My Little Barista

Today I was making myself and Rob both blended mocha's. After I got done making mine I sent Leeann out to ask daddy what flavor he wanted. He told her to choose, so she came back and told me that she wanted to choose gingerbread.

I asked her if she wanted to make daddy's mocha for him. She quickly washed up her hands and went to work!

She was excited to give it to him... that girl loves to serve others, and help in any way she can. Her first blended mocha turned out delightful according to Rob. This could be a good skill for her to learn!

Meanwhile, Titus spent way too much time perfecting his Lego Starwars skills. At one point he came outside and questioned why Leeann got to help in the yard but he didn't. He didn't stick around long enough to hear the answer or volunteer however... there are more characters to unlock!

So Leeann went to 'work' with her daddy and Titus continued his adventures of conquering... I'm not quite sure actually. I still don't know the Starwars plot. Is that awful?

Seven!

A few days ago my sweet, sweet baby girl turned seven. Seven!

She now stands just below my chin (which is a testament to both of our heights!). She's a beautiful, delightful, thoughtful little girl.

She loves polly pockets, princesses and Hannah Montana. Her best friend is her brother, and her favorite color, without a doubt is still purple.

She loves to watch movies, and is especially fond of the American Girl DVD's. She's really into crafty things, like painting, crocheting and creating other art projects out of anything that's available.

She honestly LOVES to help. She seems to feel most accomplished when she's helped someone with a task. She's always looking for ways to help someone around her. She even honestly loves to help with household chores... especially when we do them together. She regularly switches loads, empties the dishwasher and puts her laundry away.

She looks for opportunities to help those in need too. Especially those who are sad or hurt. The other day she looked up at me and said, "Mommy, you look quite sad today. Are you doing okay?" She's so insightful, and so sweet and caring.

Perhaps I should let her contribue to her updates from now on. Afterall, she is seven now!

An interview with a seven year old: (I'm typing this as I interview her)

What's your favorite:

Toy- "I like my special Leeann teddy bear. And I also like my best favorite toy is the one that I got from my mom and dad for Christmas. My purple puppy."

Movie- "The movie we just watched (Chrissa) because they were being bullies first but they ended up friends. Because Chrissa needed to tell the truth so the bullies would stop being mean so that they could be nice. Because being a bully is bad."

Place to go- "To Aunt Suzy's house, and Aunt Shelly's."

Song- "Hannah Montana. Pop it, lock it..."

Restaurant- "Red Robin. I like macaroni."

Color- "Purple."

Food- "I like macaroni and cheese. And I got two favorite desserts. Pudding, and ice cream... home made ice cream!"

People to play with- "Titus, Weston, Logan, Ashly, Amanda, KayLee, Josh. Even Landon."


What do you grow up:

What do you want to do- "A doctor. To care for people."

Do you want to get married- "Yeah. To a guy who loves Jesus."

How many kids do you want- "10."

Boys or girls- "5 of boys, 5 of girls."

Names- "I don't know yet."


At school:

Grade last year- "Kindergarten."

Favorite thing to do- "Play. I liked to play blocks."

Favorite friend- "Sam."

Favorite subject- "Reading."

What did you like about your teacher- "That she was nice and was telling us what to do so that we would know."


General:

What are you good at- "Taking care of people."

What's your favorite way to help around the house- "Mopping. Cause it's fun to do."

What else should people know about you- "That I'm a good friend. Cause I like to make friends and I like to be nice."

Move over Martha!

Leeann is having a Tea Party for her 7th Birthday which is on Thursday. Abby and I began preparing some of the yummy mini treats tonight. Move over Martha Stewart, we made baklava! And we made pecan scones (we'll make the maple topping tomorrow) and bite sized brownies that will be topped with home made salted caramel.

We will also make some orange mini muffins, mini cup cakes, french pastry puffs and chocolate covered strawberries tomorrow and/or Thursday. I know we'll have WAY too much food, but you just can't halve the recipes on some things. They're all cut into really cute tiny bite sized pieces.

