Spring Break
3 Kids
1 Puppy
2 Parents
1 Hotel Room
How did we make it work?
Wall to wall beds, Baby!
And that arrangement with the air mattresses on floor for 2 of the kids and 1 sleeping on the couch that turned out to not be a fold-out bed as expected?
Was way, way, way better than the arrangement where 1 kid slept on the non-pull-out couch and 2 kids slept in the king-sized bed with my husband and me (with the dog in her crate next to our bed)!
Don't ask me how I know!Find more
Wordful Wednesday,
Wordless Wednesday, &
Not So Wordless Wednesday.
My 5 year old daughter has an awesome solution for the puppy-getting-on-the-couch-and-curling-up-like-she's-the-comfiest-she's-ever-been-in-her-entire-life problem.
Recently my daughter declared, "I know! We could just get a new couch and let her have this one."
I told you it was awesome.
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Speaking of the puppy how is it that in only 5 weeks we've had her she has grown into this:
My 8 year old son can barely hold her!
I'm kinda worried that even though the breeder said she'd be 35lbs max. we might have a Clifford on our hands. You know, like having to build her, her own house out back when she grows too big for ours!
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On a positive training note, Madeline the puppy now not only toilet papers the house but she can take the roll completely off the spindle, so there's hope that with just a bit more training there could possibly be someone else in this house besides me that changes the toilet paper roll when it's empty!
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On another positive progress front, my 3 year old son has the job of putting napkins on the table every night before dinner, and we were consistently getting either 3 napkins or 7 napkins for our family of 5 people, but now his counting is getting better and nearly every night there are 5 napkins!
His method cracks me up though. We use cloth napkins (less for the environment than for my desire to eliminate items from my shopping list, but the environment is a plus too, and yeah-yeah I know, I waste water washing them but I can assure you my washing machine runs daily with or without cloth napkins thrown in!) and the napkin drawer looks like this:
Now if you or I were going to set the table, we would most likely grab 5 of the same color/style napkins, but not my 3 year old, I watch him do it and he just wildly grabs, like he's thinking, "One of these, one of these, two of these, aaaaaand one of these -- Done!" It totally reminds me of the argument I used to have with my firstborn son about why a navy shirt should not be worn with navy shorts. He was all, "It's navy and navy. It matches!" At least my 3 year old is my 3rd child and now I'm too tired for silly debates, I'm just like, "Five napkins! Great job, Buddy!" See, being the 3rd child is not all bad!
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Tomorrow brings the beginning of Spring Break for us, so I'm not going to be blogging much new stuff next week, maybe some re-runs, maybe not, we'll see. I'm thinking of kicking off the Spring Break fun with these, but I've been fighting this bronchitis/sinusitis dynamic duo for weeks and weeks now (just began my 2nd course of antibiotics and steroids, hopefully this time it gets knocked out) so I have not been doing the Shred workout much lately (but really with the steroids on board I ought to be doing the Shred I might could even show Jillian a thing or two!), and what are the chances I could make Oreo brownies for the kids and not eat any myself?
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For everyone waiting to bring a child home from Ethiopia, this post from Babe of My Heart is wonderful! It is kinda long if you don't have time (or are on steroids and now have the attention span of your 3 year old) you may want to scroll towards the end to the part about faith and Lazarus. Such good truth!
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And everybody should go watch the video at the end of this post at Good to Be Crazy. Seriously it will MAKE your day!
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Happy Friday!
Word has been breaking over the past week with the news regarding Ethiopian adoptions and today it is more official. There are still many, many unknowns, like if the slowdown is temporary or more permanent.
But the news is world-rocking for many families waiting to bring home children from Ethiopia.
And if the number of adoptions out of Ethiopia this year decreases as drastically as some predict, it will mean many children, true orphans, will spend much more time in an orphanage, when there are families ready and willing to adopt them!
If you'd like to help speak up for those that cannot speak for themselves, click here to sign the petition that will be sent to the prime minister of Ethiopia.
There are ethical adoptions going on in Ethiopia, if my husband and I did not believe that with our whole hearts, we would not be in line to adopt from there. But we are, because we believe there are children, more than we can bear to imagine, who have no other good option for a forever family (or even decent medical care) without international adoption. And we know there are good agencies operating in Ethiopia, doing adoptions with the best interest of the children at the forefront of the way they operate.
What do the changes in Ethiopia mean for our family? We don't fully know, yet.
