You can catch up to this point by reading, My Crazy-Stupendous Story – Part 1 and then My Crazy-Stupendous Story – Part 2.

So a day or so later, he comes to meet the Warden. He shows up right after work, and I take him back to meet my son who is playing war games on his xbox. There’s a few awkward moments of silence and confusion after the introduction and then they decide the best way to size each other up is in a Halo battle. I watch, they play. Then after about an hour, we all go into the living room to see flaky off. The Warden promptly tells him that he is not going to date me, as expected. And then flaky leaves and the Warden begins his interrogation. “Who was that? Why was he here? How do you know him? Why was he so dirty? He looks like a homeless guy. (He’s actually a welder.) Do paw paw and grandma know him?”, and so forth. Kind of like when your dad first meets your new boyfriend. I convinced him that we were just friends at that point and that we were going to see what happened, but that it wasn’t anything serious and that I just wanted them to get to know each other better so that maybe we could hang out.

After that, we saw a whole lot of flaky. Turns out, he wasn’t nearly as flaky as I thought he was going to be. Matter of fact, he isn’t really flaky at all. He’s wonderful. And his name is actually Ray. And by wonderful, I mean… this man has been the best thing to ever happen to either one of us. There were days in the beginning when I thought surely he would give up on us. My son gave him absolute HELL the first couple of months we dated. He was mean to the point of me crying and telling Ray that I totally understood if he wanted to just call the whole thing quits and move on. But Ray was very patient with my son and explained that he’d been the little boy trying to protect his mom too, when he was young. He understood that Kaden just needed to see for himself that things were going to be okay. And that he was going to treat us good and stick around and wasn’t like anything we had experienced before in our past. And eventually, Kaden saw all of those things. And it was worth all of the hard stuff. After dating for about a year, we decided to get married. I was scared to death. After all this was round 3 for me and I just knew that some crazy lady with 6 kids was going to show up and ruin everything. But the wedding day came and no crazy lady showed up to claim my man, so we got married. It was a simple wedding with family and friends and we had a short, sweet honeymoon in a town just a couple of hours away.

Since then, our life together as a family has been great. I mean really great. We have had some little hiccups here and there, but few and far between and nothing to write about. I won’t say we have the perfect marraige, even though I feel like it’s pretty dang close. However, I will say that what we have is perfect for us. I’ve finally got my knight in shining armor, and my son finally has a good man in his life that he loves and gets love from in return and who is showing him how to be an honest, hard-working, loving, strong and gentle-man. My husband loves my family, and I love his family. We really were a match made in Heaven. I love how God knew just what we needed, when we needed it and how it makes so much sense now that I can look back on everything. We married in November of 2012, and in April of 2014 my husband adopted my son. It was a long road and there were several court appearances, and lots of dirty laundry aired in the courtroom on both sides, and we experienced our greatest fears relieved and hopes come to fruition. But now we all share the same last name and a brighter expectation for our future. My son told his biological father after the hearing, in response to a comment about him being there if my son ever decided to come look for him, “I won’t ever come look for you, I already have a dad.”  To this day, he introduces Ray as his dad, to his friends as well as perfect strangers. He gets angry with us, as any 13 year old does. And he thinks we are horrible parents for making him mow the yard or take out the trash, EVERY day. But he tells us he loves us and he is mostly an “A” Honor Roll student, and he plays sports and he hangs out with his buddies and is a pretty well rounded young man, with a sweet disposition, a major funny streak, a lot of spunk and the biggest heart. So I figure we must be doing something right.