And we'll serve fresh squeezed lemonade instead of actual tea. I decided not to make an actual Birthday cake for Leeann this year, which is a little bit hard for me because I love making her fancy cakes. But, it seemed unnecessary given the fact that we will have so many yummy sweet treats already.

I realized tonight that baking is so much more fun with someone else. It was nice to have Abby help me tonight, especially with the baklava. The phyllo dough used to make it is very tempermental and needed a lot of care and attention that was much easier with two of us!

We found out today that Abby will be going home Thursday. I'll be honest, I'm going to miss the girl! It's been fun having her around. I'm hopeful we'll keep in touch. Especially since she's having a baby boy in December and I certainly want to meet him!

I should be headed to bed, there's lots of baking and Birthday prep (and packing for Abby) ahead of us tomorrow!

OMSI

(Click on image to make it larger)

I'm so far behind on blogging that I'm not sure I'll ever catch up. I had once thought this would be a fairly relaxing summer. Ha!

In fact it's been so crazy that we were quick to steal one 'free' day a few weeks back and head to OMSI in Portland. That place is full of endless fun for kids of all ages-- you should have seen Rob in the vacuum ball room!

We really enjoyed time with each other and our kiddos and even headed to St. Helens for the night. We got to have lunch with Hope, Logan, Brent and my daddy. It was nice to see the kiddos, even if for only a short time. It's hard to believe that it's almost been a year since they lived with us! Hope is getting so tall and Logan's sporting a pink mo-hawk. They seem to be doing well and that's wonderful to see.

And now I'm one post closer to being caught up. Only 20 something more to go!

Mom-1, Dad-1, Titus-0

I felt a strange sense of satisfaction on Monday when Rob pulled Titus's glasses out of his pocket and they were snapped in half! Rob broke them while trying to tighten them.

At least I'm not the only one! I can't get over the fact that Titus has worn them all day, every day, for a year and a half and has yet to break them. That's extremely impressive for a 4 year-old! What's less impressive is the fact that his parents apparently aren't nearly as careful!

I thought he'd go several more weeks without his glasses again, but they had his frames in stock so we were able to replace them quickly this time.

Field Trip

Leeann's class took an end of the year field trip to the Discovery Village in Salem. And I got to chaperone! We brought 60 kids and there were two other groups the same size. It was a zoo. An absolute zoo! But, it sure was fun.

Sleeping Angels

During the school year we've let the kiddos sleep together on non-school nights.

I actually caught this picture a while ago. I went to check on them and this is how I found them!

I love when they crawl in bed with me in the mornings and sprawl all over me. Rob... well, he likes his own sleeping space. They've learned to crawl on my side, and I'm not complaining :0)

VBS

It's the time of year where there is so much to blog but not an once of leftover time to blog about it! Or should I say, it's the end of that time of the year, hence my return after a 16 day absence. That's gotta be a record!

That time of year--Vacation Bible School. It's been a crazy bunch of weeks for our whole family as we prepared for, set-up for, participated in, and cleaned up after VBS. This year was exceptionally crazy for a whole host of reasons. One of which was the obvious addition to our family just 2 weeks prior to the big event. Poor Abby, she's put in a lot of time at the church with me in these last several weeks! She's been very helpful though, and a delight to be around, so that was actually quite nice in a lot of ways.

The kids had a blast. I slept several hours early in the afternoon and after an incident with a wii remote that was part of a Lego Starwars brawl between my two overly tired, over exerted, completely exhausted kids (who didn't get to sleep until 11:00 last night!)... they are both sleeping peacefully too. And Lego Starwars is in time-out for the foreseeable future.

I'll hopefully download some pictures of my kiddos when I get a chance. Though VBS is often like Christmas. There's so much to blog about, and it comes after such an exhausting (though rewarding) time, that I often never get around to it. We'll see. But just in case I don't get around to the rest of them, here are a few I already have on my computer:

Titus hanging with the "Big Boys" during extended day VBS (extra fun stuff for just 4th and 5th graders). We let the kiddos of the leaders staying for extended day be a part of the fun.

