potty training...a post in progress

So, it's that time again. The dreaded potty training. It comes with having children and unless you don't mind changing adult diapers with adult sized poo in them, you just have to bite the bullet and go through it. Eden is, for all intents and purposes, two. She understands what her diaper is, she understands what the potty is for, she understands what her body does...so it's time to start potty training full time. Eden came home from Ethiopia basically knowing what to do. They would put the teeny kiddos onto potties at the same time every day and they would train them to go at that certain time... because of this she was super easy to train to poo on the pot...it's the other stuff that's the problem.

So we have begun the pee parade and she's sporting her big girl panties. Since Thursday she has peed in them twice and once I forgot to change her out of her nap diaper--so that day was a wash. It's been 4 days and today, we went out WITHOUT a diaper on. I'm happy to say, that she stayed dry until I put her down for nap...pretty amazing :-D!!!

It's the little things :-)

beginnings...

I have the chance this morning...everyone is happy and/or snoozing still, so I will post on the first day of school...I've shared on facebook already, so those who connect with me there will find this repetitive...sorry.

Shoes on...check

coffee...check




pants...check

Take the tags off the extremely colorful shirt you chose for the first day...check

friendly, honest, eager smile...check



sideways debonair grin...check

Good attitude...check

special expensive sugary cereal that you never get except on VERY unique occasions...check

Motleys, ARE YOU READY TO TAKE OVER THE SCHOOL?????

check.

social networking....

So I put my children on the bus and kissed my husband goodbye...pressed my ear to two bedroom doors to ensure that my youngest two were still snoozing and sat down at the computer to pray for my friends and family. For a while now I've had a love/hate relationship with facebook. I hate its addictive nature and the cattiness that can be displayed by loose tongues and hurtful spirits--but I love the way that I am connected with my friends all over the world, just in one place!!

Most mornings, I sit with my coffee and scroll down my news feed and pray for those who God brings up--then I pray a little more and visit a few pages of different people to check in on those I've prayed for the day before, etc. It's been a way for me to organize my praying...I sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the people I want to pray for and my desire to be faithful to hold the ropes for them all. This can become such a burden of guilt when time doesn't allow for a good long prayer session. Life doesn't stop, even when I desire to spend time focusing on Kingdom things, like praying for my missionary friends...or when I want to do less-important things like just now, I'm having to stop typing because my youngest is crying--she's lost her pacifier--be right back...

Anyway, facebook has helped me stay connected and feel like God is in control of who I intercede for throughout the day. I love that. When we were at training in VA we had a day that we spent hours in solitude, seeking the Lord and after the allotted time we all gathered back together to share what God had said. One of the guys said that he started his time by putting his iPod on shuffle because then he felt like he was giving God the reigns to control the songs that came up and guide his time of prayer through song...I like that. That's kinda how I feel about facebook--God brings friends to mind, and I pray...it's freeing, really. So if I 'like' your status or comment, you can be pretty sure that you were being prayed for that morning :-)

Just another way God reminds me that though I live IN the world, I am not OF the world...

All-in-all, I'm thankful for a medium such as facebook :-)

Tripping with 8

So we are gearing up for a short vacation. The first real vacation since the end of AGM last year when our family stayed over in Madrid after the meetings to see the city. Our trip to Ethiopia, while technically vacation TIME was anything BUT vacationy--and then we all know what the Christmas vacation ended up being...

So all that to say, we are going on vacation. Nowhere flashy, goodness knows we don't have the funds yet for flashy--it's just to the City...somewhere that you don't have to drive 40 minutes to get to a fast food restaurant...somewhere with a zoo and science museum...a place with a TARGET...a hotel with a POOL...so, this year, we'll settle for comfortable.

The children are super excited...even my sweet ethiopian babies are excited and they have NO idea what a vacation IS...but excitement is catching, and they've caught it! (Although, you should hear Canaan trying to understand the concept of a zoo...it's hilarious and well, a little convicting...)

Jared and I have done our research. We plant our family in the neighborhood of the City that is closest to our favorite shopping, favorite food, and our favorite people. The sweet lady on the phone at the hotel offered us a discounted rate even though we didn't have a AAA card and we are still under 65. We also know which fast food is cheapest for our family...we can eat at Taco Bell for about $13...we'll be having a lot of burritos (we are VERY thankful for the $1 five-layer burrito!!) -- PLUS, McDonalds has the 20 piece nuggets for $5 deal going on so we can get through there for about $16...not too shabby. All this saving enables us to take a break from fast food and catch a lunch meal at the Olive Garden or something like that...it evens out.

This will be our first vacation as 8. We'll all be 'learners'. It will also be 110 in the City this week...yippee. I mean, it's been 112 in our town the past 3 weeks, but I was hoping for the cooler 101 degree weather of the City while we were there...no such luck. So we will be hitting the zoo as soon as it opens and probably last no longer than a few hours...I'm sure all will be ready to go back to the hotel pool soon enough. I've got to remember to pack the sunscreen...

