Happy 1st Birthday Sunshine!

Today is our Sunshine's 1st birthday....yep she is turning one in Ethiopia while we sit here and wait to see her for the first time. There will be a small celebration at our house tonight and today we will all just be missing her. Giggles & Speedy have been talking a lot about their little sister. Speedy told a friend of ours that he wants his little sister home. Giggles just the other day asked when she was coming home. I think this really long wait was good for them, they were able to digest this all and sort of miss her a little too. I think that will help them welcome Sunshine into our family. We miss her. Today is hard for me because it's a big milestone, we are missing so many of those in this first year. There are so many to come but I am filled with sadness to know all the details I won't be able to tell her about.

Sunshine's Birthday:
Cold and rainy in Wisconsin
Sunny & pleasant in Ethiopia

I am certainly glad she saw some sunshine on her 1st birthday!

Unconventional Holidays!

Turns out our current family take on our celebration of holidays is a bit "unconventional." After a few years of not such fun holidays we decided maybe we should re-think how we do it. We looked at the holidays that usually go well and figured out that they are the holidays without a lot of hype and build up (Thanksgiving and 4th of July). It seems our boys get so hyped up about the holidays that by the end of a long hyped holiday they have peetered out and well are pretty much done. That is no fun for us because the big bang comes at the end and well the boys are just finished by then. This year we shortened up Halloween to a 4 day celebration, granted it was a full 4 days, and the boys LOVED IT! It wasn't a bunch of hype with no bang....it was just all bang for them. After such a fabulous Halloween we decided that Christmas should be similar, so we are having what many consider an unconventional holiday. We aren't getting our tree until the weekend before Christmas and then the week of Christmas we will fill with Christmas preparations. We'll decorate cookies, the house, the tree, adn whatever else we can jam pack into that week. We will pull out the Christmas countdown calender and plan to prepare some Christmas gifts before then but other than that we are keeping it low key until the week of celebration begins. We'll see how our unconventional, short, holiday goes. Stay tuned.

Wordless Wednesday

Busy, busy boys!

Counting the days....to E-day!

Yep, our trip to Ethiopia is so close I can now see it on the monthly calendar. :) Will and I can't believe how quickly the time has gone. We have gone from 8 weeks to less than 3 in what seems like a blink of an eye. In 21 days we will be landing in Ethiopia, yep just 21 days. We leave Nov. 29th and arrive the evening of the 30th. We meet our T on the 2nd. I would love to post pics of her but it is forbidden so you all will just have to wait it out with us. Yikes....21 days to ET!

My latest crafting projects!

I have been doing a lot of sewing. I mean a lot. I have been a busy, busy person. Every spare minute I want to be sewing. Here are some of the projects I have been doing. I have included links to all the tutorials so those of you that want to dabble, can!


Homemade baby legs out of women's knee high socks for our little girl:)
http://littlebirdiesecrets.blogspot.com/2008/10/baby-legs-tutorial-make-your-own-leg.html

I repurposed a few of Will's old tees and made them into pants for our little girl and pj pants for E!

http://handyprojects.blogspot.com/2005/04/how-to-make-easy-kids-pants.html

What's up next? Hmmmm...pants for M and I think a little dress for my niece. I can't wait to try out some more things.

Who knew???

Who knew this year would be the year for a fantastic Halloween? Usually holidays leave us in a melt and burn at the end of the day but not this holiday. I couldn't believe Halloween could be so much fun with an almost 3 & almost 5 year old. They absolutely loved it. Looking back we are sort of wondering what went right. Hmmmm....we think the biggest factor was not dragging the holiday out. We literally did Halloween in 2 days. We put up some decorations last week to get in the mood but didn't do much else before that. This weekend we sort of laid low. We had already been to 2 parties by the weekend but the kids just sort of seemed oblivious. E did have his school party, which he said was fabulous. Saturday Will and I were busy in the morning. We had a costume party that afternoon at some friends, which the kids always love and usually kicks off our true Halloween celebration. Then we came home to carve pumpkins. We were hesitant at first since the boys were a little on the cranky side but once we started the pumpkins man did they get into it. M worked really hard to scoop the "gunk" out of his pumpkin and E (with a little help from dad) carved his own pumpkin. They were in such a good mood and so hilarious, I don't think Will and I stopped laughing. It was such a good time. I think it also helped that we had no expectation, we weren't trying to get the perfect holiday. Trick or treat the next day was equally fun. The boys wanted us to dress up and so we did. They were so excited they wanted to run the entire time, which was a little difficult since it's dark and you never know what M will do. It was such a fabulous holiday.....if only life were this way more often.