Apparently I thought Host Boy had gotten his visa but that was wrong information because I found out their visa appointment is actually this coming Thursday.

I will continue holding my breath until then!  There should be no issues, but you know.

The disorganization of Ukraine and timeline for the program is hard.  I desperately need to buy plane tickets to pick up Host Boy at Dulles but I’m not doing it until after he gets his visa at the embassy appointment.  I’m going to leave the kids with my sister, fly from Louisville to Dulles, then fly back home with Host Boy in the same day.  But they aren’t arriving in Dulles until 3:25 in the afternoon on December 20th.  The ticket prices are going up and flights are getting booked, and mostly I hate not having everything squared away with 27 days to go.

More patience, right?

Swift subject change–Hope all of you in America had a happy Thanksgiving!

This year I’m very thankful for quite a few things.  Especially thankful that my husband is willing to work a million hours a week to support us, and thankful that I have such a wonderfully supportive online community who has helped bring not one but TWO orphans here from Ukraine!  I would kiss you all but a) I hate germs and b) I cannot reach through the computer with my lips.

As far as celebrations go we ate at my parents’ house yesterday.  First Thanksgiving without my grandfather.  Technically he didn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner last year either because he wasn’t feeling well, but still.  Kind of sad.

I took funny panoramic pictures of everyone eating. Tyler was right next to me, so he wasn’t in the picture.  Everyone else looks so goofy!

 

My sister and her boyfriend.  Bahaha!

Lazy, all of them.

My Grandma and Ada’s booty.

(These are from my real camera)

Rosie is *always* eating.  She’s a bottomless pit!  Luckily (unlike Ada) she enjoys things like raw carrots…

Just down the road from my house, night before Thanksgiving:

My kids LOVE this house.  It’s around the corner from us.

They call it The Crazy Christmas House.

A bit of ridiculousness:

My Silkie roosters think they can fight like ninjas.

Today we had a second thanksgiving at my in-laws’ house.  We had chili instead of typical holiday food.

Afterwards we saw Rise of the Guardians, which was a pretty good movie.  It was the first time Ada has seen a movie in 3D.  She was quite impressed!

(She has a fruit snack stuffed in her cheek, haha.)

Rosie reading at home tonight–she’s reading longer chapter books now.

She likes to read in bed every night until she falls asleep.  Best habit ever!

She just finished the first book in the “Hank the Cowdog” series.  It was 129 pages!  Pretty good for a 6 year old.

Then she read the first Judy Moody book in two nights’ time.

Now she’s reading The Children on Troublemaker Street, which is slightly easier.  It’s by the same author who wrote the Pippi Longstocking books.

(I was a bit shocked to realize that this book says, “damn it” a lot.  Rosie read me an entire chapter where the 4 year old girl says damn it over and over!)

I love that she’s enjoying reading so much.  I have to encourage her to read a book from start to finish though, she tends to want to read part of a book then pick up another and read part of it, never actually finishing an entire book.  That drives me crazy! It’s like book ADD.

These pictures are from a couple weeks ago but I never had time to post them:

  

You can really see how brown Ada is in these pictures.  She’s a completely different skin color than Tyler, Rosie, and me.  No idea why!

She also tans really dark quickly and never burns.

  

 

This is, hands down, Ada’s favorite picture of ALL TIME.

“Show me the picture of me Ada with the realllllly big leaf hair!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dream House…!

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Rosie and Tyler are at King’s Island today.  (Amusement park, for those not local…)  It’s Toyota’s free day there.  Toyota rented out the entire park and workers get free tickets for everyone in their family.  Tyler has made it a tradition for him to take Rosie every year and Rosie *loves* it.

 

 

It’s weird having half of my family in another state without me.  Ada doesn’t know what to do without Rosie here!  It’s so much work too–I have to actually watch Ada every second because Rosie isn’t helping me.  How sad is that?  I don’t realize how much Rosie does until she’s not here.  She’s an excellent helper and tattle tale, haha!

 

I’m getting super excited about hosting this winter.  We’re still waiting to find out about Karina, but if she can’t come this little other guy stands out to us–he is super adorable!