The day you see pictured here? Messy Olympics!

Because who doesn't want to slip and slide in top ramen, creamed corn, mustard and baby shampoo?

Sadly, I couldn't participate. Someone has to take the pictures! I was devastated. Absolutely devastated!

"Twister"

And one heck of a food fight. I stayed far, far away from that action!

Confused?

If you're confused as to why my last post seemed out of place... it's because it was. Somehow I posted it on the wrong blog. These are the kind of things I'm trying to keep off Robyn's Nest. If you'd like to read more about FlyLady and my efforts (if you could call it that) at organizing my little piece of the world you can hop over to Real Life Pastor's Wife.

Flying as I can!

I like to think of myself, not as a failure, but as a little late at getting things together. See, I decided to do the 31 day FlyLady beginner steps (as you all well-know) several weeks ago. I think I'm still on day 3 or something!

I have been following her on facebook and via email so I am implementing some of her ideas, but I haven't been precisely following the baby steps as I originally set out to do. First we had a holiday weekend, then a couple of house showings, then we randomly started fostering a 15 year-old foster girl. Oh, and VBS is a week and a half away (I almost panicked as I wrote that... is it seriously just a week and a half away?).

Anyway, she hasn't been on the forefront of my mind, but she has been there. I've actually been thinking a lot about the control journal. I have my notebook, paper and plastic sleeves. I've even started writing some things in there. I really hope to actually make good use of it because it sounds so logical, helpful and useful. We'll see I suppose!

I am one of those people that will think through a logical, fool-proof, fantastic system that I never get around to implementing. The idea works. The function works. I just have to use it.  Novel, eh?

I'm really hoping my control journal isn't that way. The best tools are only helpful if you use them. I think FlyLady told me that!

Maybe I need to stick my baby-steps in my control journal so I don't have to log on to the internet and remember to go to the site first thing in the morning... which I obviously haven't been doing! Though it would require me to actually open up my control journal. Uh, am I beyond help?

Because we're crazy!

Last Wednesday I got a call from our adoption case-worker (she's still our case-worker from when we pursued adopting a teenage girl 2 years ago, as our case hasn't yet expired.) She asked if we were interested in doing foster care for a teenage girl with some special circumstances.

I found out a little more about her and her situation and told our case-worker that I'd chat with Rob and give her a call back. Much to both of our surprises, I think, Rob and I agreed to take her in. We had just been commenting a few days earlier about how we have the extra room, and a good home that we could share with someone in the right circumstance.

We've had several situations where people lived with us in the past, and it's usually worked out well. Over the years we've had a teenage boy live with us for 8 months, Rob's sister and her two boys live with us for 8 months, my half-siblings who were 4 and 5 lived with us for 6 months and we fostered a baby for 10 days a few months ago.

The hard part is in this situation, we had no idea what her personality was like or what we'd be getting ourselves into. She was a perfect stranger outside of the few details we knew about her. And frankly, you never know what you're going to get with a 15 year-old! Nevertheless, I left work early and headed down to DHS to meet Abby. We met together with her case-worker to find out a little more about each other and I brought her home.

I can't imagine being 15 and driving in the car with a complete stranger to a strange house, with no idea of what's in store. But, that was almost a week ago, and we're not strangers anymore! She's a sweet girl and I think it's actually been a really good fit so far. The kids are enjoying having her around, and she's good with them. Personality wise she's been a joy, but the sheer nature of having a teenager around is a little over-whelming. I'm suddenly managing social calendars, appointments, friends, shopping trips, etc.

I'm trying really hard to remember what it was like to be 15, and to have as much sympathy for her in her situation that I can muster. I'm attempting to parent her the way that I would have found most helpful if I were 15 and in foster care. We'll see how it goes. Like all of the rest of the kids we've interacted with, she doesn't come with an instruction manual!

