What To Expect When You're Expecting a Two-Year-Old

If you've been pregnant anytime in the past 25 years, chances are you've read it. What to Expect When You're Expecting is the book that answers every question you could possibly have about pregnancy and many you couldn't even have dreamed up on your own. It breaks down each month of pregnancy and let's you know what symptoms to expect and also what developmentally is happening with the baby. I remember pouring over that book with my first baby, eagerly reading each month as my pregnancy progressed, delighting in discovering when his fingernails and eyebrows developed! Of course by my 3rd pregnancy I could never even remember how far along I was, people would always ask and I'd just quote my due date!

Recently they've even come out with the book What to Expect When Your Wife is Expanding: A Reassuring Month-by-Month Guide for the Father-to-Be, Whether He Wants Advice or Not, I'm really not sure how my husband survived my pregnancies without such a reassuring month-by-month guide!

But, search as I might, I have not yet found the reassuring month-by-month guide answering all my questions and letting me know exactly what to expect now as I'm expecting a two and a half year old!

A friend and I were discussing the adoption this past weekend and she asked me, "So, what's it like? I mean it's not like you are pregnant, but you are expecting, just with a two year old!"

And it got me thinking about the pregnancy book and wishing I had some sort of guide for this journey to our 4th child because somedays the unknowns, the unexpecteds, the unanswered questions can just about drive you nuts!

Maybe if such a book existed it might have warned me that despite having a to-do list a mile long, my husband and I would spend hours researching the region and city our new daughter is from, digging through the internet for maps, photos, news articles, even YouTube videos showing people from that region, anything to glean just a bit more information about our daughter and her life before us.

Of course the book couldn't outline what is happening with our daughter developmentally, because unlike fetuses, 2 year olds can vary drastically from one another. So, we rely on the referral write-up, cling to each picture we've gotten, and relish any details provided by other adoptive parents who have met our daughter while visiting their own child. And the couple videos we've been blessed to get? Well, let's just say we've watched them several times, with our faces pressed right up to the computer screen because that's as close as we can get to our girl. But, I have to say those videos of our 4th child, of her smiley 2 year old self, are way cuter than the sonograms that gave us glimpses of our other 3 children before we could hold them in our arms and stare at them face to face!

And though there is no guidebook for this journey, no due date or end in sight, and that makes things scary sometimes, we are grateful to have the best guide ever. He just happens to be the greatest expert on adoption, has adopted billions of children! "He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will," Eph. 1:5

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The Sweet Life

Have a sweet weekend!

You know, the kind where

you get to savor every last bit of a pudding pop

while the chocolate runs down your face, arms, shirt and legs

and somebody else cleans up the mess!



Find more Finer Things Friday here.

Life with kids is always an adventure!

One of my favorite things about doing life with children is that even the most ordinary, every day things become adventures!

For example, today my car chimed that the gas was getting low, I pulled into a gas station to fill up the tank, which I've done countless times in my life, nothing exciting there, right?

Wrong!

I pulled opened the door to the gas tank, reached in to unscrew the gas cap and jerked my hand back in surprise because this is what I saw:

Yep, someone had wedged a plastic spider inside the little pull open door, right next to the gas cap! At first I thought such an elaborate prank was beyond the abilities of my children and surely must have been the work of my husband. But, I plucked the plastic spider out of the gas compartment, opened the car door, and showed it to my 4 year old son, "Look what I just found while I was pumping gas!"

He said, "Yeah, I found it yesterday and put it in there."

If he can pull off this prank at four, what am I in for at fourteen?

Life will not be dull, that is for sure! I'm thankful for the adventure that is life with kids!

Find more Thankful Thursday here.

Doesn't everyone have teff flour in their closet?

I'm not sure, but I think this may mean I've officially gone off the deep end.

For several reasons that I can explain but don't fully understand, there is a 25 pound bag of Teff Flour in my under-the-stairs closet right now.


