A Day with Grandma

My kids adore their Grandma. Each one of them absolutely loved Grandma and Grandpa from the moment they saw them at the airpot when we came home. There was some kind of zing, a connection, a planetary alignment, something that meant they were bonded in a special way forever.

Today we went down to see my Mom (my dad was out birding, his obsession). We went to the Dollar Store and Grandma gave them each $5 to spend. We were there for a very long time--big decisions to be made on the best 5 things to buy. Then out to lunch and time at Grandma's house. It was nearly impossible to get pictures with all of them smilng and looking at the camera, but I think you can see how much love there is between them!

more pix

Home again...

Just back from a week at the beach. The weather was beautiful and sunny, then foggy (and beautiful) and then back to sunny again. The 4th of July parade was amazing this year - the biggest one ever, with TWO marching bands, a belly dancer troupe and the return of the Coast Guard Helicopter, which follows the parade route (all 6 or so blocks of it). Pretty cool all around.

Random Stuff

Me to new Chinese hostess at our favorite Chinese restaurant: Where's Jenny (Jenny being the owner who has run the front desk for the last 12 years)?

New Hostess: She is working at her other restaurant now

Me: That's too bad, We will miss her. My kids are Chinese and from the same part of China as Jenny and they really love her

NH: Oh, I thought you looked Asian!!

Me (a little startled): Oh, they are actually adopted from China

NH: It must be your necklace - that makes you look Chinese!


My necklace is a little jade circle on a red thread.

Summertime

I've been pretty lax about updating the blog lately, maybe due to being in summer mode, though we haven't had too many sunny days so far. The kids are out of school and in summer day care, Bethany is taking a summer reading program (she's not exactly thrilled about that) and we are all looking forward to 4th of July at the beach. So here are some recent pics.

They really do love each other

Saturday, Sunday, Monday in the Park

One of the things I like best about where we live is that there is some kind of park about every mile or so. Since Charlie works on Sundays, in the summer the kids and I try to find a new park at least a couple of times a month. Last summer we went south of our house. This summer we are going west.

On this long weekend, we visited 3 parks and today's park was especially nice. It was full of kids of all shapes and sizes. We brought a picnic lunch and the kids ran around for almost 3 hours. Annie found a little girl to teeter totter with and Jack and Bethany found sticks to be Samurais with. I sat on a bench in the sun, and read a little, but mostly watched kids and dogs and squirrels and birds and moms and dads enjoying the spring.

Two Picnics in a row

Yesterday we met some friends for a picnic in a park and then had our first experience geocaching - it was pretty fun! We found 7 of them with their help. The kids really liked finding "treasure." Charlie liked messing around with the GPS and I was just happy we got out and about and the weather was decent.

Charlie worked today, so the kids and I went to see my Mom for another picnic in another park. Weather was a little iffy, but we got some good play time in. These are pictures of the weekend!

At Least One Thing a Day.

We have too much stuff. Unbelievable, ridiculous, maybe even immoral, amounts of stuff. We have a very small house that is filled to the rafters. This includes the garage, the shed, the finished basement and the attic. We have 5 people, 2 dogs and 2 cats and really need the space currently occupied by stuff. When Charlie and I got our little place over coast, somehow I thought it would take a lot of the overflow. Which it did, to some exten, but now it's kind of full of stuff too. So last week, in the midst of spring cleaning fever, I decided that I could commit to giving away at least one (hopefuly more) thing a day for as long as possible. So far, it's been multiple bags of books to the book exchange at work, 3 large bags of clothes to a clothing drive, a couch, a dresser.

Today, we are taking a bag of things to Goodwill. So far we have some kids clothes, some of my clothes and the kids are right now looking for the one thing they have to give away today. This is a difficult task for them, so we are starting small (some Happy Meal toys, some small toys like play jewelry). The kids are going to give something away each week and I think we will need to work up to some bigger things. Some of their stuff we will probably sell on Craigslist and anything we get for that will have to be saved.

So we will see how this goes. The trick is going to be giving away more things than we bring in. Though we got something like 125 items of clothing yesterday from Craigslist yesterday, we have given away more than that in the last week (clearly their dressers and closets needed clearing out). I hope we can keep this up.

Why I Heart Craigslist

So my family has been big on garage sales, consignment, resale and thrift stores for a long time. Craigslist kind of combines all those things while letting you shop at home, so for me, it's been a perfect place to find kids' clothes, electronic stuff, etc, etc. A good share of the kids' wardrobe has come from clothing lots on Craigslist for the last couple of years. Today we scored big. I am so amazed by these girls clothes I had to write to boast about them--we got 130 things for 60 bucks and everything looked new. No stains, no tears and no sign of wear and all really expensive brands (we don't buy much Nike stuff new here). In fact there were several things that clearly had never been worn, including jeans and swimsuits and shirts. What was a little odd was that the seller said that she was selling them because her daughter outgrew them -there were about 10 sets of identical things (like they would have been for twins or something. This was good though, since the girls liked almost everything so it made for less fighting. The stuff that doesn't fit will be donated to a clothing drive at my job. So now they are pretty much set for months and months. Now I just have to find a place for it all.


Another reason to love Craigslist - we had a dresser I loved that became almost unusable (this happens when children pull out the drawers and use them as a ladder). So out on the curb it went and a posting went on Craigslist in the free section. And within a couple of hours it found a new home. More stuff will hopefully go tomorrow. Can you tell we are spring cleaning?

Mothers' Day is tonorrow

Bethany LOVES her Grandma


As always at this time of year, I am thinking about all the different Moms in my life.

