June/July events

Well, my summer vacation got off to a fairly rocky start.  Our cat, who normally is very low maintenance, began to throw up. . . a lot.  At first, I thought it might be her food.  But after changing food several times, Tara was still throwing up after most meals.  Then, the week after I got done with school, she started doing something she's never, ever done before.  She started peeing outside her litter box.  This was just not acceptable at our house.  I was not going to have a house that smelled like cat pee AND it was clear that Tara just did NOT feel good.  So we found a local vet through a local interest facebook page for our area and took her in.  Turns out, a bunch of tests and $300 later, Tara had a pretty nasty urinary tract infection.  Try giving antibiotics through an oral syringe to a cat for nearly a month.  Yeah. Not my favorite.  But as of right now, she seems like she is doing fine.  I do need to make a follow up appointment at the animal hospital to make sure she is completely over her infection.  We really don't have the money to spend on this cat so hoping we get the all clear.  I don't want to have to make upsetting decisions about her if this thing has caused more damage, damage we really couldn't afford to fix.  

In late June, our neighborhood HOA put on a fun event at the park across the street.  Normally, I have no use for the HOA and the management company that controls it, but I will admit that they throw some fun neighborhood get togethers.  They do a makeshift pumpkin patch in the fall and then this event in the summer complete with petting zoo, food vendors, face painters, jump houses etc.  Ashlyn napped for most of it, but Claire enjoyed the whole thing and it was nice to get out and chat with neighbors we don't always see.

Claire performed in her second dance recital and third stage performance this year (her second one was her appearance as a Froglet in my production of "Honk!" at the middle school). It's crazy to me how comfortable she is with all of this.  She has been going to concerts and productions since she was tiny so I guess it's not a huge jump for her to do this, but it's been really fun to watch her go from having to watch every little move her dance teacher was making in order to perform (and still only knowing a little bit of what she was doing. . . but she was so, so cute!) in December to being able to do some of her routine for me at home and then seeing her with confidence on stage in the Spring was pretty cool.  I could never dance very well so hoping she gets her interest and talent from other areas of the gene pool.

Claire's teacher's assistant, Miss Emily

Claire's teacher, Miss Bethany

Ashlyn made the big move to Claire's bedroom and her trundle bed, this summer, too.  Having the girls in the same room has gone well for the most part. I am still nursing Ashlyn and, at times, she wakes up and wants to nurse at night.  So getting through that was difficult since now she could, potentially, wake up sister if she cried.  Sometimes Claire sleeps through her night wakings and other times she will awaken and I can hear her on the monitor say, "Ashy, mommy will come in the morning! Go to sleep."  The last couple days, I've been night weaning her, though.  It's been fine.  I go in, I tell her she can nurse when the sun is up and, inevitably, she will get angry.  I bring her out of Claire's room so Claire can sleep and rock her in her old bedroom.  If she is too upset, sometimes I will put her in her crib and let her sleep there.  She's never really been a baby you could rock to sleep like Claire was. Often, when I put her in the crib, she'll curl up and stop crying immediately. It's weird. It's like the crib is still a comforting place for her, even though she is doing so well sleeping with Claire.  But her night wakings are less and less every night and I wouldn't be surprised if in the next few nights she'll be sleeping through the night with sister in her room the whole night.  It has, however, made Claire, who used to sleep until at least 8am every morning an early riser since Ashlyn will wake up and then poke Claire and they are usually up and making noise now at 6:30am (when Ashlyn makes it the whole night in the new room.  Not my favorite. Hopefully, the "newness" of sharing a room will wear off and they will start sleeping in again. But I love that they love sleeping together and that everyone had a roommate for now :-)

Ashlyn at Dunn Edwards swinging on the counter ledge

Ashlyn's personality is coming through more and more these days.  She's goofy, sweet wants to kiss and hug EVERYONE and EVERYTHING. Including her peepee when it gets flushed down the toilet.  I kind of wish I was kidding since it's kind of weird but that's just her.  Everything and everyone needs a hug and a kiss and a "I yuh yuuuu!" She's also pretty impish.  She's tiny and genetically I guess the Reed/Johnson genes took full control in that regard, but she's LOUD and seems like she's going to be a little passionate (also a trait of my family. . . both sides) and somewhat mischevious.  If she wants something she'll say "peeese?" and give you this sidways half smile.  You can practically see her batting her eyes. She likes to grab onto counter ledges, bars, really whatever is in front of her and swing (we are considering gymnastic classes).  I thought potty training her was going to be insane and it turned out to be, really, pretty easy.  But I couldn't really tell her "when" to go.  I had her naked from the waist down and told her where the little potty was.  After one accident the first day, she went on the potty every. single. time afterward.  I was floored.  After she did her business, she'd yell, "Yay! I did it!!  I want jamameen (jellybean)!!"  Week two, we put her in underwear.  Same thing, few accidents and then she got that she wasn't wearing diapers anymore. She got brand new "'Punzel" undies as her reward for doing so well, and Lord knows she does NOT want to peepee on 'Punzel.  