My attempt to explain the madness:

Teff flour is what they use to make injera, the Ethiopian sour spongy bread that is a main staple of most meals in Ethiopia. In fact there are no utensils used to eat traditional Ethiopian food, you pinch up bites of the meat and lentils with pieces of injera. We've eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant a few different times in the past year and our family (well, minus my 5 year old daughter) has really grown quite fond of it. And ever since we found out that the child we are adopting is a toddler rather than an infant, I've been determined to learn to make Ethiopian food. So, I was super excited to discover recently an Ethiopian grocery store just a few miles from our home, and we visited it over the weekend.

We got a cook book, some spices, each of our 3 kids picked out a small bag of Cheetos (random, I know! I'm assuming those are not Ethiopian but just something extra thrown in for American benefit!), and we should have just left it at that. But, no, they had the teff flour we'd heard is used to make injera and you can't find that flour in regular groceries. I flipped to the page in the recipe book for injera and saw the ingredients: "Teff flour, water, and yeast" and that was it! Considering I judge a recipe's difficulty by number of ingredients required, I was all, "I can do this. I can make injera from scratch. Let's buy the flour!" Nevermind that all they had was a TWENTY-FIVE POUND bag, I buy regular flour in huge sacks at Sams, the quantity did not scare me!

Until the cashier rang up the purchase! Let's just say the teff flour? Is a bit more expensive than the white flour at Sams!

And the best part of the whole story? The Ethiopian woman who was the cashier looked at me with an amused look on her face and said, "You make injera?" And I said proudly, "I'm going to try! Do you make it?" Totally expecting her to say "Yes" and give me cooking tips, but instead? She said, "No! It's too much work!"

So there we were hauling our super expensive 25 lb bag of teff flour out of the tiny Ethiopian grocery store while our 3 children ripped into their Cheetos with me wondering, "Why oh why didn't we just buy some of the ready-made injera they were selling!"

I blame the crazy dialog in my head that went like this, "When sweet little girl finally comes home from Ethiopia she may want some injera!" And my immediate next thought, "Then this mama's going to learn to make some injera!"

And the last bit of the crazy explained, it's in the closet because it won't fit in the pantry and I can't store it in our overstock pantry in the garage because all my large plastic containers are in use storing the white flour I bought in a huge bag at Sams and I'm afraid bugs would get to it if I don't have it stored in a tub!

One man's trash is my little girl's treasure!

My 5 year old daughter loves hunting for "treasures," you know random things she finds on the ground that most people would call "trash". She's had some really exciting finds on the playground at her school this year, like the time she found a deflated balloon! A balloon that I wouldn't let her attempt to blow up (so mean of me, I know!). "Why not, Mommy?" she asked. "Because we do not put our mouths on balloons we find on the ground," I replied. I file that one in with many, many other life lessons I never imagined I'd have to teach my children, but would just be obvious. Don't even get me started on the, "We don't lie down on the floor in a public restroom!" I mean, seriously!!!

But, back to the "treasures". My daughter was changing out of her school clothes one day this week and a ton of random junk, I mean "treasure," came tumbling out of her pockets onto my freshly vacuumed floor!
A water bottle cap, a sticker, some rocks, a button, some string, a colored popsicle stick, and a dirty straw! Awesome!!!!

My little girl who goes to school nearly every day in a dress or skirt with a bow or bows in her hair comes home with pockets or a backpack full of trash!!

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When we had a family outing to one of those frozen yogurt places where you get to choose your own toppings and then pay by the weight, that same little girl picked out mint chocolate cookie flavored frozen yogurt with the following toppings: fruity pebbles cereal, cinnamon toast crunch cereal, oreos, and gummy worms!
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I overheard my 8 year old son describing the concept of an umbilical cord to my 4 year old, "It's a black rope that goes from a baby to the mommy and the baby eats through it."

I'm sure he thinks it's black because he has memories from when he was 4 and the now 4 year old was a newborn with that black stump on his belly button!

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Hope your weekend is full of treasures!

Find more Finer Things Friday and Friday Fragments.

Still praying for that Texas Sized Hug in Ethiopia!