We are hoping that this week is our last dry week...we've been praying for rain for so long. Last week it rained for about 10 minutes. Just long enough to make Jared, who had just started mowing the lawn, run inside. My children run outside to play in whatever God chooses to send us...but it's WAY more fun in the rain than in 120 degree temps...

We've added to our number!

Our sweet little girl was born in the afternoon on June 8th.

This also happened to be the 6 month anniversary of the day that we received Canaan and Eden into our family FOREVER! I'm afraid the celebration was rather different than I expected, but we'll make up for it on December 8th!

Now, we are a family of 8. I've always loved the number 8...I'm not sure why----it's just always been my favorite. I like even numbers--there's no odd-man-out, and, well, it's just nice and round!

Apparently eight really is enough...and, judging from the stares we get in public, we are a true spectacle, at least in Southwest Oklahoma.

I have yet to try Walmart with everyone, by myself. I know, I'm a sissy. But I'm not raring to go out this time around like I was with the first three. I think I have a deeper desire for my housework to be tackled than to satisfy my need to get out of the house (on the other hand, the main factor could be the AMOUNT of housework I now have). Also, the thought of trying to navigate WalMart with 6 kiddos and then squeezing all that our family needs to get through the weeks between WalMart trips into one cart, seems rather daunting to me at the moment. I'll get there, I just need some time.

Time is something I run out of very quickly these days...almost as quickly as I go through detergent. There never seems to be enough of it. I always go to bed with things left undone----this is something new for me. Not that I was always on top of things before...I've never had very high standards...but even with my relatively low standards for the state of our home, I go to bed with things left undone. Right now I'm struggling under the 150 boxes that landed on our home 2 weeks ago (oh my, has it really been 2 weeks??). The boxes held our memories, our valuables, our mundane, and our trash----sorting it all out is taking a lot longer than I thought it would.

It's weird, but I find myself correlating our transition moving back to the States with how it felt to move to Italy. They are surprisingly similar:

I'm learning new ways to cook.
Cooking for 5 children means cooking more...in normal cases adding two children under 4 wouldn't mean adding two adult sized portions...but we are talking about Canaan and Eden a.k.a. 'the little vacuums'. During our time in Italy I felt like I really grew in my abilities in the kitchen having to learn to make MANY things from scratch...here, the ingredients are different...FLOUR is even a different consistency, and I have to rework all of my staple meals into 'American.' Plus, making things from scratch is cheaper than most ready-made options that I used before moving overseas and learning to fend for myself...so I'm still trying to pinch pennies and make good, easy meals at the same time. This is one country where 'eat like the locals' is NOT the way to save money in the kitchen.

I'm figuring out how to get from here to there.
Traveling in a car with every seat taken by a carseat, getting the kids to learn the order in which they should load and unload so as to avoid Stooge-like jam-ups inside and outside the car, driving a boat compared to other cars----all these things trigger a need for a new strategy and are not unlike our transition to driving in Italy...also, packing to board the metro is not unlike packing for a trip to WalMart, or worse, to a store with no shopping cart to hold kiddos like Penneys or a *gasp* furniture store...

I'm learning a new language and watching my kids do the same.
The language of my english-learning kids, the langage of southwest oklahoma slang, and even the language of pop culture has changed in this transition.

I'm still watching my children for signs of cultural stress.
They are adjusting well, but I still need to be vigilant to protect them from our tendency to do too much too soon.

I'm figuring out how to arrange our home out of nothing.
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss having IKEA nearby...their space saving options were so helpful...and while our home here is considerably larger than our apartment in Rome, we are still attempting to squeeze 3 children in each bedroom...I miss IKEA.

We are battling new illnesses, encountering new germs.
Ringworm, how we hate you.

I have to figure out how to clean the floors again.
In Italy it was learning to sweep and mop marble floors efficiently---- in Oklahoma my mopping skills come in handy, but there's also a ton of vacuuming...carpet care is TERRIBLE. Carpet is nice on tootsies in the cold winter compared to marble, but I find myself dreaming of a happy medium, like wood.

I run out of things I never ran out of before...
in Italy it was baking powder and baking soda---- in America, it's laundry detergent, toothpaste, and shampoo.

Life is a hodgepodge at the moment--a big, beautiful mess. We are so thankful for the way the Lord is providing here in America. He has been so very faithful. We cling to Him with every new 'hard'.

When you are an inept blogger...

...I find that it is desperately hard to start again.

We have had so much happen in the last 5 months and hardly any of it has been documented...where do you start? Do you go back to 5 months ago and hope to rehash? or can you just move on and start fresh from where you are at the moment?

Knowing that I'll probably go all defunct again very soon, it'll probably be best to just start from here and see what happens.

Just know that in the major 5 month gap, we've lived...chaotically, unconventionally, and barely holding it together at times...but we've lived.