His name is Nazar and he’s 7 years old. His bio says he was hardly able to talk when he came at age 6 but now, a year later, he’s doing well at school and totally caught up. He’s described as cuddly and liking to tell stories and talk about books he’s read.  Sad to think of what might have happened to him in his first 6 years of life that caused him to be so behind.  The only negative thing the bio mentions is that he has really bad teeth, poor kiddo.

I wonder if we might not be better off with a little boy so we don’t have three little girls fighting over dolls and clothes!  He has the same color hair as my girls and the same shade of blue eyes that Rosie has.  :)

In order to host him we’d have to move the litter box to the bathroom closet and turn the back room (current home of the litter box and cat food) into his room.  That shouldn’t be too hard, assuming my orange Gus kitty decides to start using the new litter box.  Frustrating!  By the way, for those that asked in my previous entry the litter robot is called The Litter Robot. That’s the actual name of it!  (This reminds me of Dr. Who…doctor who? The Doctor! DR. WHO!  What’s the name of that litter robot?  LITTER ROBOT! Ahem…) The Litter Robot is freaking awesome.  We’ve had it for a week, and there’s just hardly any smell!  It’s like night and day difference.  When you walk in our house you don’t immediately smell cat.  When you walk in the room with the litter box you don’t immediately smell it.  And you never have to squat down and scoop it, I hate doing that.

Anyway, back to winter hosting–

All of the kids from this particular orphanage that Nazar is at look so pale and scrawny to me in the pictures.  They told us that the kids from Tanya’s orphanage were the best fed out of all the orphanages they’d ever visited.  That must be true because at age almost 8 Tanya wore size 10/12 clothes.  She was quite hefty and new how to pack the food away, that’s for sure.

Christmas isn’t that far away.  The host organization is still visiting orphanages and compiling the photo listing of kids to choose from.  They plan to have at least one hundred kids on the list this winter!  The photo list should be done in October.  I’ll share it here in case anyone is curious, once they post it.

So far they’ve just posted photos from this one orphanage.  Tyler and I were looking at them and we both pointed out Nazar at the same time.  Our choices are limited because you have to be 15 years older than a child you adopt from Ukraine according to their law.  (I think you also have to be at least 25 years old and married for one year.)  So we could adopt a kid 11 and under.  We wouldn’t want to host a kid we couldn’t adopt in case we fall in love!  And we wouldn’t want to host them knowing we might be taking an opportunity for them to be hosted by a family that *could* adopt them.

There are so many older kids on the list, up to age 16, that look like they are full of potential.  Some of them are able to come here on student visas once they age out of the system at 16 if they are sponsored by host families here.  That basically saves their lives and gives them a chance to choose college instead of prostitution, organized crime, or suicide.  There’s one boy on there whose bio says he’s very intelligent and wants to be a computer programmer.  Another boy wants to be a preacher.  One loves animals and dreams of studying to be a vet.  In Ukraine when they age out their only options are organized crime or some kind of basic trade school.  I would love to help those kids one day, when we’re older.  It seems right now we’re in the season of our lives where we’re young and have little kids.

I don’t know what will happen with Karina.  We would have trouble seeing her on the host list and just forgetting about her, you know? We’ll just have to wait and see I guess.  Always with the patience and waiting!!

 

Of course all of this is pointless if we don’t get the $2,700 to host.  You know how that goes.  I will be praying my little heart out and also brainstorming some fundraisers.

Why is money so overwhelming?  If we do decide we want to adopt we will need to round up so much money too.  I wish it was free, but love alone isn’t enough.  I guess faith goes a long way.  That whole faith the size of a mustard seed thing again…

I want to approach the Ukrainian church here and ask them if they would be interested in hosting, fundraising, and translating.  They would be such an awesome resource.  The church is very strict–they even wear head coverings for women in church and they only speak Ukrainian in the services and Sunday school classes.  (They also speak in tongues there…)  Tanya loved their church when she was here.  Tanya said she’d never been to a church before.  The Ukrainian church members we talked to had never heard of orphan hosting before and seemed intrigued by the idea.

