Dinnertime

"You know honey, one of these days she's going to figure out how to get the lid off and we'll turn around and she will have eaten half a container of baby cheetos."

Adoption Update

This past Wednesday I mailed off our dossier to our adoption agency.  Whew.  I've only been working on that since August.  It didn't help much that I tend to procrastinate tedious tasks, and a large portion of the dossier definitely fell into that category.  Aidan, Harper and I spent the better part of Wednesday morning getting pictures developed, having copies made, and completing the assembly of the dossier.  I'm pretty sure Aidan thinks we are mail-ordering his sister, since we had to get the papers ready "to send to China to get his sister".  Just one more thing to explain to his future therapist, I guess.

Speaking of crazy, (lovely segue, I know), I've been coming up with some come-backs to tell those few people who are, how should I say, less than supportive about our adoption.  Most people are very encouraging when I tell them that we are in the process of adopting.  However, sometimes, when I tell people that yes, we have 3 biological children, and yes, we are adopting a 4th, they actually look at me incredulously and say, "Why??"

So to those of you, here is what I would at least think about saying back to you:

1.  Brandon and I suffer from mental illness.
2.  The more children we have, the more work hands we have for all of the farm chores.
3.  We have all this extra money lying around that we just don't know what to do with.
4.  Harper has all of these hand-me-down clothes that we just hated to get rid of, so we're going to bring a little girl home from China just so she can wear some of them.

5.  We can't think of a good enough reason "why not".  There's plenty of not-quite-good-enough reasons "why not", and we spent the last several years using those as excuses.  But we really want to add a 4th child to our brood by adoption, and we believe whole-heartedly that this is what God wants for our family.  

From this point, someone at our adoption agency will review our dossier, and if it looks acceptable, they will send it to China to be "logged in".  Our log-in date (LID) is when our wait time officially starts.  The wait time from there could be a year or so, but I have also read blogs of families who only waited a few months, and in one case, 6 days for a referral.  Holy cow.  At the time of referral (this is when they call us and tell us they have a child for our family, information, picture, etc.) is when the bulk of the remaining adoption fees are due (yikes!).  So basically, a very unpredictable time-line from here on out, and a lot of things that are completely out of our hands.

And if you think of any other completely sarcastic responses I could use in the meantime, please do share.

Lazy Blogger...

I just cannot get motivated to blog lately. I have decided that my little blog needs a big makeover, so hopefully I will figure out how to do that at some point this week.

I hope everyone had a very pleasant MLK Jr. Day!

I spent the day at work in the ER trauma center in Houston on a holiday weekend, while my sweet friend Heather watched Dane, Aidan, and Harper, along with her three boys. I think I definitely had the easier day!

Dane went back to school yesterday and learned all about MLK Jr. He came home with a picture that he had colored:

Please note the bright pink hue to Dr. King's lips. Perhaps Dane thought that he, like Aidan, sometimes got into his mommy's make-up.

Please also note the black circle drawn on his chest. According to Dane, "that's the bullet hole where the light skinned person shot him. He DID NOT make a very good decision."

Lovely.

Speaking of lovely, this sweet girl has been up to all kinds of trouble lately.

Her favorite place to play is the trash can and under the kitchen sink. She will crawl over all of her toys in the room to dig a diet coke can out of the trash can and put it in her mouth. Last night I dug an empty Milk Duds box out of her mouth that she had gotten from under a couch cushion. My best guess is that it has been there since Halloween, since I don't frequent the Milk Dud aisle very often. You would think we don't feed her, that she's not a 22-pound 10 month old squeezing into size 18 month clothing, that she doesn't double-fist the baby Cheetos at every opportunity.

I can't believe she'll be a year old in just 2 months. I'm thinking of having matching birthday t-shirts made for her, me, and my mom. Harper's could be "1", mine "32" and my mom's "?".

My apologies for the stream-of-consciousness blog post. Perhaps better than no post at all?

So This is January...

I don't know about you, but so far 2010 has proven to be c.o.l.d. And apparently, I have difficulty blogging and typing and generally forming thoughts coherent enough to blog about when it's 16 degrees in HOUSTON. Houston, we have a problem. And it's called January.

So what have we been up to besides running the heater and wearing all sorts of layered shirts and warmy shoes?

