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.

What makes me tick (no not like a time bomb)...

Parenting, crafting and reading....that seems to be my sanity....oh & a little working out to my fave terrible TV shows too. Lately, it's what I do. I raise the kiddos all day and then at night craft or sew or read or both. It's fabulous since the TV is now downstairs because I can do all those things and Will can be in the same room hanging out. Seriously, I love it. Here are some pics of my latest project for our T's room.

Looking back on the summer....

This was a fabulous summer. Despite my working 60+ hours a week we all survived and Will spent the entire summer with the boys. Here are some pics of

our summer. I hope you enjoy!

We Need Some Pics!!!!

It's apparent, I look at the blog and think...seriously....no pics. My vow from now on is to add more pics. With our computer out of commission it was hard but now we are up and running again. I promise to add more pics.

A big change!

We made a big change this weekend....are you ready for this? We moved our TV to the basement/playroom/family room, whatever we are calling it these days. We decided to decentralize the TV from our life. After this summer we cut the viewing time down and the TV has just sort of disappeared from the children's everyday "need". However, I do use a 1/2 hour of their TV time daily to workout. They watch "The Cat and the Hat" and I walk on the treadmill. It has been fabulous. We have reclaimed our living room as a place of family fun.

A bummer :(

Our International adoption agency emailed today and said the courts had reopened and they had their first court cases through for the new year. That's great news! I finally did ask how far out the courts had scheduled and unfortunately they have scheduled through November. Since, we have not been given a date the earliest we can hope for is December. Here is to hoping we get a date in December. Cross your fingers for us.

Cold Turkey!

We're giving it a go....yep M is going to try big boy underwear. He has given us many signs that he is ready but I have been very hesitant because he won't be 3 until December. Still, I figure we should give it a try. We ran out of diapers today and we figured rather than run out and buy more we might as well give it a try. We shall see what happens.....here's to hoping M does well in big boy pants.

Court Case submitted....

So, we just received word that our case has been submitted to the High Courts in Ethiopia. What does that mean? Just that now we can be given a court date. Yikes, it looks like we better check on our travel vaccines and also check on the new travel information with our adoption agency. Yikes, I am freaking out a bit because we have so much to do and wanted to tear down a wall before she comes home. Big sigh....my heart is racing. We didn't expect to hear this until the end of September.

Hardest on M :(

Turns out that in all our preparation with E about his big start to preschool we didn't really prepare M. No one ever talks about how hard a sibling going to school is on the sibling at home. I never really thought about it until we left E at preschool on Wednesday and M cried all the way home and cried himself to sleep. Poor guy probably figured we were just leaving him somewhere....we didn't tell him what was going to happen or anything. He misses E. It's a good thing he is gone in the afternoon or it would be harder on him I think. His playmate is gone and boy does he miss him. I think I should have prepared him more for this. I think it is actually harder on him. Poor guy. Seriously, why doesn't anyone warn you about this.

It certainly didn't take long ;)

Today, after school was over E was telling me about his classmate, B, who he calls his silly friend. They are silly friends because they are silly together. Then he proceeded to ask me if I could call B's mom and arrange a playdate. It didn't take long did it? I am not surprised....he is after all E and nothing about that little boy surprises me....except of course that he is so amazing.

I love school, I love school!

Those are the exact words my E was chanting when I picked him up from school. Yeah, it was a slam dunk. He loved it and had so much to tell us about it. From the bubble gum song to his classmates, whose names he doesn't know yet but will soon enough. Oh and he LOVES his teacher Ms. Pam (what's not to love she is fabulous).

I am SO happy he loves it so much.

It's here....

...E's first day of preschool. It's exciting and sad all rolled into one. It means my little guy isn't so little anymore and is growing up WAY to fast. He is attending Orchard Ridge and I know it will be great...but a mommy has to worry doesn't she.

Same old, same old...

Yep, summer is over and it's time for the regular year to start again. By this I mean the time in our life when Will goes back to work (after summer break), our little friend joins us 2 days a week, and life as we know it goes back to normal. It's here and the boys are excited about it. Well, at least some of it. They are not thrilled about daddy going back to work but they are so excited to be seeing their little buddies again for playdates and lunch dates and all the social activities mommy sets up. Turns out they did miss me after all :)

The Call!

It was the final day of my summer job. Everyone was busy and it was sort of a crazy day. At 12:14 PM my phone rang and it had an odd number with an area code I didn't recognize. It took me a minute to realize that this could be the call. I went outside to answer my phone and missed the call. We played a little phone tag but she finally caught me. It is always surreal to me to get the call. I feel totally numb, like it isn't really happening. It also takes a while for the excitement to set in. I feel bewildered and disbelieving for a while before the reality hits. Of course I was at work all day and had no way to get to my email to check for the referral info and Will was at Devil's Lake with the boys and was completely unreachable. It was a long day and it was good that I had so much to get done. Figures that the call would come on the busiest day the whole summer. I was so excited to hear about our little girl.

E's prediction!

So, the other day.....E was sitting on my lap and looked at me and said his baby sister's birthday will be in September. We'll see:)