My friends from high school became mothers at a much earlier age than I did and many are grandmas now.

There are moms I "know" through online adoption groups. Many of them have adopted 5,6 or more kids. Some have adopted children with significant medical needs and, sometimes, uncertain futures. They are awe-inspiring.

There is my friend Monique, who is going to have her first child in September and will be an amazing, amazing Mother.

And there are three mothers on the other side of the world who I will likely never meet. Because of them, I am a mom. I don't know the circumstances that led them to give up these precious children of mine. I hope that it was because they thought it was the only path to a healthy and safe life for the child. I do know they were all left in places where they would be quickly found. I imagine that those birth mothers must think of these children every day. I can't really get a handle on, though, what it would be like to never know what happened to them. Are they safe? Are they happy? Did they even survive? But in reality, I just don't know what those mothers think.

Then there is my Mom. In a few weeks, she will be 80 years old. Like everyone, she has weathered many challenges in life. She has significant health issues that I doubt many people could face with the strength, grace and just plain stubbornness she has. She was one of the first people we told when we decided to adopt and couldn't have been more supportive. She opened her heart and her arms to the three of them and they love their Grandma with all their hearts. I told them a little while ago that we were going to go see Grandma tomorrow and they all squealed with excitement.

My sister and I sometimes joke that we are turning into our Mom--we should be so lucky. Love you, Mom!

How to do a Pony tail

Bethany has been trying to grow out her hair forever. Unfortunately, she has hair like mine, very fine and kind of wispy. She also has an amazing cowlick on one side that causes her hair to stand straight up. But she has refused to let us do more than trim the ends and is determined to grow her bangs out so her hair will be like her older sister's.

Today I ran across a list that Bethany wrote, I think that Annie dictated it, on how to do her hair

Pot 1: Brush your hair first

Pot 2: Get the sponge and get it wet and get it wet on my hair.

Pot 3: Clip my bang.

Pot 4: Use the glitter thing and wet on my hair and hair and get it wet.

Pot 5: Put Hairtie in and do a pony on my hair.

The list is illustrated with drawings and carefully placed by her bed for future reference.
Although the pony is out in the above picture, the "glitter thing" is still in place. She is too cute.

Easter Weekend - and it's sunny!

Alas, the clouds are supposed to come in tonight, but today feels like spring. We had lunch with my parents and my sister and her family, then hit the park for a little bit. Just a lovely day.

Update on Jack

So we got to come home late yesterday. Jack slept for a while after surgery, then woke up and wanted to play computer games. He had a pretty decent lunch and everything was functioning well so they let us out. He was so cute, one of the nurses brought around some balloons from somewhere and the first thing he asked was if he could have two extras, for his two sisters. On a side note, balloons are thankfully becoming less traumatic in our house, For several years, the girls became very attached to any balloon they received and named them all "Balloony." One birthday, the Balloony of the moment decided to leave us and go on an adventure all by himself and it was a very difficult time for everyone.

Anyway, poor Jack is struggling with pain issues as he did with the last surgery. I would, too, if I had four very large incisions (one on either side of each knee). He remembers his last surgery very well, unfortunately, so is even more sensitive to even the beginnings of pain. We moved his bed out into the living room and he gets to spend the week watching TV and playing video games with Daddy. Hopefully tomorrow we can get him up in the walker for a little bit. This was our sixth surgery at Shriners between the three kids and it sure never gets any easier. Thank goodness for Shriners, though, it is an amazing place. Jack told Charlie today that he doesn't want to have any more surgeries. It's so tough to know your child is in pain, even though we know that this is something that can't be fixed when he's an adult and the consequences of not fixing it now will affect him forever. Still, when he's crying, you just want it all to be better.

Now it's a waiting game, in 3 months we get another xray and find out if the straightening of his legs is about the same, has reverted or might even be getting better. We are hoping and praying for the last one --any other prayers would be appreciated.

Easter Eggs and Surgery

We spent the afternoon at my sister's house, coloring Easter eggs, a tradition since Annie first came home. The kids loved it and have colorful hands to show for it.

Jack's orthopedic specialist called Thursday night and due to some new information he found, they decided to go ahead and take the hardware out of Jack's legs as there is a chance his growth could be affected permanently. The good news is that his legs have straightened 80-90% since the plates went in. Now we wait to see if they stay the same as he grows, revert or (small possibility) get better on their own. He may have to have them put back in at some point, but it's just a waiting game. This surgery should be a lot shorter than last time, so hopefully all will go well and we will be home tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from today. Or there will be some pictures later as Blogger's not letting me upload right now!

This is not for the faint of heart

In the last two days, I've been:

~thrown up on in my favorite grocery store, necessitating a frantic race with with a barfed- on child wailing in the grocery cart and a furtive trip out the door (a kind passerby notified store personnel for me). This meant that I had to drive 10 miles out of the way to go to a different grocery store the next day, because they know me at the first store and I

~provided dinner and snacks to two school friends that I did not know were coming for a playdate until 10 mins before they showed up,

~been told by all three of them "You NEVER pay any attention to me because you love Annie/Bethany/Jack more"

~been assured that other Moms would allow their 7,8 and 9 year olds to walk home after school and stay by themselves for 3 hours til I come home (never mind that there is actually a law against that here).

~Had several other infractions of Good Mommyhood that I don't quite understand but which my children assure me that I incurred.

Now I am going to be a Good Mommy (in their eyes) and a Bad Mommy (in mine) and going to my room BY MYSELF while leaving them to play the evil Batman Lego Wii game.