PoPs

Before I was a mom,

I was an aunt.

It is still one of the favorite titles attached to my name.

Before The Angel and The Dinosaur came home,

our niece and nephew were with us almost every weekend.

Now that our nephew is 16 and driving,

I feel like we are always begging to see him.

Having him around always keeps us laughing,

but I know that we are not near as cool as his friends right now.

Last weekend, however, we were a full crew.

Our nephew even brought one of his buddies to hang out with us.

We set out to pick peaches at an orchard about an hour away.

We got to the orchard too late and with the 105 temperature outside,

we opted for a favorite Oklahoma pit stop on old Route 66,

a burger joint that specializes in pop.

It's an old school salute to all things cola.

Oldies,

Random flavors,



And the perfect way to spend a Saturday.
(The Dino was having fun, he had just woken up from a nap :)

Trail to Thailand: Doctors Appointment

Another accomplishment on the paperwork trail today.

The paperwork procedure leading up to our home study

has been quite lengthy this time around.

I don't remember so much prep work before our home study,

but then again, it may be me.

I think mommy hood has sucked out my brain.

The Hero and I went and had our physicals done by our physician.

Only one more stop this week (the kids have to visit their pediatrician for health updates)

and we can send off to our home study agency.

Then they will schedule us for a home study and come out

and see how much more insane we are than two years ago.

Praying to get it all done and sent off by Friday.

And that $1800 will appear in our bank account.

God will do both.

What The...?

Has it really been 16 months we've been together?

Days it seems like we just met,

but more and more it feels like this

Instead of like this:

And our baby,




Isn't much of a baby anymore.

Thank you Lord for reminders.

Of where we were.

of where we are.

and where we have yet to go.

The Things I Can't

I've noticed that having another girl in our family

creates it's own dynamic.

I love it but there are times that I become frustrated by two women in the house.

The Angel Can get The Hero to do things that I have tried for 8 years.

She has him wrapped like a Christmas present.

What ever she says, he snaps to attention.

Adopting a second time involves its own set of challenges, but we seem to be suffering from a lack of time. Although we pray for our new addition every night,

The Hero and I have struggled to

complete our home study paperwork.
To be honest, I've had mine down for almost a month now,

but The Hero had a HUGE test a few weeks ago

and has been lagging in the "recreational time" category.

On Saturday, The Angel was distraught

that our newest family member would not be home by Christmas

to play with her and was demanding some pretty stringent time frames.

I pulled out her notebook of paperwork

that we filled out when we were going through our first adoption

with her and The Dinosaur

and explained that this was going to be awhile.
She asked where we were in the paperwork stage

and I showed her the 100+ paperwork application,

The Hero had yet to complete.

I told her that this needed to be done first.

She huffed.

"Um...what do you need to say on that?"

Mommy: "Well Mommy has already filled it out.

Daddy just needs to finish."

The Angel: "Hmmm...why he not done?"

Mommy: "Well, Daddy has been busy."

The Angel: "Ok Mommy. I'm on it."

I laughed it off.

So tonight, after dinner,

right as The Hero was slinking into his chair and

breathing a relaxing end to the day,

his daughter questioned

"Daddy, is your home work done?"

The Hero, incredulous, glanced my direction.

I shrugged.

He answered her, almost laughing "What homework?"

Now both hands were on her hips,

"You know the home work. The one for (insert name)".

The Hero tried to get my assistance.

I ducked back into the kitchen.

He tried to fight back.

"Well honey, I'll work on it in a little bit."

She was not to be moved.

"Daddy, it better be done before you go to bed."

While the rest of us finished a movie,

The Hero pouted on the couch and finished his home work.

While being in the house with another girl is a challenge,

The Angel moves The Hero in directions, I never could.

I love that about her.

Gimmie A "T"...

The Hero was at the fire station yesterday.

The Angel and The Dino were supposed to go to a birthday party.

They had talked about it for days.