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know our current family dynamics. I find it beautifully humorous that in spite of the fact that we're not on any sort of 'list' for foster care, we've know had 4 kids placed here in the last year. It seems like God's got a plan and is determined to work it in spite of whether or not we're on a 'list'. God is good, all the time.

You Are Missed

Janice, you would have been 59 years old today. You've been gone for a year and a half now. Sometimes it feels like you've been gone for soooo long. Other times it feels like I should still be able to pick up my phone and call you. I have so much I want to tell you.

I have an endless amount of memories from the few short years I had the pleasure of calling you mom. Even though you went to see Jesus when my kids were quite young, they still both talk about you often. Every once in a while Leeann just bursts into tears and says, "I miss Mee Maw". Sometimes I do to.

I look at the amazing son you raised each day, and I am so grateful for your role in making him who he is. The lives of so many others are blessed beyond belief because of him--but especially the kids and me. You have also raised 3 other children who are strong and courageous, and constant sources of blessing to their own families and to so many others. I know I am blessed by each of them, and so are my husband and children.

Leeann and Titus are beginning to grow out of the last sets of clothes and shoes that you bought for them. They are outgrowing (or have broken) many of the toys and treasures you have gave them. The earthly things that remind me of you are becoming fewer and fewer with each passing year. But, the eternal legacy you leave in the lives of your kids, and grand kids, and someday great-grand kids will continue to live on.

I can't thank you enough for the great memories I had the pleasure of sharing with you. I only wish there were more. I wish I would have taken more pictures. I wish I had more of your voice recorded to listen to at times like these. I wish I had more 'things' to remind me of you. I wish I had taken more time to tell you how much I love you and how much you mean to me. But I take joy to think about the fact that there is a little piece of you in all of the people that surround me that I love so much. You aren't here, yet you are everywhere around me. You are so, very, very missed. I love you mom. Happy Birthday!

Update Central

This is set to be a post full of random updates. For no particular purpose I suppose...

Leeann has 13 days of school left until she's in 1st grade. If every year flies by as fast as this one she's gonna be graduating before I know it!

Titus has new glasses (finally) and talks about Lego Starwars ALL DAY LONG. His brain has one wave-length, and one wave-length only.

Our crossover was not covered under warranty and not only did we have to replace the power steering pump, but the back breaks as well. I miss those Uncle Ben's already.

I didn't leave anything in New Jersey, and I'm proud of myself for that! I finally finished posting about the rest of my trip. You can read about here if you'd like Real Life Pastor's Wife.

I am knee deep (and perhaps in over my head) in planning both VBS (4 short weeks away) and my 10 year class reunion (August 6th). And, on top of that I have this random inclination to totally make-over my world and how I function. I all of the sudden have an intense desire to spend days on end baking food from scratch and cooking to store food in my freezer. And I want to get myself on a cleaning schedule. And I want to deep clean every area of my house. And I suddenly want to organize and re-organize everything. And I really want to keep my eye-brows plucked. I made a list of things I want to do before summer starts and another list of things I want to do before summer ends. And like every other list I make (and I make them often), I now have no idea where it is and may never look at it again. But hey, at least I wrote it down, right?

Today is the last day of our Biggest Loser challenge at church. My final weigh-in leaves me down just over 4 pounds from my starting weight. It's not quite what I wanted, but given my recent lack of discipline I'm just happy to see that I'm not back at my starting weight. I have a goal of running a 5K by summer's end, so hopefully I'll shed a few more pounds in that process. But as for tonight, I'm making some of Pioneer Woman's salted carmel brownies for our small group party. I haven't stopped thinking about them since she posted them. So tonight... I'll make them... and eat them... and enjoy them immensely!

I still need to post about some recent events (or not so recent events), like our trip to Eastern Washington, Leeann's field trip, Rob and Titus's man trip, and last year's Christmas. And the Christmas before that come to think of it...