If there are 10 host families in our area (OH, KY, VA, and a couple other east coast states) then the kids will fly into a local airport instead of Chicago. That would be amazing!  The other KY host family is hosting two kids, plus if we host one, and there’s another lady in VA who is hosting two brothers, and if Tanya’s family hosts her again…that’s six kids.  We’d only need a few more families to reach the magic number of 10 kids for our area!

I’m getting so excited.

I know that not everyone is able or willing to host or adopt an orphan for multitudes of personal reasons. But this is the best part, my favorite part–it’s kind of one of those “it takes a village” ideas.  Every single person who contributed to the hosting cost for Tanya was a part of bringing her here and helping her find a family.  Not just me alone.  Lots of people weren’t able to host, but they were able to send a few dollars (or more) so that we could host her.  Lots of people were able to help give her a wonderful summer and possibly save her life.  You guy saw the difference between her sad orphanage picture and then the pictures I posted! She was able to get correct glasses so she could SEE.  Tanya couldn’t see the TV when she first came to our house because the prescription was way too strong.  Orphanage hand me down glasses are not ideal.  If nothing else we sent her back to school this fall with the gift of sight, and you all contributed to that.  She was able to start public school this fall, she’s not in the horrible mental institution right now like they were planning.

Sure, we can’t save the whole world.  I cannot save every child who has no mother or father.  But we can love one at a time, right?  It’s kind of addicting. :)

 

Oh my gosh we are sick yet AGAIN.

I’m so fed up with this.  We’ve been sick over and over for months.  We’ll be better for a week, two at most, before coming down with the next illness.  Tyler and I both get sick every time too no matter how hard we try to wash our hands and not catch it.

This time it’s another cold.  Super sore throat, stuffy nose.  I still wasn’t fully well from the last illness either.

We take vitamin D, multivitamins, probiotics, vitamin C, and try supplements to ward off germs when we feel them coming on.  Nothing helps.  We used to never hardly get sick, until Rosie turned 5 last year.  I don’t know what the deal is.  Every illness starts with her.  I think it’s because she’s developed a disgusting nose picking habit and she just shoves germs right up her nose then spreads them all over the house.  I’ve tried multiple things to get her to stop doing it.  It’s like a compulsion or something.  She hardly got sick when she was a toddler or preschooler because she never put things in her mouth.  I guess her immune system has a lot of catching up to do.

Kill me now.

Pretty soon we’re going to have had every illness out there. (Except chicken pox, which is the one thing I wanted them to catch and get it over with!)  Rosie had four stomach viruses this past year alone.  FOUR!!!!!!!!!  The last one was in May.  She never threw up in her ENTIRE life until she turned five.  After that stomach virus in May we were sick with some cold and fever for about two weeks in June.  Then sick for a week in the middle of July with a cold.  Sick again the last week of July and the first two weeks of August with a horrible cold and high fever and congestion thing. I think that was the flu because it came with severe body aches and days of high fever.  Then immediately after we got sick with a tonsil infection, we all had puss in our throats.  I was just recovering from that one.  My last puss filled sore burst yesterday afternoon.  Now we’re sick again the for the last week of August with another cold and low grade fever.

I’m desperate to make it stop.  Yesterday I even ate a raw clove of garlic to ward off sickies.  Apparently it did not work, because after staying up the entire night with a crying sick Ada I am now sick with the cold.  My throat feels like someone sliced it with knives and the snot is starting up.

Ugh.

Now that I am done complaining, I’ll post pictures.

First new Instagrams of the ducklings from yesterday!  I moved them to their little pen instead of the box they had been in.

This is the pen.  The extension cord goes to their heat lamp.  (It’s so hot and dry outside here!)

They need some straw.  I was going to buy some today, but we’re all too sick to go out.

Did I post these already?  I’m too tired to look back.  They’re from a couple days ago.

See little Lazarus back there?  He’s doing great!

Duck face is all grown up, on the left.  June is in the middle and Benny is on the left–they are the parents of the ducklings.

This is a picture of the hardware to my garage door.  The wood is the ceiling of my garage.

Every time I walk in the garage I look up to check for large dangling spiders–learned the hard way to make that a habit.

I looked up the other day and did a double take.  That’s a bantam egg stuck up there.  She must have climbed up there to lay it!?