But at the last minute, they said they would rather paint.

So we did.

The temps in Oklahoma have topped over 100 for almost two solid weeks.

I set up a fan on the porch.

Brought out the paints,

the paper,

the play clothes,

and just let them have at it.

We painted with brushes,

our fingers,

and made a complete mess.


We painted dogs,

and sunsets,

our names

dots,

uh, The Dino really never explained this one.



But even in the middle of a beautiful,

hot summer day,

a portion of our minds

were several continents away,

thinking about our newest family member.



Each of the kids wanted to paint something

for their soon-to-be sibling,

so Mommy painted it and

The Dino and The Angel put their stamp of approval on it.




That's right,



We LOVE Thailand!

Thank you so much to all of you that voted.

You all must know how much we love Africa,

because over 40% of the votes were
guessing that we were adopting from Uganda.

Not this time.

This time we're headed to Thailand.

Where our newest member waits.

Our winner for the "Worth the Wait" tee is:

Amanda from To God Be The Glory blog!

Thanks to everyone who played along!

Women Wednesday:

I use to think that having a great girl friend meant I had done something right,

That I had picked a good friend.

The older I get, nothing could be further from the truth.

My best girl friends in life have always chosen me.

I guess I assumed having a good friend meant I was a good friend.

It's not.

I am a horrible friend.

I forget to call.

I forget birthdays.

I change plans, often times at the last minute.

I need a girlfriend to call me out about these things.

And I've found several.

Knowing where I am lacking as a friend is not always a fun conversation.

But if I want to have a good friend, it's important to learn to be one.

And I am grateful that the good Lord has sent me just the girls for the job.

So why do we as women avoid making new friends?

I think we avoid new girl friends because:

1.) There's too much laundry to do,

2.) We haven't yet determined what keeps us from being a good friend

1.) What keeps you from being a good friend?

2.) How has a girlfriend now/in the past challenged you to be better?

Me? Or Three?

Becoming a mom overnight to two toddlers was hard.

Since neither The Hero or I had never parented before,

there was/is/always stuff we don't know.

And parenting two adopted children has its additional set of questions.

But the one we are asking ourselves lately is

Is it me?

Or because he's three?

The Dinosaur has his nickname because well,

he's a Dinosaur.

A cute dinosaur,

but a dinosaur all the same.

Two was adorable, challenging because of

attachment issues, but we've come to the other side of those I believe.

We are outside of the terrible 2s and fledgling in the

horrible 3s.

Maybe I was drinking or fell and hit my head when I was reading all those parenting books

and getting advice from all my mommy friends.

But I really thought that they were called the terrible 2s because

there was an ending date.

The Dinosaur would blow out his 3rd birthday candle

and there would be a respite.

Ha!Ha!

I almost fell off my chair laughing.

The Dino better at three?

Right.

So mommy may look like this for awhile:

Until The Dinosaur looks like this again:


Come on parents, fess up,
what was your most challenging parenting age?

Where In The World?

For any of my new blog newbies:

1.) Welcome.

2.) We are adopting again.

3.) We haven't revealed much about our newest addition just yet.

4.) We kinda like messing with you guys about it too! ;)

We answered the question a few weeks ago about how many children we were bringing home.

A lot of you were shocked to learn it is one.

The next question everyone wants answered is WHERE?

Since we are still very early in the process (still gathering info for our home study),

we are going to give away a Worth the Wait tee again to a lucky reader.

All you do is:

1.) Go to the poll on the right and vote for where you think our newest clan member is from.

2.) Leave a comment to this post that you voted.

3.) Sit back and wait.

We'll draw and reveal our winner next week!

Women Wednesday: Roots Part 1

Everyone has a story. It is a mixture of pain, beauty, hysterics and ridiculousness. Mine doesn't make me different from anyone else; just me. Perhaps by acknowledging that each of us have been hurt by another woman, we'll show more love to one another. Here are my roots, Part 1.