Goofy girl taking a shower.

The 4th of July started with me having Christian plant a couple tomatoes in our garden.  Late?  Yes. Better late than never.  Of course!  Unfortunately, two of the tomato plants (same kind) didn't make it but our Beef Steak tomato plant is doing fantastic and we've already gotten some great tomatoes from that plant.

Our evening consisted of our church's barbeque in the afternoon and then a walk down to the city's fireworks show.  The fireworks show seemed to have a little trouble (started 30 min late, couple issues with the fireworks themselves) but for the most part it was a good show and it was nice to have a meal with church family and talk to people I normally don't.

So far, one of my favorite things about summer is this. Here.  Every morning, instead of hurrying off to work, I get to have breakfast with my husband and family before he heads off to work.  This picture was taken one Sunday before church, but it's one of my favorite summer views most every morning.  Blessed party of one over here.

So, how'd the yard sale go?

So people have been asking how our yard sale went.  It was a LOT of work.  I'll tell you that but you know what?!  It wound up being totally worth it.  People gave a TON so much that we rented a storage unit for some of the furniture items for the month.  Now, after the big sale, we've been able to move those items into our garage.  So, no. We aren't done selling things. If you have any interest in a little girls' bedroom set, kitchen table and chair set, 100 lb heavy bag complete with chains and gloves, a surfboard (we have two) books, dining room chandelier, wall hangings, three section folding mirror etc. let us know.  It's all going to fund our adoption.  

But the above picture is how our garage looked before the sale. I HATE clutter. So you can imagine how excited I was to be rid of all this stuff.  We spent the week before the sale pricing everything. We have two friends from church, Rick and Amy, that we owe a LOT to who came over and helped sort on Wed, Friday and then helped us sell on the actual garage sale date.  I don't even know how to deal with such amazing friend. It got to the point where I gave up on pricing things.  I finally just put up a sign at the sale for clothing and books and the craft items.  And we wound up having people bring their pile to the cash register and then we just quoted them a price for everything they could carry.  It was awesome.  For everyone.

We had our share of really, really bizaare donations including a certified, autographed photo of Janice Dickinson.

What we didn't anticipate were a few major bumps in the road prior to the sale.  Christian took the day off on the Friday before the sale.  That morning, I took a trip to Target to get more hangers and things for the yard sale and on my way home, my brakes went out on my Honda.  Luckily, I was walking distance from home and nowhere near an intersection when this occurred.  Christian drove the car home on the parking brake and it is still sitting in front of our house.  Depending on how much money and work needs to be done on it will depend on what we do with it.  We are planning on selling this car and getting a larger one but do need to make some money off the sale of the Honda in order to do so.  So, side note, please pray for our car situation.

Now, the sale itself went great.  We hauled everything in a Penske truck to my parents' house in Whittier. We ended up having to take two trips out there because the guy who had the Penske truck we wanted decided to extend his rental so we were stuck with a 12 foot truck when we really needed something like a 20 foot to actually get everything where it needed to go.   

Amy, the cash register queen.  She priced things and gave the customers rad deals that made us money and made the people who came super happy.  

Rick was pretty excited about the yard sale. . .

My dad serenaded us all on the guitar.  Several people asked if the guitar was for sale.  He said, "Sure! $2000."  He didn't get any takers after that.  

We had a consistent flow of people from the time we put the signed up on Whittier Blvd. until we finally took them down.  We sold everything that was worth buying, really.  It really was a fantastic sale.  

So there are a few special people we'd like to thank for their help.  Obviously Rick and Amy (already mentioned), my parents for all their help and for allowing us to use their yard and my grandparents who allowed us to invade their house and spend the night over there the night before, who watched the girls for us the day of the sale all day and who brought us breakfast in the morning and bought our whole family dinner in the evening when it was all over. . . all the people who donated items, money and time to make this happen.  We made very close to enough money to pay for the remainder of our homestudy and with the furniture items and big things we have left to sell, I'm sure we will wind up making enough to finish that homestudy very, very soon! Let me know if you want any of our remaining items!  God was faithful with our yard sale and I know He will continue to be as we continue this journey.  