About 5 months ago we gathered our children up from Ethiopia and came back to the States to meet and greet and celebrate Christmas. 3 months after we touched down, we found ourselves unable to return to Italy...and then my camera battery died (the charger being in Italy with my other lenses, video camera, extra memory cards, camera cord for the computer, and card reader--all left behind in the frenzy to pack up the 5, pack for the 2, close up the apartment, and skidaddle to Addis with 3 days notice)

But now, thanks to my mom who knows how terrible this loss of camera use really can be for my general well-being, I have a battery charger once again and after borrowing my mom-in-law's camera cord, I can share pictures with you fine people once more. Much better than just words... much better than a post relying on my ability to piece thoughts together coherently for those of you NOT privy to the inner workings of my indecipherable thought process...which lends itself much more toward james joyce-ness all the time.

So enough of this...the children are outside playing, screaming, riding their trikes like crazy--they spend the majority of their time in this way these days. Hope the neighbors don't mind. I don't normally regulate their noise level when they are outside I had to do that in Italy, I don't want to do that here if I don't have to ...it's when they get quiet that I have to worry. In the meantime, I have the extremely noisy dishwasher running, a load of laundry in the washer and a mountain waiting to be gathered up by their owners and put in the appropriate closets and suitcases (because, alas, we are still living somewhat from suitcases having no furniture in the boys and our room yet)... all that this all means is that there is time, however brief, to share a few pictures.

I'm sure someone will be running in to tattle on their sibling in about 2 minutes. But I'm trying the new tactic of 'work it out yourself'...shocks them every time still. I think they think I'm truly lazy, when in reality I'm learning that it gives them a chance to see that the offense really wasn't as bad as they first thought--they are going to live, they have words they can use directed toward the other person, and if you give a problem 2 minutes to rest, you most likely will end up thinking about something else.
Not to mention that if momma has to get involved that fought over toy will go into an indefinite time out and one of the offenders (if not both) will end up enduring a rather lengthy sit in a boring corner of the house. I'm pretty consistent with the consequences and so far, tattling is less frequent.

So, none of this is illustratable yet--so I'll just stop and start posting the pics...a plethora from the last couple of weeks. Elijah's class at school reenacting the Land Run, Judah and Iliana at church on Easter Sunday helping their teacher tell the story of Holy Week through Resurrection Eggs, my attempt to get Easter pictures of the family...good stuff. And if you follow me on facebook this is a colossal waste of your time...sorry.

Adoption changes everything...

Adoption is hard.

This is a little of what I have been learning in the last 3 months since bringing Canaan and Eden home...

It is also really good. Challenging. Full. Amazing.

We are still working on our initial bonding issues...tough stuff. More on that later probably.

On top of the challenges of adoption, our family has gone through so much bureaucratic hokey, misinformation from those supposedly in-the-know, and a whole slew of bad advice to last us for a LONG time. So, on top of the transitions that come with adoption, we have also been displaced from our home in Italy and relocated back to the States...for good.

In a nutshell, we cannot get the documents that Italy wants to grant our children long term visas, making our living in Rome (and probably any other country besides the US) no longer possible. The Italian-Ethiopian embassy will not translate the necessary documents into italian because we are not italian citizens and we are no longer in country (Addis) to plead our case. We did not know of these requirements before we left Rome. When we came back to the States, we tried to line up documentation as best we could, but roadblocks always appeared. As the months passed, we could not rely on our company to support us any longer during a wait that was indefinite, and they do not grant transfers to those in their first term (not that any country would most likely take us) so we made the difficult, but very clear decision to resign.

I could tell our story with bitterness, blaming individuals for their bad advice and attitudes that seemingly lead to where we are right now--but that would be unfair and untrue...the fact of the matter is, God was, and continues to be, guiding all of our circumstances, bringing us to the place where He wants us to be. It is His 'fault' that all this has happened. And THIS is where our peace comes from. He is showing Himself faithful to our family and we are blessed.

We are blessed to be together as family. Together with Canaan and Eden.

We prayed and waited for so long to be here, at this point, that we can't dwell on everything that we've lost. We have to focus on all that we have been blessed with. Our children are all healthy and happy. They are all getting used to this new family amazingly well. Canaan and Eden are growing and blossoming...they look healthier since we first brought them home...they've each gained almost 10 pounds and a couple of inches each and Eden is about to celebrate her 2nd birthday on Saturday!!

God has provided a car, a job, and hopefully this week we will close on a house for our family. Then we, along with our suitcases of things, can move in! We hope that our things in Rome will be crated and sent to us soon--we have many things for Canaan and Eden there, along with all of our supplies and things we'd been saving up for the baby coming in June. We've transitioned this far...it will be interesting to see how things change as we move from living with grandparents to living on our own. We'll have a whole new bunch of changes to sort through :-)

I know this is a little scattered...I'm not very good with words at the moment...I'll stop trying to type and just close with a few pictures...