I also have pictures of the kids from the last few weeks that I never posted.  Most of them are of Ada because Rosie is always off playing with friends or something.  A bunch of the Ada pictures were taken while Rosie was at dance class.

Bath crayons stain my white tub and tile and make it look filthy.  I’ve given up.  They have fun.  The whole tub needs a good scrubbing in the grout, I’ll get right on it if I’m ever not sick for five minutes…

There was a bunch of light coming in the window above them.

Ada has an obsession with this owl mask that my soon-to-be sister in law gave her.

These were taken while Rosie was at dance class last week.

And lastly a few of Ada last night while Rosie was at dance class.  It’s so dark in front of my house in the late afternoon.

Now clearly I need some portraits of Rosie!  She’s getting new glasses at her one year check-up in September and I’m definitely getting that non-reflective coating on the lenses.

Glasses reflections ruin most pictures of her, so frustrating!

Back to laying in bed and feeling like death…

I have to interrupt my regularly scheduled homeschooling post to share pictures!

I don’t think I ever updated about The Birthday Ducklings.  They were all murdered by their father, Benny Duck.  He broke their necks one afternoon and I found them all three floating in their little pool.  I’d seen him chasing them the day before and thought about separating them, but I never dreamed he would actually kill them.  Apparently male ducks sometimes murder their offspring, who knew?

It was incredibly sad.

BUT…they are back!  The three ducklings, reincarnated. ;)

June, the mama duck, sat on eggs this past month.  For some reason she abandoned them a few days before they hatched.  (She’s an awful mother, she should have protected the other ducklings and didn’t even miss them when they died.)  I stuck the two eggs I found under my Silkie hen.  Silkies will brood anything.  This particular hen had been sitting on a box of river stones she found in the garage for a few weeks hoping to hatch them.

A couple of days later we could hear peeping and pecking from inside the eggs.

Rosie was thrilled and spent a lot of time listening to them.

  

  

After 48 hours of noise there were cracks! The first egg finally pipped!

We waited and waited, but nothing else happened.  The duckling got the tip of its beak out of the shell but could move no further to hatch out.

With a sinking feeling I realized a terrible error in my Silkie-hatching-ducks plan.  Ducks get out and swim, then get back onto their eggs wet.  This makes the eggs warm and humid.

Chickens…well chickens don’t do that.  They are much more dry.  I SHOULD HAVE MISTED THE EGGS!

The baby duck couldn’t hatch out because the membrane inside of the egg had dried out and essentially glued the duckling to its own egg shell.  Crisis!

There’s no such thing as a bird c-section.  Eggs have veins running along the inside that attach to the membrane.  If you rip open the veins then the bird will bleed to death and die.

What to do, what to do??

 I had to try and do something, otherwise the duckling would just die inside of the shell.  So I started at the little hole the duckling had made with its bill and I gently chipped away while moistening the dried out membrane I exposed using a warm, wet sponge.

I managed to mostly avoid the veins I saw.  I was holding my breath.

I love seeing how the duckling was all packaged tightly inside.

See all of those veins in the shell?

I wasn’t sure if it would be ok since I peeled it out of the egg.  It fluffed up and it’s fine now!  Rosie named it Junior, after the mama duck June.

Then the second egg pipped, and the beak was sticking up out of the shell with the duckling unable to move around and hatch out, just like the first duckling.

 I held my breath and attempted to rescue it without killing it.  This one was more bloody and took a long time to perk up.  We thought it was going to die for sure.

It laid there limply for hours.  The girls named it Sleepy because they didn’t believe me when I said it could be too weak to live. Obviously it was only sleepy!

Please don’t die, please don’t die….

(Here are some pictures from my real camera.)

Sleepy, next to its empty shell.

Sleepy next to the shell, and Junior happily napping while fluffing up.

Rosie and Kirsten watching the ducklings.

DUCKSSSSS!

While waiting for Sleepy to wake up (or die) we had a tea party in the weird red glow from the heat lamp.

Then we played soccer, which ending up being dangerous after the ducklings almost got knocked out.

Finally, fluffing achieved!

I don’t know what this face was about.

And Sleepy look like it might live!

