Here's your catch-all post about spring!
The play house is a big hit. Once the carpet is in I expect there to be lots and lots of fun and giggles coming from under the stairway.
I finally had some neighbors over to the house when Caitlyn had her baby shower. Only took me 20 months! Well, the good news is, they are really nice people and Alyssa even sent me this picture. And as the weather warms up we will all be hanging out in the neighborhood again like we did last summer. I'm so looking forward to it!
Spring pics from when the class pictures were taken. I think they are pretty darn good looking, if I say so myself.
Dan's project of making a projector screen from scratch for the basement had lots of volunteer helpers. It is an awesome sight!
These little mice popped up from the left over foam for said screen project. (:
Awww, M loves her doggie. I do too. The dog is on estrogen now and seems to be younger and happier because of it. It took a while to figure out the dosage, but I am so grateful my friend Sonya encouraged me to go see her vet. We had been going to the same vet for 9 years so it took a while, but they just weren't helping my sweetheart black lab. So glad she is doing better and has control of her bladder again. Yeah.
These two couldn't have been more excited to help me with yard work this spring. We had an unusually high amount of rain, which was both good and bad. Good because we didn't have to worry about watering much and bad because the seeds we planted literally drowned in the rain. So we planted more. And they drowned too. Never a problem we've had here before!
Oh, how I want to vent right now! Seeing the above photo is very bittersweet for me. Sweet because I am very grateful to this woman for watching over my children free of charge while I saw a therapist down the hall every week for months on end. Bitter because, well, who wants to have to drag four children to a therapist every single week? Why do I have to do that? Well, turns out some of the things that happened to me as a kid affect the way I am able (or unable) to parent my child who isn't ok with being adopted. It's tough. It's real tough. I had trained myself to be grateful and not dwell on negative things... which turns out is just another way of sweeping wounds under a rug to fester and create even bigger problems later. Ugh. And we had to open up all this miscarriage and adoption and all those other life traumas too. Ok, now I'm crying as I type. Dang it. This is why I don't talk about all the things that remind me that my favorite hymn is "I Need Thee Every Hour." I honestly don't know how I could deal with my past and my present and my lack of hope in the future without the grace of God. Seriously. Now you know one of the very important reasons I keep a blog and make my children scrapbooks. It is for me to look at when I am feeling down and to remember there are so many good things happening in my life that I just need to try to forgive myself, pull up my boot straps, and keep on going. Everything may look peachy on the outside, but the battle that goes on inside of myself both physically with all my health problems and emotionally really takes it's toll. And what about this therapy that is so expensive and difficult? When I found out this lovely lady pictured above couldn't watch my children anymore, I really began to think about whether this was all worth it. Had all this actually benefitted my daughter? I knew it was hard on the other 3 and D and M would ask me not to go and L. was the only person that made it ok. And then I had this thought: K feels like she is different from the other children in my family. We are only pouring salt in the wound by taking her to a therapist and talking about how she was adopted every single week. So, I informed the therapist we were taking the summer off and we would reevaluate in the fall. That was a decision the whole family was happy about.
my little ballerinas in their new outfits
K did an awesome job at her school's cardboard carnival. She worked so hard not only during her shift, but when another child didn't show up, she did that one too. I was so proud of her!
K, D, and M all got to go to a special introduction to horses one Saturday while Dan worked in the basement. They all loved it! I was very impressed with what a wonderful job this ranch did and would have signed them up for horse camp in a heart beat if we didn't already have other activities scheduled all summer. (I'm trying to make sure summer is relaxing as well as introducing new things.)
Speaking of animals, we now own guinea pigs! Somehow D and K convinced me to buy them pets for their birthdays this summer and even more surprising, they convinced me to buy them in the spring because we would be out of town for D's birthday. And we wanted to get K's at the same time since D's was a male and we didn't want to have any dominance issues later on. So, after spending quite the wad at PetSmart, we now have 4 children and 3 pets. Those numbers are a little frightening to me. lol. Fluffy (D's) and Fuzzy (K's) are cute little rodents and as different as night and day in personality. D's is super active and just wants to run around. I think K's would let you snuggle him all day long if you could sit still and do nothing for a day. It has been interesting to see the lessons they are learning in caring for their own pets. M and N adore the little critters as well and are more than happy to help if K and D forget. M is working on convincing me that since she is so good with the guinea pigs I should buy her a rabbit. Oh boy.
In between rains we planted our little hearts out. The flower bed I've been dreaming of since before our house was even done being built finally was finished this spring. I've never had a flower bed in the shade before so it was fun to research and go crazy at the nursery buying all these flowers I've never been able to enjoy before. I absolutely love it. And the children have a new favorite flower -- a bleeding heart.
K convinced me it would be fun to walk home from school in the rain one day, and she was right! But we still chose the mini van most of the time.
I had cousins come stay with us for a weekend while they were house hunting. It was so much fun to have grown ups to chat with, torture with Studio C sketches and play Settlers of Catan: Knights and Cities with.
One day Dan came home from work early so that I could go mow my parents lawn. M thought the dandelions were so pretty and I'm glad we took a picture because D decided they made awesome sword practice too.
We are going to miss M's preschool so much. Here are pictures from their May Day celebration. They danced around the May pole singing songs, ate strawberry shortcake, held chickens, and played. It got really exciting when poor Addison fell out of the tree while climbing it and broke her leg. M was determined to stay until the ambulance went away and later her mother told me that after Addison was back at school M was very attentive and caring. There's my future nurse/doctor for you! (M has also added "farmer" as a potential career.)
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