Tangled Party!

So Claire and Ashlyn are 10 days shy of being exactly 2 years apart. So far, they love celebrating their birthdays together and, really, love doing just about anything together (Claire asks what pjs Ashlyn is wearing before going to bed so she can wear a similar or identical pair.  I'm sure this won't last but right now I'm enjoying it.)  So their birthday party date fell on the 24th (the weekend between their birthdays) which is also my dad's birthday, so he was a pretty good sport about attending a little girls' birthday party that day.  We are planning something for him the following weekend.

Ashlyn did not really have an opinion about the theme of the birthday party this year.  She likes lots of things- dogs, Life at the Pond, water, swimming, singing, stimulating converstion and fish. But Claire decided that she really wanted a "'Punzel Party" and Ashlyn didn't really seem to mind.  

There were a couple things I wanted to make sure I didn't do for the party.  #1. Make is so girly that the girls' friends who happen to be boys would feel uncomfortable. #2. Buy a bunch of plates and cups at Party City and call that a "Rapunzel Party."  I tend to want to be a big more creative -and kind of hate the dipictions of Disney Princesses on most of the items marketed for little girls (can me a whack-job but it is what it is).  I don't have the time or the creativity to go nuts with it but I decided to go with the Rapunzel colors (purple and yellow and a little pink) and then come up with games and activities around the characters.

So here was a few things we did for the party. Some took a bit of work but the girls LOVED their party.  I had a blast planning it, honestly.  It came at a pretty stressful time at work but it was something I wanted to do, so I made time for it.  Very little beats the girls' excitement over these things.

Super simple gift bags for the kids at the party.  Just cut out the Rapunzel royal flag and glued it to plain white bags.

Ordered the invitations from www.belleprints.com and printed them at Walmart.  The gal at BellePrints also sent me Thank You Cards and a banner so we put the banner on the front door of the house.

For dessert, I made cupcakes and Christian and I made a "donut tower" My dad was nice enough to create a little stand for the tower with a piece of wood an a dowel.  The only issue was that the donuts on the bottom started to crumble under the weight of the other donuts on top.  I have no idea how to remedy this problem.

I set up an art table where the kids could come and paint and draw like Rapunzel!  Most of our kids were pretty little, though, didn't take advantage of it due to the fact that most were more interested in the bounce house ;-)

We are so blessed by our church. They have allowed us to use the Bounce House every year! The kids LOVE it!

The girls wore Rapunzel shirts I found for $10 each at the Disney store and a sweet friend made their tutus for the day!

Claire's "Rapunzel Hair"

Gramma and Ashlyn

Lined up to play "Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn Ryder" 

Nathalie won! ;-)

Next game was "Maximus' Apple Toss"  I got a great "Mini Corn Hole" set on amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Mainstreet-Classics-Micro-Bag-Toss/dp/B00417V520

Ashlyn only lasted halfway though presents until it was time for a nap!

The girls had a fantastic day.  We are so blessed by our sweet girls! 

Big Decisions: An Announcement

"Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert." Isaiah 43:19  

So in the past several blogs and in a few posts on Facebook, I have alluded to something big going on with our family but have, continually, said I'd let you all know later.  Well, it appears that now is the time to spill the beans.  Not sure why I kept this quiet for so long.  Although, in reality, we haven't necessarily kept it quiet.  I mean, if it came up or if people asked, we told them, but as far as full fledged announcement, this would be the first.  

When I was really young my parents subscribed to the Focus on the Family Magazine.  In it, there were usually stories of Christian leaders, answers to parenting and marriage questions and family interest stories.  I remember  reading a cover article about former baseball player Tim Burke who had, with his wife, adopted several children from various countries.  From my memory, I think the children were from Korea, Vietnam and Guatemala.  I remember there were 4 children at the time of the article and most of them had some sort of physical handicap.  I have no idea what happened to this family.  All I remember was that Burke quit his lucrative baseball career in order to be with his wife and children.  I tried to find the original article but all I could find was a LA Times piece from around the same time period which can be read here.   The article stuck with me and something told me that somehow this issue of adoption would pop up in my life at some point, however, when I, easily, became pregnant with both of my children, I thought that maybe it was a passing interest or one that we would be supporting from afar.  While adoption doesn't require inferitility, for whatever reason, we put our interest in the idea on hold when we began to raise our biological daughters.  Clearly, the seed was planted in my heart for a reason, however. 