Rosie before her first dance class of the season, the evening of Hatch Day.

He knows not to eat them…

I swear, he won’t touch the ducklings! But they smell good…

She wasn’t squeezing, she knows how to be gentle. Most of the time.

Yesterday I found a third egg peeping outside!  June left it unattended all night long, and it got cool out.  I was surprised it was still alive.

I tried to let it hatch, but it was stuck too.  So I helped it gently like the others, but there was a lot of blood.  A lot.

I managed to get it out, but something was wrong.  I think where it got too cold it didn’t finish developing properly.  It didn’t absorb the yolk all the way.

Basically its ducky belly button is like a big hernia.  It hasn’t been able to open its eyes.  It twitches and scoots around the box on its side, but its almost been more than 12 hours and it hasn’t opened its eyes or gained any muscle control.

I thought for sure it would die over night, but it didn’t.  It’s still flopping around in there.  I’m not sure what to do.  I hope it dies soon to get it over with.

The other ducklings are snuggling it, and occasionally it stretches out and yawns.  Poor little guy.

We took the two healthy ducklings outside to play yesterday evening.  They are big enough now to waddle along.  Yesterday they could barely walk in the grass. They loved it today!

This afternoon we looked at a house for sale.  We really liked it, except that it has a tiny backyard.

We need to move.  Our current house is just not cutting it, we’re tripping over each other.  If we’re going to homeschool successfully we need to have a little space to spread out and do work.  No matter how much I try to organize it’s impractical to live in this cramped space 24/7.  It’s not like we’re all away at school and work during the day.  Especially since we want to have more kids, we will need more space for sure.

We can’t afford a farm with acreage and a nice house.  Don’t think we want to go the route of trailer, because then we’d be stuck there and never be able to save up to build the house we would want/need for a big family.  We can’t find much to rent with our dogs, cats, and chickens.

I’m not sure what to do.  I guess that’s why casually looking is a good thing.  We can wait for something good to come along and for things to fall into place.

I have my eye on an old school house built in the 1920′s.  It’s got two floors and a basement.  It’s a huge red brick building.  I think it would be kind of awesome to live in it.  It’s on five acres of land too!

There are a lot of considerations though–asbestos, lead paint, wiring, sewage…this all basically translates into $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

Yeah.

Tyler is going to call the mortgage broker tomorrow to see what amount we’d be approved for once he’s hired on.

Did I mention Tyler got his hire on papers for Toyota last week?? He turned in his application and now he just has to go through the drug testing (hair and urine both), physical, an interview, and get background checks done.  All of that can take 4-6 weeks by the time they do all the paperwork and everything.  They are notoriously slow.

After he’s hired on we get way better insurance and he gets a $2 an hour raise every six months until he maxes out around three years from now.

Anyway, after looking at that house for sale we did some of this:

We had supper at my in-laws’ house tonight.

Rather than buying the stupidly expensive battery and charger for this old power wheels thing we decided to come up with a free way to use it.

The girls have been pushing each other on it, which is hysterical because Ada can push Rosie down the sidewalk.

My father in law tied it to his old lawnmower tonight.  (Obviously the blade wasn’t on.)  It went so slow, but the girls thought it was unbelievably fun.

I think they would have ridden around the yard for hours.

Tyler had fun driving them too, once Papa got tired of it.

We’re starting back to school tomorrow.

Rosie is doing Year 1, or first grade. We’re doing Charlotte Mason style homeschooling this year again.  I love it.

I want to write more about our school plans and goals for this up coming year soon, but right now it’s 1 in the morning and I’m so tired I think my eyeballs are melting…

Today is my birthday.  I’m now the ripe old age of 26.

To be honest it wasn’t a very great birthday.  The girls have been sick with a cold and Ada hasn’t slept more than two hours in the past three days. I am totally exhausted, like to the point of being non-functional.

When I went out to check on our chicks this morning something had eaten the skin off of the head of one chick.  The poor little thing was still alive, but it had a bare skull.  The rest of its body was unharmed.  Disturbing and sad.  I held it for several hours this morning to keep it warm while it died.  I thought about putting it out of its misery but then I didn’t really know how to easily do that.  It was still peeping and trying to open its eyes and move around.