--Aidan informed me the other day that "When Harper grows up she is going to be a boy." This led to another unfortunate conversation about how girls are always girls, and boys are always boys (minus the occasional confused celebrity).

--Aidan also said a prayer in his preschool class at church. Included in his prayer, was "And God please help Harper to grow up to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and 10 and 11 and 13 and 17 and 20."

--Brandon came home with a bowling ball (in it's own bowl) at a white elephant gift exchange that we went to last weekend. Um ,the last thing that we need in our house with our children (and their father) is a 16 pound bowling ball. I can just see it crashing through the stairs at some point. I tried to hide it from Brandon and leave it at the hostess's house last weekend, but he found it and got it in the car. Then I took it from our car, and snuck it in our worship minister's office while no one was in there.

The next day, he found it and just assumed it belonged to Brandon (where else could a random bowling ball have come from?), and returned it to him. I was putting groceries in the car a day later and found that the bowling ball had found it's way back into the trunk. So I promptly drove to another friend's house (another co-worker of Brandon's), and left it on their front porch. Again, the bowling ball appears in our car a couple of days later. Hopefully last night I got rid of the ball for good. I hosted 14 of my nearest and dearest girlfriends at my house for a night of Pokeno, and the 6th place winner went home with her very own 16 pound bowling ball (complete with bowl). Congrats, Kim! Enjoy it with gusto!

--I didn't make any New Year's Resolutions this year, but I did start something a little different. I have been needing to be more disciplined with my Bible study time, and I heard about a Read the Bible in 90 Days reading program. There's a book, and it just basically is an NIV Bible that is broken into 90 sections, and you read 12 pages a day. Starting in Genesis, finishing in Revelation. 12 pages a day, straight through, for 3 months. I'm a couple of days behind (I started on the 5th, and I meant to start on the 1st), so I'm still playing catch-up, but so far, I really like it. I figure if I can plow through Leviticus and Numbers this week on schedule (yikes--gotta be honest, not looking forward to that), then it should get better from there.

The program is not for everyone, there's no study questions, journaling, and obviously it's not an in-depth study of each verse and the context, etc. It's just plowing through the entire Bible from start to finish, but I think I'll like finishing the whole thing in 3 months. Hopefully since I've posted this on my blog, that it will provide a smidgin of accountability. I figured there's no point in making New Year's Resolutions regarding other aspects of my life if I wasn't spending the time with God that I needed to be spending.

--I haven't been working as much as I was hoping to be working right now to save up for our adoption. Shifts have been very hard to come by, since the hospitals I work with are cutting back on extra staff to save on budgets. I'm trying to not freak out about it, but it would be really nice if I could work more hours. A lot more hours.

--The boys are trucking along with school (um, Dane is learning fractions in his kindergarten math class. Yikes.) and Harper girl is as sweet as ever. Brandon went back to work this past week, and I have been working on our adoption paperwork as usual. We received our documents "certified" by the Secretary of State of Texas on Friday, and tomorrow I will mail out the rest of the certified documents to the Chinese Consulate in Houston for "authentication". Then our dossier will be (drumroll, please)...COMPLETE and I can mail it in to our agency to be sent to China. Then the ball's in their court, so to speak, and the uncertain waiting game really begins.

So, what have you been up to?

Better Late than Never...

Here's a handful of pictures from this past month that haven't made it on to ye old blog yet this year.

Is anything harder than getting a family picture with 12 people?

Brandon and I all smiles at Fogo de Chao.

House of Pies: just more proof that God loves us.

Harper and her Aunt Val. Val, Harper would like a girl cousin come April. Preferably one that can hold her own in a wrestling match.

Speaking of wrestling, a cousin movie night commenced while some grown ups were playing "Would You Rather" in the next room (FYI--WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION was learned about my family during that game). Aidan is being tackled just a bit by Harper.

I look at this picture and all I see is an orthodontist in the north Houston area who is going to make a lot of money off my family someday.

Dane and Aidan made a gingerbread house with Brandon the other day. You know they made it with Brandon, because if they had made it with me, it would have a plain white icing roof with a few random sprinkles here and there.

Not artfully designed with a sidewalk, wreath, and each side of the roof's decorations dictated by each child. Nope. Mine would have a white roof, no windows, and some red and green sprinkles atop to make it Christmas-y.

And they always look better than they taste.

After the destruction:

Wishing you and yours a very Happy New Year.