Most of my readers know that, due to complications with my pregnancy with Ashlyn, I cannot have any more children, "the old fashioned way."  For many, two girls is a "quiverfull" but to us, who always dreamed of and felt called to minister to many children in our home over the course of our marriage, we were a bit blindsided and bewildered by this series of events.  While we discussed some technological options that we could persue (and my OB/GYN encouraged us to consider), neither of us felt terribly comfortable with those options at this time for several reasons I won't really get into here.  Both of us felt that either God was calling us to focus on our two little girls or that He was steering us into a completely different direction.  So for the past two years, we focused on the girls, I focused on my work at the school, homeschooling Claire, working through my own birth trauma.   Christian worked through his own feelings about what happened and his own concerns and fears about the next step. 

Last summer we went to Colorado for my grandma's family's family reunion. While we were there, we celebrated our own 5th wedding anniversary.  We put the girls to bed and took the video monitor out to the spa behind our room at The Hideaway where our family was staying.  We had a long talk about the past year and a half. Christian relayed how during our first night in CO, staying with my cousin at her house, all four of us in her master bedroom, he would hear the girls cry or make noise and his mind kept telling him "Oh, that's Claire," or "Oh, that's Ashlyn" but a couple times, he said, he thought, "Oh, that's the 3rd baby. . . "  We worked through several issues found ourselves on the same page with our vision for our family and our desire to trust God with any future children he might have for our family and this conversation led to both of us saying, "yes, lets do this, let's adopt." It was confirmation for both of us that this is what we were supposed to do.   

So that's the big announcement if you haven't figured it out by now.  We're adopting. 

I have been following an organization called Faithful Adoption Consultants whom I had been VERY impressed with just by how they presented themselves, their care for everyone involved in the adoption narrative (adoptive families, birth families, the children etc.) and their committment to praying for everyone involved.  They came highly recommended by several people on several different adoption boards.  I feel like I always knew that if we were to consider a domestic adoption, they would be whom we would call first. We considered other adoption options- international, foster-adopt but the more we considered it and the more we prayed about it the more we felt let to a "standard" domestic adoption. Our current family, life situation seemed to lend itself more to this than either of the others.   In the future, we may go about it through a different route, but "baby Herman #3" will be brought to us this way. So late last year we signed up as clients of Faithful Adoption Consultants and began our homestudy with Nightlight Christian Adoptions early this year.  So on top of crazy work schedules, homeschooling a preschooler, starting up a business (which I took the plunge in starting in order to help fund the adoption), involvement at church and just keeping our homelife together we've been filling out forms, answering invasive questions, writing autobiographies, getting doctors' appointments, attending adoption related classes at the agency, ordering livescans and ordering originals of most of our major family documents (marriage certificates, birth certificates etc).  After most of this paperwork is complete we'll meet with a social worker from the agency who will conduct interviews and do a home visit.  After all this is done, they will write up the homestudy and we can then be "active" with Faithful Adoption Consultants.  From there, it could be a short wait or several months to a year.  Our contract with them ends after a year.  They work in several states, none of which is CA, so we'll, most likely, be spending some time out of state to bring home our 3rd child.  

So we are asking for a couple things.  

1. We REALLY need your prayers.  A LOT.  We have no idea how is whole journey is going to go and where it'll take us but we know that if the Lord goes before us we have nothing to fear (Deut 31:8) Pray also for this baby who may already be growing in his first mama's womb and for the whole situation we will encounter.  

2. We need your JUNK.  You read that right.  Our first fundraising effort for this will be a huge garage sale sometime around June 21st (after I'm done with work).  We have already been collecting things from the awesome people at our church, from family members etc but would love more stuff to make this a huge success.  So if you are local to Southern California and have items you've been DYING to get rid of (stuff you haven't used in years, furniture you'd like to get rid of, clothes, toys, games. anything!!) PLEASE contact me.  We will gladly meet you for pick up or come by when it's convienient for you. 

To those of you who have already offered encouragement, filled out forms and wrote letters of recommendation for us, brought us items to sell and babysat our children during classes and just listened to our concerns about this whole thing, THANK YOU!  We are only at the beginning and I fear we'll need even more encouragment as this goes on.  Some days I wonder why in the world we have decided to take this on and how the heck it'll come together but we are reminded that somewhere out there there just might be a mama in a situation she doesn't quite know what to do with and there's a sweet baby whose life she can't fathom terminating but the prospect of raising the baby is nearly equally overwhelming.  We don't know the details of the situation (since every single one to so completely different) but we are hoping our family can be the missing piece in this little one's life (and in our home) and be support and care for this mama too.  The girls are excited about the possiblity of a new sibling and we are so excited about the possiblity of another blessing in our home.   

Thanks again for all the prayers!

Christian and Sarah