Why is it that I never manage to blog about Christmas? There's so much going on and no time to blog during that season. I'll put that on my, "Things to do before Summer end's list". If I can find it...

Playmates

Today when Titus and I got home from walking Leeann to school he immediately asked to play Lego Starwars. I usually let him play for a little while once we get back, while I'm taking a shower or finishing getting ready for my day.

Well, today I told him he couldn't play right away because he spent so much time playing yesterday (the cousins came over for a little while so he'd gotten some extra-long play time). You should have seen the dejected look on his face!

He very sadly stuck his quivering bottom lip out and started to whimper as he lay face-down on the stairs. I sat next to him and encouraged him to play with some trains, cars or lego's. "But I want someone to play with me." he said through his tears. The look on his face was just so sad! I told him he should go pick out a book and he just continued to talk about how he just wanted someone to play with him!

Then all of the sudden I realized--Leeann will be in first grade next year. ALL DAY! That means that instead of needing to entertain Titus from the hours of 8:40-11:15 (relatively simple), I'll be needing to entertain him from 8:40-3:00.

I don't usually need to entertain him that much because he and Leeann play so well together. And, again, she's gone at school for relatively short periods of time. The thing that you need to understand about Titus is that he is an extrovert. He loves being around people. He might even make me look like an introvert in comparison, and that's saying something!

Take this moment in time for instance. He is sitting so close to me that he's practically sitting on me as I write this. He's holding his beary bear and he's just singing and talking to himself. Occasionally he'll ask me what certain buttons on the computer are for. Or he'll stick beary bear in my face and marvel at the fact that I can still type even though beary beary is covering my eyes. Right now he's singing his ABC's to his bear. The boy just wants to be near someone-- or playing Lego Starwars.

I have the feeling that I'm going to have to be super-prepared to keep this guy entertained (and keep me sane) while Leeann's in school full-time next year. Hopefully I'll be diligent enough to make the most of it though, because all too soon he'll be in school all day too, and I'll have to find something to do to entertain myself!

From Panic to Peace

A couple of things have happened to me recently that demonstrate the beauty of financial freedom. If you haven't yet read about my crazy love of Dave Ramsey's method of money management, read about it here.

Or here.

Or here.

Or here.

Maybe here.

Or, read this post.

Bored yet?

C'mon, this stuff is goooooood!


The first illustration is about Titus's glasses. Remember, the ones I broke. Well, as soon as that piece snapped off I almost panicked. Before 2 seconds had passed I quickly added up in my head the minimum cost of an eye exam and new glasses. A minimum of two Uncle Ben's... probably more.

My mind immediately shot to default mode. I worriedly thought to myself, "Can I fix it? Can I find a way to get him new glasses without updating his prescription (though it'd been 1.5 years and he really did need a new one)? Can they just fix that piece? Are there any other options I haven't thought of yet? Can I put this off? Can I sell something?..."

Then suddenly I remembered. I don't need to do any of those things. I have an emergency savings fund. Emergency savings funds are designed for things like this. (Panic begins to subside). Can you hear it? That's the beautiful sound of financial peace!

Then last night our crossover (part car, part mini-van, part wagon... it's hard to know what to call that thing) started to make a funny noise. This morning there was a small fluid leak. This evening there was a fluid gush. When I say gush, I mean HUGE gush. The liquid was everywhere underneath my whole vehicle. Yikes! It only has 44K miles on it... I'm not ready to do a major repair yet. Again, my default instinct is to panic. Luckily the nice guys at Jiffy Lube encouraged me to come in even though it meant them keeping the store open past it's regular hours for me. Since we'd just gotten our oil changed I was hoping they'd just forgotten to do something that they could easily (and without cost) fix.

I pulled into one of those "please don't let me drive my car into that hole and look like an idiot that can't drive' bays."

"I've got a steady red-fluid leak down here," calls the guy from down-under.

The guy up under the hood with the flashlight says, "It's everywhere. Whatever it is is all over everything."

