our family.  I could sit and look at this collage for hours.  Aren't they a great bunch of kids?

As you can probably tell, Lisa, Anthony, and Jeremy were born to us.  They have that distinctive Stauffer look.  The other four came to us as teenagers.   We have funny stories about that.  

Miki is just fifteen years younger than me, and we got such a kick out of the new birth certificate that arrived in the mail after we adopted her.  It listed her father as Richard Stauffer, age 16, and her mother as Jean Witmer, age 15.  I said, "Boy, our descendants will have fun with that tidbit of information some day!"   One time when she was visiting I had her come to school to talk to the kids about Sweden.  When I introduced her to our middle school I said,  "This is my daughter Miki.  I was 15 when she was born."  And I paused.  The look on their faces was too funny.  Then I said, "But I didn't get to meet her until she was 14."  

The big joke was that some people just assumed that the boys were our biological sons because Dick, with his dark curly hair, could have passed for another ethnicity when he was younger.  The funniest story is from his basketball-playing days at the Lititz Rec (after the boys were grown up).  From time to time one of the boys would go with him to play when they were home.  One evening several of them joined him, and they all ended up on the same team.  One of the boys mentioned that all the Stauffers were on one team.  Another player looked at him and said, "Is he yours too, Dick?"  Dick said that he was, to which the guy said, "Man, Stauffer, you were ALL over town!"  We have cracked up over that so many times since then!

One interesting fact:  Sam, Frank, and Ray never lived in our home at the same time as Miki.  She married and moved to Sweden in 1991, Sam and Frank did not come to us until 1994, and then Ray came in 1996.  But during some of Miki's extended visits they became well acquainted.  

Many other children and teens joined our family for periods of time, but we've lost touch with all of them except a very special sibling group, Nicole, Krista, and Joseph, who were adopted by a wonderful couple.  Thanks to Facebook, we are able to be more in touch with them than we've ever been in the 22 years since they left our family.  

If I ever had the time, I could write a book that would make me a millionaire, hahaha!