What is really creepy is that the same thing happened to another chick the night before.  There’s a serial chick killer!  It scalps my chicks!

The chicks are in the garage with two Silkie hens brooding them.  The garage door is closed, and I know the Silkies didn’t do that to their own babies because they are very protective and loving mamas.

When I called my mom to tell her about it she suggested that it could be crickets.  My garage is infested with these freaky monster crickets. They’re called camel crickets, or cave crickets.  They’re huge, the size of a man’s thumb, and they have humped backs.  They even have toes.  There are so many of them in the garage. They only come out at night.  If you go in there in the dark the floor is just solid with them.  They are on the walls too.  Chickens sleep very soundly in the dark, so it’s possible that these disgusting creepy freak monster crickets could sneak into the nest and eat a chick.

Since the broody hens have been in the garage I’ve been closing the door, thus trapping the cricket population inside without food.  Before this the door was always ajar because it doesn’t latch well.  I already knew that it’s not safe to leave crickets overnight in the lizard cage because they will eat the lizard.  I guess they eat chicks too.

My mom suggested I put up lights over the nest so that the crickets are deterred. My garage is lit up like a Christmas tree tonight.  I went in there earlier, after dark, and I didn’t see a single cricket.  Fingers crossed they don’t murder anymore of my fluffies tonight.  :(

On top of that tragedy, I must have eaten something wrong by accident because my intestines had that awful flaming sensation brewing inside of them today.

I found out that I am extremely allergic to rye–did I ever write about that?  The testing also showed I’m allergic to pistachios, which are easy to avoid.  Unfortunately it’s hard to avoid rye because of cross contamination.  Really annoying.  I must have accidentally eaten some rye hidden in bakery goods (like crumbs on it by accident or mixed in the wheat flour) because eating rye gives me liquid fire in my lower abdomen the following day, plus my mouth feels irritated and swollen, and my nose is extremely stuffy.

Awesome.

I’m glad I figured out what causes it, I just wish it was easier to avoid.  (I’m also lactose intolerant, which isn’t as big of a deal to me as the stupid rye allergy.)

Randomly I am not allergic to any other grains even though they are closely related. Just rye.  Not gluten, or wheat.  My body hates rye!

Anyway, I spent the day feeling like crap and doing nothing.  My kids were grumpy from being sick and tired.  Tyler had to be at work early.  My house is a mess. My intestines were too angry to even eat birthday cake or go to birthday dinner with my parents. How sad.

Tomorrow will be a better day, right?  Right.

I was feeling rather sorry for myself and considering a lame pity party until I went outside this afternoon to water the birds and the garden.  I heard this huge commotion and suddenly my duck June came marching out from her hidden nest way back under the chicken coop.  She quack honks so loudly when she comes out.  I think she likes to announce her presence.

She had four ducklings following her!

I couldn’t believe it.  She’s been hiding under the chicken coop on and off for months but nothing has ever happened.  I was beginning to wonder what she was doing under there.

Benny and June made adorable babies!  Squee!

She hatched ducklings ON MY BIRTHDAY!  Of all days!

All the chickens were staring at the ducklings as if they were thinking, “What the heck are those things?”

Here they are trying food and water for the first time.  Well they didn’t try it so much as just look at it.

Watching their daddy duck eat:

“Hey guys, what is this wet stuff?”

Warning me to scoot back from her babies.  Shocking, she’s usually very tame and will eat from your hand.

Don’t mess with Mama Duck, huh?

Oh, hello there!  See how tiny they are?

I love it when ducks peer upwards with one eye.  (Especially when they all do it in unison.)

Ah, they are so cute.  It’s nearly unbearable.  I just love ducks.

I’m thrilled to have surprise birthday ducklings!

They totally made my day better.

I’m having a lot of anxiety.

That’s really nothing new considering I’ve struggled with anxiety for a long time, but still…anxiety is lame and I dislike it.

I’m nervous about K coming.

We’ve already got such a good thing going, what if she ruins it?  What if her visit is just horrible?

What if she has reactive attachment disorder?  What if it’s just too hard to deal with?

