Today after playing a game with my 3 year old, a game in which he won, he asks me, "Are you so happy I won?" And I said, "Yes, I'm happy you won." He then makes a face and says, "I'm sad, though, because I wanted you to win."I hug him, how sweet he is!Then he says, "My feet are happy, though! My feet are happy because I won!"___________Among other random conversation around here, yesterday we were talking about the puppy's various toys and chew bones and two-thirds of my children admitted to tasting the dog's fake rubber bone that supposed to be chicken flavored. "Yeah, but it didn't taste like anything!" they tell me!"What? You guys tasted the dog's bone? Gross!"___________I have never eaten brussel sprouts before in my life but I cooked some last night using Andrea's technique. One-fifth of our family liked them, one-fifth thought they were okay, and three-fifths thought yuck!! (Can you tell my 8 year old is learning fractions at school?)My 3 year old finished off one serving and asked for seconds!! "I LOVE these brussel sprouts!" he kept saying! I thought they were alright, but my husband said, "If it weren't for the taste and texture, they'd be fine!"___________My 5 year old daughter has her first loose tooth, been loose for over a week now, and I just can hardly stand it. She shouldn't be old enough for that!Funny how different kids can be, though. My older son never wanted my husband or me to wiggle his loose teeth and he didn't wiggle them much himself either, but my daughter is constantly wiggling hers and several times each day she asks me to try wiggling it, too!___________My kids have gotten into the Beverly Cleary books and oh the joy! My 8 year old son's read all the Henry Huggins books and my 5 year old daughter all the Ramona books. I highly recommend them!
Have a wonderful weekend!
A few months ago I had the realization that a bigger sadness than waiting much longer than expected to be able to bring home our daughter from Ethiopia, would be to wait much longer than we expected to wait, yet still fail to do everything we could possibly do to prepare to parent our newly adopted child.
We'd nearly completed the training required by our agency, read a few extra books, gone to some adoption talks, a conference, started an adoption group at our church, but still I knew there was more we could do.
Much of our agency training have been videos from the teaching of Dr. Karyn Purvis and I've also read her book The Connected Child: Bring hope and healing to your adoptive family
. And I have to say her teachings are amazing! She talks honestly about issues that children from "hard places" may have, but she brings so much hope, constantly repeating the message that in all her years of work with children, she believes there is no child that is too far gone, and she provides many techniques for compassionately helping your child to heal from their past with a Biblical perspective.
Dr. Purvis is the director of the Institute of Child Development at TCU and their website has some great resources, including a way to buy DVDs of Karyn Purvis's teaching series. Also, Empowered to Connect is the study guide that goes along with The Connected Child book and the website empoweredtoconnect.org has many free videos and materials. We are planning to get a few small groups from our church adoption ministry to go through the Empowered to Connect study in the coming months, hoping that families will benefit from sharing their journeys and supporting each other.
We've also decided to travel to attend an optional 2 day training class that our agency is offering free of charge, and are excited to spend two days immersed in the techniques.
The likely reality is that each extra month of our adoption wait is an additional month of her life that our daughter will have spent in an orphanage on top of the trauma that led her to being an orphan in the first place. The least we can do is prepare ourselves with as much knowledge as possible to be able to best help her begin healing and bonding with us.
I am so thankful for the wonderful, Christian resources that are available now, that were not just a few years ago! It is an exciting time for the world of adoption and foster care when kids and families can get the help they so desperately need. And I just know God is thrilled because these kids from the "hard places" are His BELOVED, PRECIOUS children!
Mark 9:37, "Whoever receives one child like this in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me, but Him who sent Me."
Find more Thankful Thursday here.
My 8 year old and I were working with the puppy on some dog training in the backyard this afternoon and my 2 younger kids were playing together for several minutes. They were happy so I hadn't really noticed what they were doing. But once I finally looked, this is what I saw:
Yes, it's exactly as it appears! Some sort of game where my 3 year old stands on the ladder of our swing set while my 5 year old daughter hurls balls at him from a blue bucket.
Why in the world my 3 year old was a laughing, willing, eager, and non-protesting participant, I'll never know!
But, the balls were fairly soft so I didn't stop them, just snapped some pictures that my poor 3rd child will have as evidence of his hard life some day!
Find more Wordful Wednesday, Wordless Wednesday, & Not So Wordless Wednesday.
We don't have any new news on our adoption.
And the uncertainties are huge, for us and many, many others right now.
There seemed to be some positive news coming out of Ethiopia last week, but it is mostly unconfirmed (thus I'm not quoting sources).
An amid all the uncertainty, I find a continuing need to refocus.
On The One who is certain.
So, my chalkboard frame that used to display the menu for the night's meal (or the meal 3 nights ago if I got behind, which was probably more typical), now displays this:
And the kids' drawing wall:
Not sure if you can make it out amongst their art, but "Nothing is impossible with God." Luke 1:37. Yes, indeed! You don't have to read far in the Bible to see evidence that God can do really amazing things, and that actually He seems to kinda like it when the deck is stacked against Him!
Another verse I've been saying over and over as I find myself tending to worry or wonder what will happen is Mark 9:24b, "I do believe, help my unbelief." Find more
Gratituesday.
The last few weeks we've had an escalating situation on our hands with Madeline the puppy.
She has decided she really, really LOVES taking a bath.