And, before too long I heard words like transmission and power stearing pump. I'm not a mechanic, but I know those words. Those are expensive words.

Then the guy upstairs says, "The power steering pump is nearly impossible to get to in this thing." I know those are also expensive words. That means lots of labor. Suddenly these expensive words are turning into potentially really expensive words.

Those are the kinds of words that used to paralyze me. For so many years we lived with so little margin in our budget that it would take us eons to save enough for a major car repair. Or, more specifically, any time we'd managed to save anything note-worthy a car repair or medical expense wiped out any excess we had. It happened like clockwork. Seriously. Once the bank account went above a specific amount we could almost start counting down the days until the next catastrophe.

Back to today. The man at Jiffy Lube couldn't tell me how much the repair might cost. He said it might still be covered under warranty depending on the date the car was manufactured. It's a 2005 and has a 5 year warranty on these types of things as far as he could tell from the paper work in my glove compartment. So, as of tonight I still have no idea how many Uncle Ben's I might have to depart with on this one. Maybe none, maybe lots?

Either way, I don't have to panic. I am debt free and I have money in the bank for situations like these. Don't get me wrong, we are by no means ridiculously wealthy, nor do we have it all figured out. And a major car repair will still sting, but it won't paralyze us. We are an average family, on an average income, learning how to do as best we can with what God's trusted us with. It's times like these that I'm so grateful that we started working the baby steps to financial peace. I'm truly, truly reaping the benefits of our decision to follow the plan!

Her Voice

Leeann and I are doing some switcheroo-ing of clothes today. Out with the old and in with the new-to-us clothes that we are once again incredibly blessed with!

All of the sudden Leeann looked up through tears welling up in her eyes. "I don't remember what Mee Maw's voice sounds like anymore."

She is so missed...

Missing

 

Has anyone seen this boy? I miss him. I miss him so much! This was on our Valentine's Date when he was 14 months old. We started training him young to love Starbucks!

I can't wait to give him snuggles tomorrow. 27 hours!

TOMORROW!

I get to see my beautiful family TOMORROW! Oh, I miss them so much!

Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day and I'm 3,000 miles away from the two bundles of joy that made me a mom. I have thoroughly enjoyed being here, but I wish I could be in two places at once! I'm a little sad today. Not so much because it's Mother's Day, but more so because I've been away from them for a week. A couple of days away was good, to be honest. We're now entering the "too long" away category.

Tomorrow will be a fun day though. I'll get to see the big NYC sites like Ground Zero, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, Central Park and Grand Central Station. Oooo, and I get to go to the American Girl store! I so badly want to buy Leeann a Samantha doll from there... but it's not exactly in the vacation budget. Seriously, they're like $90 each. For a doll! Still though, I'm excited to experience the store. Hopefully I can find something a little closer to my budget to bring back from there.

If you want to see pictures and hear details about my trip you can hop over to my other blog. http://reallifepastorswife.blogspot.com 

Somebody

Somebody was being careless. Somebody was twirling these glasses around in their hands.  Somebody was fiddling with them as if they were a child's plaything. Somebody was not paying attention.  Somebody made a very expensive mistake (seeing as we no longer have eye insurance). Hopefully somebody learned their lesson about how to treat glasses.  Because these ones can't be fixed.  Somebody is very sorry.  That somebody is me. Whoops! Titus got these glasses when he just turned 3. He's had them 1.5 years without breaking them or losing them. He asked me to clean them the other day and I was talking to a group of ladies just twirling them around in my hand and 'playing' with them. His ear piece just snapped right off! I'm telling you, I was not being unnecessarily rough with them! So now he's been without glasses for a week because his are special order glasses. Really, he needed to get a new exam anyway. The frugal side of me was just waiting until these ones broke or got lost. It took longer than I thought it would. I just always assumed it would be my crazy 4 year-old son that would break them. Everybody keeps asking him where his glasses are and he get's to say, "Mommy broke them!"