What if she hates us?  What if our house is too messy?  I can’t keep my house clean all the time with two kids, how will I keep it clean enough with three kids?

What if our house just isn’t good enough?  What if we aren’t old enough parents, rich enough, experienced enough?

Even worse than the above fears, what if she’s perfect for us?  What if we fall absolutely head over heels in love with her?

How will we put her back on the plane to Ukraine if we love her and want to keep her forever?

How will we afford to adopt her?  How will we go to Ukraine to get her and stay there for the several weeks to months it will take to complete the adoption when we have no money?

What if it’s impossible?

Even more frightening, what if it is possible?

What does older child adoption look like?  How do you heal the lonely heart of a little girl who has never had a family to love her, who missed out on all the nurture and love she deserved during her babyhood?

It’s so safe to just say no.  To sit here and not let our hearts go.  It’s safe to not love unconditionally, without knowing where your love will take you.

It’s risky to love an orphan.  Very risky, very scary, and very…a lot of emotions.

But how can we not?  Once we know, how can we not do it?  There’s just no turning back.

The other day I was driving down the road and inwardly lamenting the fact that our house is small and we don’t exactly have room for K’s clothing to fit anywhere.

We only have these really old, broken kid sized dressers.  Spending money on furniture is not in the budget.  So our clothes don’t have space to be put away in drawers.

How could we have a little girl here with no where to put her things?

We got home and as we were getting out of the car my neighbors across the street were carrying out a dresser.

He asked if we wanted it.  His wife bought a new bedroom set and they needed to move the old one out to make space.

Huh, what?  Random coincidence again??

Not only did they want to give us a dresser, it is a nice solid wooden dresser with a mirror on the top.

(Rosie was just asking me if she could ever have a dresser with a mirror in her room!)

AND it has a matching tall dresser that they also gave us.  Two nice dressers!  Not ten minutes after I was just stressing about not owning dresser space.

What the heck?

Now for some things that are good.

Mainly my kids!  (I mean, you know, they aren’t always good, but they are pretty much awesome 99% of the time.  Or when they aren’t trying to make me crazy…)

Rosie had her spring dance recital last night.  For the recital she has to wear make-up.  The outfits and the make-up kind of make me want to run in circles screaming and then bury my head in the sand, but Rosie absolutely *loves* every tiny detail.

So she had to wear red lipstick…and this was a source of major, major excitement in our household.  I let Rosie put some on the morning before the recital so she could practice not smearing it all over herself by accident.  Oh, she nearly exploded with joy.  She kept asking me if I thought she looked more like a queen or a princess, or a maybe a fashionista?

Ada grabbed the tube of lipstick, whipped the lid off, and ran down the hall laughing at the top of her lungs while rapidly applying it to her lips.

She was very upset when I took it away.  She stayed angry at me for quite a long time actually.  She felt that she didn’t get to put on quite enough of it.

“Mom, send this photo to Cade.  It will make him want to marry me.”

Someone help.  Where does she even get these ideas?

Ada saw her reflection and was very pleased wif her wipstick.

 Miraculously she has not a single speck on her teeth.

Rosie has no stage fright.  At all.  She doesn’t get that from me.

She loved every second of her recital.  Her group tap danced to Yankee Doodle.

Before the recital:

 

Dancing!

Every girl got a medal after the show.

Here are a few more pictures from the performance, just for the heck of it…I took them from my seat with Ada squirming in my lap.

Ada wanted to run up on the stage and dance too.  She ran and I had to tackle her several times, but luckily she never made it onto the stage!

And after…

I have a bunch of pictures from today to share too.  Will have to post them tomorrow because it’s already 1:15 in the morning.

On Sunday night Rosie was being absolutely awful and refusing to go to sleep even though she was waaaay over tired.  She just kept screaming and kicking, it was terrible!  Finally at 10 Tyler went in her room and sat on the bed to scoop her up in his arms, but somehow in a split second in the dark her leg got caught or something.  Tyler doesn’t even know what happened.  Rosie was kicking and fighting him and it was a freak accident.