I think it started the day she had two baths in one day, remember when we bathed her for the grandparents coming to visit and then an hour later my 5 year old spilled an entire cup off milk on the dog who was sitting under her chair at dinner and the dog got a 2nd bath in one day? Well, now she thinks she ought to be bathed often.
And honestly I'm doing good to make sure my children get bathed nearly every day, I can't do daily dog baths, too!
We've gotten used to having to close the door when the kids are in the bathtub because she will jump in and then her furry, furry self has to be blown dry!
But, recently there's a whole new level to the madness.
Now she jumps into the empty bathtub a few times each day and BARKS, as if calling out, "Come bathe me!!"
I snapped this picture today after investigating the barking, but I knew it's likely reason and sure enough, this is what I found as the source of the barking and carrying-on.
And the answer is "NO, no bath, not today!" This isn't a doggie spa!
I am left shaking my head at the chaos and wondering if God hand-selected this puppy because her personality fit us or if she would be totally normal in someone else's household and we're the ones making her so crazy!
Anyone else officially NOT switched over to Daylight Savings Time yet?I think it's the fact that it fell the 1st Saturday of our Spring Break and we were on vacation for a few days and then came home 1 night before some out of town family came to visit with very close in age cousins for my kids to play with. And the fun and activities have been non-stop!
We can't manage to eat dinner much earlier than 7pm which I rationalize is really 6pm and get the kids to bed before 9pm which I tell myself is like hitting their regular 8pm bedtime just before spring forward. But, man, we gotta switch over or the real world is going to eat us alive come Monday morning!!_________________It has been good, though, all the fun times and I've still been able to tackle some spring cleaning along with the fun fest. Would you believe me if I said I painted about half the inside of my house before we left for vacation last Saturday?We had a bunch of cabinets, baseboards, stair rail rungs, window sills, and trim around doorways that had gotten so nicked up over the last 4 years living here with 3 young kids. But, the trim paint is a thicker type paint that doesn't dry quickly like wall paint does, as in it takes over 24 hours to stop being soft! So, when would we ever be able to paint it that a child (or puppy) wouldn't be rubbing into it before it was dry?I figured out the solution! We'll paint the night before we leave on our trip and then wake the kids up in the morning, quickly load them in the car without anyone touching anything and then be gone for a few days while it all dried! Awesome idea! Why didn't we think of it before?!!!As it turns out, taping in preparation for painting takes a long time, so that was all we got done the night before our trip. "No worries," we thought, "Surely the taping took the longest, now we'll just slap some paint on in the morning while the kids and dog play outside."Well, the painting took a while, too, and it takes even longer when you are a not-all-the-way-recovered-perfectionist (occasionally it rears its head), like me, and just keep finding more and more areas to paint. And when you decide instead of touch-up painting a door or cabinet it would really just look better to repaint the whole thing!I drove my husband very near to the brink of insanity as he begged me to finish so we could leave and I kept promising "just a little more". But, we did still make it out of town shortly after lunch, our marriage survived, and I am totally loving the new paint job now that we're back home!!!But. . . . there are some spots I missed so I'm already formulating plans for prior to our next trip. Shhhh, don't tell my husband!_________________My little super heroes (sporting capes they won in midway games) don't know it yet, either, but tomorrow is going to be rest and doing wash and a day without eating hot dogs or pizza. Whether they like it or not we're powering back into real life!
I mean, even Batman and Supergirl had regular, ordinary lives some of the time, too!Have a Super weekend!
I snapped this picture yesterday when we stopped off at a state park for some hiking on the way back from our vacation.
And I love it for a variety of reasons.
First, notice my 5 year old daughter is leading the way across that log while the boys and the dog are lagging behind trying to get themselves together to make it across! That is so my daughter, she has no fear when it comes to stuff like this. She was tearing out across the limb and it even went across a little ravine just a few feet beyond where she's standing in this picture and she was totally ready to walk across without worry of falling! I cautioned her, but she charged on, until, that is, she encountered a swarm of bugs and then she was outta there! Girl is not at all afraid of physical feats or any of the roller-coasters she was tall enough to ride on our trip, either, but a few bugs (really it only takes 1) will send her screaming!!
I also love the imagery in the picture of our family (crazy new puppy and all) out on a limb together, because that is what this journey following after God feels like sometimes, and really it's the best place to be!
We've had a lot of discussions and wonderings over the past few weeks about just what it is that God has for our family as things with Ethiopian adoptions become more uncertain. My daughter even brought up tonight (which totally doesn't relate to the current state of adoption slow-downs in Ethiopia) that we should adopt 3 kids instead of just one because she liked the idea of having 6 kids in our family just like the family in her dollhouse (we've added children to the original set to be able to represent a variety of races in our dollhouse, so there are several kids in there of many colors). Then my 8 year old piped up, "Yeah, is it too late for us to change our paperwork so that we can adopt 3 kids instead of just 1?"
It's so crazy, but at this point if the Ethiopian government would let us bring home 3 kids, we'd totally entertain the idea! I think what has changed most about us in the last 3 years is our flexibility and willingness to consider things beyond our comfort zone for the sake of serving God best.
One thing we know for sure, as a family we are willing to be out on that limb following the path He has for us, whatever it is.
Granted we may need some bug repellent!Find more
Thankful Thursday here.