For now we're asked to do the hardest thing.
To wait.
I'd rather hear that we need to go spend a week sleeping on the floor of the American embassy in Ethiopia or make three trips instead of the two (which was already one more than required when we first signed up to adopt) or submit a bunch more paperwork to be able to bring our daughter home.
Because then there would be something I could actually do.
Does anyone like feeling powerless?
But, because I believe in God and what the Bible says, I'm not completely at a loss to do anything.
I can pray.
James 5:17-18, "Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops."
I love that the Bible says "Elijah was a man just like us" because I would never have said "Elijah was just like me," but the Bible says it, so it must be truth!
For now we are going to pray and watch what God is going to do.
I do believe He is faithful and that He led so many of us to this adoption journey for a reason and He will see that reason to completion.
It just will not be on my timetable and may not look like we expected it to look.
I still imagine a day when I will be able to hold my daughter and tell her how long we waited for her, not expecting any gratitude, but so she'll know she's that important, that worth it!Find more
Thankful Thursday here.
Remember last week when I said there were mini-blinds soaking in my bathtub as part of my spring cleaning?
Well, I never hung them back up!
Actually, I hung up a couple of them, but not all, because I decided I liked how my windows looked better without them!
(And the new puppy may or may not have chewed one of the blinds a little bit while I was drying them off.)
We never closed the blinds anyway, because blocking the sun is not an issue for those windows. We just left them half-way raised.
But, I never realized how ugly they were until they were gone!
My kitchen seems more open, cleaner, less cluttered without them (it helps that I applied a new coat of white paint to the window ledges, too). I love how it looks!
And the best part?
The part that makes me want to do a happy dance every single time I look at those windows (which is a bazillion times a day considering they are right over my kitchen sink!)?
Is that I crossed an item off my to-do list FOREVER!
If I'd cleaned the mini-blinds and re-hung them, that would be a task that would need to be done again in a few months, climbing onto the counter to clean them or take them down to wash them in the bathtub. Mind you it wouldn't get done for another year or more, but the task would nag me. It would sit on the to-do list for weeks and weeks, likely months, but, not now!
Less to clean works for me!
Find more Tackle It Tuesday, Gratituesday, and Works for Me Wednesday here.
Yesterday late afternoon I bathed the dog and used the hair dryer to blow her dry. She was so clean and fluffy. Then at dinner my 5 year old spilled an entire cup of milk, coating the dog who was under her chair. I knew all that soft fur would reek of spoiled milk by morning, so the poor dog got a second bath and blow dry! It's rough being a dog in our house!_____________________My husband and I disagree over whether the dog should be allowed on the couch. He says let her, I say, "If she was going to be a 10 lb dog we could talk about it, but she's going to be 35 lbs!" Madeline sneaks up onto the couch at every opportunity and just looks at me like, "What? I'm comfy."
I'm really trying to be the alpha dog in our relationship, but I think the puppy secretly knows she runs the place already!_____________________Last night my husband was supervising bathtime (while I blew dry the dog for the 2nd time in 3 hours) and somehow the kids totally soaked the bath rug on the floor outside the tub. I noticed the soaking wet rug later and commented to my husband that it would need to go in the dryer because it was too wet to ever dry on its own. Later in the night he told me he put the rug in the dryer but didn't turn it on. When I asked, "Why not?" He said, "I don't know how to work that thing!" The clothes dryer we've had for over 6 months, he doesn't even know how to turn on! My women's lib. self of my teenage years would totally freak out at that fact! But, my 30 something year old homemaker self says, "So, my husband never does wash, so what? He does dishes every night!"
The adoption wait can be agonizing.
Thankfully, there is Truth I can cling to.
Hosea 6:3, "Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, He will appear; He will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth."
God will come to us. With the same amount of certainty I have that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, I can believe that He is coming. He is faithful!
2 Cor 4:17, "For momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison."
The hard of this earthly situation will bring about glory in eternity.
2 Cor 4:18, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
God is doing so much more than what I can see and it's the behind the scenes stuff that will really matter in eternity.
James 5:10-11, "Brothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy."
For the record, God made Job prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before. The Lord honors perseverance.
Isaiah 49:16, "Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; your walls are continually before Me."
God has me written on the very palms of His hands and He knows well the roadblocks of this adoption.
So, no matter how many emails I get with news that is not good, "I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord." Psalm 27:13-14.
Find more Thankful Thursday here.