Considering everything that has happened with Ethiopian adoptions in the past year (feel free to snicker at the fact that last July I thought we'd travel to Ethiopia "some time in the next 8 months") and all the new complications and possible/probable delays, it's crazy that along with praying to be able to bring our daughter home soon without further delay, that I'm also still praying to be able to meet our Compassion child on one of our trips to Ethiopia, but I am! I know I'm asking a lot, a whole lot, multiple miracles, but I'm still asking! And I'm thankful for a God who hears!

1 John 5:14-15, "And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him."


**Originally posted July 26, 2010**
I'm from Texas and it always cracks me up when I meet someone from afar who's never been here and they just assume they can pop over to any town in our state like it's such a quick trip. But in reality I can leave my home in Texas, drive for 8 hours, and still be in Texas!

But, that's pretty much the way I treated Ethiopia.

We're going to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the capital city of Ethiopia twice some time in the next 8 months (God willing!).

When news first broke that we'd now have to travel twice to complete the adoption of our daughter when Ethiopia used to only require adoptive families to travel once, after the initial disappointment over the added expense and effort, I began to see positives. Like, we'd get to spend more time in our daughter's birth country. And maybe we'd get to see Mathews!

Mathews is a boy we sponsor through Compassion International, financially providing for him to have food, clean water, medical care, education, and teaching about Jesus. We also write to let him know we are thinking about him and praying for him, caring for him from the other side of the world.

He lives in Ethiopia, so I reasoned since we're going twice, each time for a week, surely we can see him while we're there!

But, like Texas, Ethiopia's a big place and we discovered Mathews lived near Awassa, a city pretty far from Addis Ababa, and thinking roads would be bad in Ethiopia we were deflated and thought that meeting Mathews probably couldn't happen. And the idea was moved to the back-burner.

Until last week, when I noticed some of the first families to have to make two trips to Ethiopia had gone on their first trip (there was a period of time where families who were well into the process were grandfathered in and only had to do the one trip). So, I clicked over to one family's blog to try to learn more about what that 1st trip (where you testify in court and meet your child but cannot bring them home) looked like. And as I saw things like "free day" in their agenda I dared to hope and pray again that we'd get to see Mathews.

The day after I began the prayer, I was reading this blogger's description of her time in Ethiopia a couple months ago adopting her precious twin boys through the same agency we're using, and lo and behold she wrote about a side trip they did to Awassa from Addis Ababa! It was a 6 hour trip over a good road with amazing sceanery along the way. And I got so excited realizing it was possible to make the trip!

Then 2 days later I was reading this blogger who is doing an internship in Ethiopia for the summer and reading to kids at the Gladney Foster Care Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and she wrote about a trip she took to Awassa!

And just tonight I read about another adoptive family who made the trip from Addis Ababa to Awassa and highly recommended it!

God blows me away with His attention to the details!

Here I am thinking it's not possible to make the trip and in the week after I pray about it, I "happen upon" the stories of 3 different families/people from the United States who made that drive!

Mathews is the same age as my oldest son. He'll turn 8 this fall on my exact birthday. His picture hangs on our refrigerator. And to be able to see him in person? To be able to hug his neck and show him with our presence how much we care? Hand deliver him a backpack of goodies? Well, that would just be awesome!

Now, there are still hurdles to clear before this dream can be reality. Compassion says they need 8 weeks notice before your travel date and we may not have 8 weeks from the time we find out our travel date until we need to travel and our dates can change if there is a glitch in the Ethiopian court system. And there are tons of other details about this travel and adoption where we are already asking God to do huge things.

But, my God is big, really big, and I'm daring to pray!

Find more Thankful Thursday here.

It Will Pass

I was thinking today about kid phases that in hindsight passed so quickly, some terribly missed, some not so much.


I can happily say it's been over a year and a half since this has happened, although there did seem to be a season in there when my youngest child was coating his bedroom in powder or some equally messy antic at least every other day!

So, if you're currently elbow deep in a powder mess, know it won't always be that way, it will pass!

Find more Wordful Wednesday, Wordless Wednesday, & Not So Wordless Wednesday.