After my last Women Wednesday post, I was talking to a girlfriend who said "I thought that because you have always had good relationships with your mother and sister, you would be a terrible candidate for being afraid of women. Where did all this start?"
I laughed. Probably a huge reason why I have women issues because I was so close to my mom and sister. I always felt like I didn't need another female relationship. And I had starred in my own personal version of Mean Girls before Hayden Paniterrie arrived on the planet.

Being 75lbs and under 5ft tall at the start of junior high was laughable and boy, did my classmates laugh it up. While my body missed the memo about evolving, my father missed the memo about the color of men's collars in rural Oklahoma. While dad worked 8-5, my peers' fathers worked according to the sun; if it was in the sky, they were working. Although my parents struggled with money like everyone else in the late 1980s', the title of "spoiled rich girl" cemented my pre-teen biography.

I swore off all vanity; any modified change in my appearance only invited attention and attention was always more teasing. My hair was too straight and brown and my body resembled my nickname, "Twig". The gaggle of girls that tormented me hurt, but the silence from the boys in my class only confirmed that women run the world.

Home life was so good, I didn't want to disrupt it with my pubescent woes. Having three kids in five years left my parents busy, even if I had displayed angst about school; but I wasn't up for talking to mom and dad. While other mothers were making a home, mine was making a business. She made jewelry, ordered the best take-out ever, only turned on our oven for special occasions and looked young enough to be my big sister. Her bottle blond hair, 5'8" frame and Farrah Faucset good looks were the only positive comments I got from boys through most of my tween years. We laughed, worked and played as a team and life was a strange dichotomy of great and miserable. I hid my dive-bombing self esteem, bruises from being pushed into lockers and planted my emotions in an alternate universe, books.

I was called my first expletive in writing. Scrawled on a note and shoved in my locker, the word screamed at me. A few weeks later, one of the ringleaders held my face in the snow. I walked to my first class drenched in a mixture of tears, snow and sweat. I told my teacher I fell. She called my mother. I told mom I fell.

Gum was consistently found in my books, locker and even my hair. Name calling was after every class bell and I tried to shrink into oblivion. I was reading 6-8 books a week, both at school and home, anything to forget I was me. I was arriving at school as the last bell was ringing and hiding in the locker room during lunch. The more anti-social I became, the less banter I had to tolerate in between school bells.

I stopped talking all together second semester of my 6th grade year. I correctly answered the exact date the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor during history class and a combination spit ball and "dumb a***" followed. I tanked the test. By mid-semester, I was failing almost all of my classes. The principal called my parents.


I don't remember the incident, but it was so bad a big sister of a girl in my class broke it up outside school, brought me home and told my parents everything. They cried. I enrolled in a new school the next week. The wall against true sisterhood had structure. Four years later, I'd return to this same school and confront all these issues again.
Maybe I'll go there next week, but today my soul is raw from remembrance.

Show more sisterly love today.

Even if she doesn't deserve it.

She probably needs it the most.

Book Review: Passport Through Darkness

It is not uncommon for me to read through a book rather quickly.

If I can scrape together enough free time

and ignore the laundry,

I can read quickly.

Not the case with my most recent selection.

The writing was brilliant.

The story was griping, tragic and beautiful.

But the subject matter was difficult.

There were times when I wanted to turn away.

Close the book.

Ignore the pain that was inside of it.

But I couldn't.

Passport through Darkness is Kimberly L. Smith's story of

how she and her family personally experienced and were drawn

into a world of combating human trafficking and

helping protect the planet's most vulnerable victims.

Together with her spouse, Kimberly started

Make Way Partners, a non profit

built to protect those to which other organizations and ministries say

"No Way." "Too expensive." "Not worth the risk."

You cannot read this book without

calling out to God and asking Him

how to break your heart so that your life might make a difference.

I've linked you to the Amazon page so all you have to do is go buy it.

So that we may fight for freedom for everyone,

not just those of us who buy fireworks for a day in July.