She started screaming this scream I’ve never heard her make before.  It was kind of chilling.  She screamed like that for an hour, and she shook hard all over, her teeth chattered, and she sobbed that she was going to die.  Finally we woke up Ada and carried Rosie screaming to the car to go to the emergency room because something was obviously very wrong.

They took us back to a room right away, but then we waited for hours.  Netflix on Tyler’s phone saved the day for sure.

They finally did an x-ray, and we waited for another couple of hours.  Rosie was in so much pain but they wouldn’t even give her Motrin until after they looked at the x-ray results. Why, I have no idea.

 

(You can see her ankle bracelet!  The arrows point to the irregularity.)

 

 

Finally the ER doctor came in and said she thought Rosie’s leg was just sprained because the x-ray didn’t show any fractures she could find.  So they gave Rosie some Motrin and wrapped her leg with an ace bandage and sent us home.

The next afternoon the emergency room called me and said a radiologist had reviewed the x-ray and saw an irregularity.  They suggested we see an orthopedic doctor.  The orthopedic doctor they suggested had a week wait time to get in, so I called our pediatrician to see what they thought I should do and they made an appointment for us at their recommended place.  They called me and said to go right in to the orthopedic doctor as soon as we could.  I’m so thankful we finally found a competent and caring pediatrician’s office!  I was really disappointed in the care we got from the ER.  What a huge waste of money that was.  (Just our co-pay is $250!)

We went in to the orthopedic doctor this morning and we waited for 3.5 hours.  Holy crap.

We tried to make the best of it.

Finally we were seen.  The doctor said he saw what looks like a buckle fracture on her leg.  It’s very minor, but there none the less. Poor Rosie.

 

They gave Rosie a padded brace to wear.  She can take it off for bathing and sleeping, so it’s not too awful.  It should heal in 1-3 weeks.  We go back next Tuesday to have another x-ray so the doctor can see if it’s gotten better or worse.

I think it’s already healing because yesterday Rosie was so miserable she couldn’t move.  Today she doesn’t complain of pain until the Motrin wears off, and even then she’s not hysterical like she was yesterday.  She’s able to get up and walk around some today.  That’s a good sign.

Rosie is extremely upset that she is missing dance class this week.  Her recital is coming up on June 8th. I’m really hoping it’s healed by then or she will be totally devastated.  They are tap dancing to Yankee Doodle.  She already has her outfit and she practices daily.  She loves dance class, it’s her very favorite thing.

Tyler has cried a lot over what happened.  He feels so sad about it.  He was so upset on the Sunday night when we had to go to the ER that he made himself sick.  He’s afraid Rosie will think he broke her leg on purpose because he had just been upset with her for her trillion hour long tantrum when he was picking her up and her leg got fractured.

I can’t figure out how someone’s leg can get fractured in bed.  What the heck?  It was really, truly a freak accident!  I hate seeing Rosie in that much pain.  :(  I’m still kind of in disbelief that this actually happened.

I’m still a little worried that the hospital will call CPS to investigate.  I need to clean up the explosion of toys in Rosie’s room just in case they show up, and probably put away the rest of the laundry.  I don’t really have anything to hide but I’d feel a lot better if my house was pretty clean.

 

My to-do list is about 20 miles long.  We’re a part of our town’s tour of chicken coops coming up on Sunday.  We’re expected to have 500+ people in our yard to view our chickens.  I had a major set back with Rosie’s injury.  I still have to finish planting my garden, paint the chicken coops, clean them out well, and pressure wash my back porch.  Duck Face has been living on the back porch and it’s getting a bit scary.  I have to get him some kind of pen soon now that he’s bigger and making larger poops.  Yikes.  Tyler has to stain the back porch railing and the picnic table.  We’ve already done some landscaping, but we still need to hack back our tangle of blackberry bushes.

I feel kind of panicked, I have so much to do and so little time.  Rosie can no longer run and play outside with Ada while I get stuff done!

My sister is graduating from high school on Saturday, and that will take up most of the day. Her party is after graduation.  I can’t believe she’s this old! I used to change her poopy diapers!  Here’s her senior picture.  I’m going to do more senior pictures of her soon without her hair straightened.

 

I also have four photo sessions to edit, which I better go get started on right now…I need to go to bed soon!