(actually we received two, one for each of the girls), but now we are once again on the move! Typical in adoption, you hurry up and then wait, hurry and wait. We hurried after we received the LOAs, and now we are waiting again. This wait won't (hopefully) be so long, as the LOAs were really the logjam that has now cleared.
We were excited to receive two updates on the girls, one official, one unofficial. One we received from our agency that said that that daughter was well, walking, and unfortunately, has stranger anxiety. Eeek, I will be a stranger to her! She is not a small thing. If the measurements are correct, she is one chunky monkey!
Our other update came in the form of an e-mail I received from another mom I connected with via a forum. We discovered that our kids are in the same orphanage. She is there now, and before she left asked me to send a picture of our daughter as well as her Chinese name. She was hoping to be able to send pictures of our girlie if she was able to make a trip to the orphanage. We were thrilled when she sent six pictures! As God would sovereignly orchestrate it, our kids had beds right next to each other! The comment from orphanage workers about our daughter is that "she walks, plays with other children, and is a good girl." That girl has quite the belly on her. Clearly, we will have to name hers as we have done to the triplets' bellies.
It's so hard to predict when things will happen, but we are thinking we will possibly travel in October/November. Maybe. Perhaps.
In the meantime, we are STILL waiting (heavy sigh) to move into our new house. We have some construction going on, and I don't want to live in a construction zone. I could just see one of the triplets accidentally get built into a wall. Hmmmmm........no, no, perish the thought!
We did have to start school in our present home, which was a major bummer. I had to go to the new house, rummage through boxes, and bring materials back to the "old" house. School is definitely a challenge this year as I have preschool through high school. The first week I thought I would lose what little mind I had left, as it was very difficult to juggle the needs of all the kids. Of course, everyone needed me at once. By the second week, I had worked out most of the kinks, but all will change again when our other activities start again. Here are my lovely students:
Here is Big D, my first high schooler (where did the time go???)
Then there is "Bob" my middle schooler
Sissy is my lone upper elementary kiddo
Kimi is a kinder!!!!
Monkey boy (MB) is too, and boy is that kid a fast learner!
LB rounds out the bunch. He is definitely improving, but really can't keep up with the wonder twins. That's okay, the point is that he is improving at his own pace. Victory is still very hard won (what I call "blood, sweat, and tears" to get him to do things sometimes), but we celebrate them nonetheless.
Homeschooling moms are the opposite of the ones you see on TV commercials who are dancing through the aisles at Staples when it is "back to school" time. No, we are more like the kids in those commercials, dragging our feet with heads bowed behind the cart. Okay, maybe we're not that bad, but we love summer. We don't mind that the kids are home all the time, because, well, they are always home all the time. It's just that in the summer, we are not having to formally teach them. The start of school for us means that "free time" is the time after the kids have gone to bed that we can do all the things we didn't have time for during the day (grading papers, laundry, meal planning, etc.). It's not easy, but the trade-off is SO worth it. I would not have it any other way.
Apparently, some people around here are taking photography as an elective in school. I recently found these (among many) pictures on my camera:
They're actually pretty good, the one on the right could be considered kind of artsy. Then there are the incriminating photos:
Look into the camera now....
Hmmm, was the flash a little unexpected?
This is an artsy one... "Topsy turvy wonder twin"
Glad the nostrils were clean...
This one was a crime caught in the act. He did get busted because of this photo. He is trying to turn on my tablet, which is a big no-no.
My poor kids never saw the snow this year, so when I had to chip chunks of ice out of our stand up freezer (the door had been open, so ice accumulated in huge chunks), they were in winter wonderland (yes, these pics were taken after church, we don't usually dress up for school).
I ended up with at least four tubs of ice chunks.
He's not too cool to have fun with his sibs
There's Bob the wise guy sprinkling ice dust on LB's head
Who clearly didn't mind
It was a hot day, so Sissy was using it to cool off
They were supposed to be putting the chunks on the dry spots on the lawn, but you can see how that went
Simple pleasures...
Speaking of simple pleasure:
Dirt angel (told you they were starved for snow)
and...Kimi came downstairs with this get up
I know, she looks like a Chinese Miss Havisham from "Great Expectations"
Here is another look at what she is wearing (which confused me for a bit)
At first I thought it was a fitted sheet, but it was sheer...
it turns out that her "princess" gear was actually a "stroller net," something you put over the stroller to protect little ones from bugs I suppose. MB had unearthed it in all our cleaning and packing, and gave it to his sister. I guess we can put it in her "hope chest" if we had one. Fetching isn't it?
Well, hopefully news will be coming more often, and perhaps I will blog more than once a month!
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