It's that time again -- the 5 Minutes for Mom Ultimate Blog Party! Welcome to the It Feels Like Chaos party!
Feel free to grab some ear plugs at the door; it's always LOUD around here!
And I must warn you against eating any of the cake!
The ice cream, however, gets rave reviews!
To introduce ourselves, we have 3 biological children ages 8, 5, and 3 years old and are in the process of adopting a little girl from Ethiopia.
As if having 3 young children and an adoption in progress wasn't enough crazy, we recently added a puppy to the chaos. Madeline is a 16 week old golden doodle puppy who really, really loves taking baths, in fact just this week she's discovered a new tactic that nearly guarantees her a much coveted bath:
Yes, that is mud covering her furry blond feet. Sorry for cutting off her head, as it turns out children may be easier to photograph than puppies! And for the record, the puppy is now getting a bath and blow-dry more times each week than I do!
So what's up with the name? Is it really chaos?
Well, there are occasionally backwards jeans.
Teeth have been known to fall out! And we anticipate losing 60 or more in the next few years! And our tooth fairy is way stingier than the tooth fairy for my kids' friends, so I don't know what's up with that! I tell my kids, "Well, their teeth just must be better than your teeth, maybe they brush more!"
I got a sewing machine for Mother's Day last year, The Internet has taught me to sew, and now I make more than half of my daughter's clothes, like this dress I made with this tutorial this week. I delighted in how sweet and girly my daughter looked in it. Then after school, she came home and made mud pies with her brothers while wearing it! Awesome!
There may or may not have been a moment this week when I called my husband at work and said, "All 3 kids are muddy, the dog is muddy, the 8 year old needs to be at soccer practice in 30 minutes, and I really just wish the mom would show up and deal with all this." Yeah, I know I AM the mom, and I did suck it up and deal with it all, even making it to the practice on time.
But the really crazy thing about the mud that made me wish I could turn-over my mom position just for an hour or so? Is that it hasn't really rained here in I-don't-know-when! My children created the mud by toting water from our outside faucet to the dirt under their swing set with buckets!
Back to the "Is it really chaos?" question.
Random face decorating is common around here.
There's usually a science experiment going on.
And somehow my toilet paper always ends up looking like this:
It used to be a toddler wildly unrolling the t.p. and this frugal momma rolling it back up (I mean it's not really used t.p., just unrolled)! Now, the puppy is the culprit!
My in-box pretty much always looks like this:
And while sometimes being the main manager of all the chaos leaves me feeling like this very tired bear.
I wouldn't have it any other way!
This blog is about sharing the crazy journey God has us on -- the messes, the fun, the joy, the pain, the struggles, the crafts (for the uncrafty, of course), the cooking from scratch, the attempt to live frugally for a greater purpose, the learning, the loving. The chaos! But, as the Sanctus Real song says, "It feels like chaos, but somehow there's peace." The peace comes from the only thing truly good about our home, and that is Jesus. I am so glad that He's "up to something bigger than me"!
Thanks for joining our party! Feel free to come back any time for a front row seat to all the chaos. And the best part? You get to enjoy it without having to clean up from it!!
We have had some truly beautiful weather the month of March. It has been cool in the mornings and evenings and sunny and warm in the afternoons, perfect for being outside a lot, which I love. Having 3 kids and a dog, my house stays much cleaner when everyone can eat/snack/play, outside!
This past weekend it was even warm enough to drag out the old baby pool!
This may not come as much of a surprise considering how very much our puppy loves taking a bath, but we found something else she loves:
Oh, she had a fine time jumping in and out of the pool over and over again, then she found some nice dirt to lay down in and combined with her wet self it created, you guessed it, mud! So to cap off the joy of the baby pool Madeline the puppy got her first hose bath!
It's going to be a fun summer and I'm imagining a plastic wading pool in our future, Madeline came very close to popping that inflatable one; it's only a matter of time!
Find more
Thankful Thursday here.
Lunch in the treehouse.
Just my 3 year old son and me.
It's something I've done with all 3 of my kids many, many times.
Sometimes all together, squeezing in.
Me worrying someone will sit too close to the side and fall out.
Sometimes one-on-one, just one child and me.
It's a cheap date.
One day too soon when their whirlwind of childhoods are over, I hope they'll remember their mom eating lunch in the treehouse with them.
But mostly I want them to look back and know, "I was loved, special, cherished, treasured, important!"
Find more
Works for Me Wednesday,
Wordful Wednesday,
Wordless Wednesday, &
Not So Wordless Wednesday.
I'm not going to lie, this morning was one of the harder ones for me in terms of our adoption wait.
There were a variety of reasons, I'll list just some of them.
First, we are rapidly approaching ONE YEAR waiting for our referral for the child we will adopt from Ethiopia. One year into a wait that was averaging around 4 to 6 months when we signed up!
And, lately I've been bombarded with various sign-ups for next school year and I have no idea what next school year will look like for me! I don't know if I'll still have just 3 kids and with my youngest starting pre-K he'll go to school every day next year, just for 3 hours each morning, but still it will be the first time in the 8 years I've been a stay-at-home mom for me to have more than 2 mornings each week where all the kids are in school at the same time. Or, hopefully, prayerfully, we'll have our new daughter home from Ethiopia by then, in which case not only will she not be in school, but she will need nearly all of my attention for a long time! And then there's the fact that we don't know if she's going to be an infant or older toddler, and that affects what activities I can and cannot do next year as far as Bible studies, volunteer positions, activities for my older kids, etc., etc.! So, you see, the lack of ability to plan was beginning to get to me!
Already I'd adjusted to the summer being a big unknown. I haven't signed the kids up for any camps and we cannot plan any family vacation because we don't know when either of our two different trips to Ethiopia will fall! But now with the unknowns leaking into next fall and beyond, it just began to feel like too much. I'm more than happy to put my life on hold to help my new daughter adjust to her new life and family, but I'm tired of putting my life on hold to wait!
Have I mentioned before that I'm a planner, as in we found out the sex of all 3 of our biological children in utero because I needed to plan -- rooms, clothes, names, etc.!
It was a gray morning, unusually cloudy, and the frustration and depression over the adoption situation was definitely getting the best of my mood.
I checked my email right before lunch, hoping for news, there was none, sigh.
After lunch, my 3 year old and I made chocolate chip pumpkin bread and then I put him down for his nap while it baked.
I headed downstairs from tucking him in and the whole house smelled yummy like pumpkin bread, only it reminded me of Thanksgiving when I always make that bread and then all I could think about was how we really thought we'd get our referral, see the face of our new daughter, before Thanksgiving and here we are pushing Easter of the following year!
I sat down with my Bible and before doing my lesson for my Bible study, I turned and read randomly from Psalms. My eyes locked on Psalm 18:6, "In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears."
It was just about an hour later I learned of some big, good news relating to our adoption. Not a referral yet, but a huge barrier holding up our adoption (and many others) has been cleared! Praise God for some much needed good news! Praise God for hearing our cries! Hurray!
Find more
Gratituesday.
Thankfully, mothering is not always a thankless job!
The card my 5 year old daughter made me today:
"Dear Mom,
You or the beast mom in the wold."
And yes it does say "beast mom" but I'll have the record reflect that when she read it to me, my daughter read it as "best mom"!
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.
