1 Week

1 week until their first ballet lesson. There's a lot of excitement around here!

Cause You're Just Dying to Know...

It's O for Octopus week around here, and a membership to the Georgia aquarium came in real handy! We've actually never gotten to see the octopus before; he tends to spend a lot of time in hiding. We took our chances though and set off with wishful thinking. When we first got there, a diver was in the tank cleaning it out, and wouldn't you know it - the octopus was nowhere to be seen. We stopped back by later though, and he was out in full force! He was climbing all over the glass, and we even got to see him eat some food, work on capturing some more, and change colors!  

Here are the pictures the girls' made before we went. (Are the grease stains around the goldfish making anyone else rethink their snack options - eww!)

Name That Body Part

Any guesses on what we're studying in school this week??

How about another hint?

Crafty Craft: Earring Holder

I saw this idea several months ago and only recently got around to making it for Emma Lee. I don't remember how much they were selling for, but I do know that it was a lot more than the $1.49 it cost me to make this one!

Materials:
Wooden frame from the dollar store
Plastic canvas sheet from Michaels
Scraps of paper and random assortment of stickers
Mod Podge

Easy and functional! 

You've Got a Friend in Me

I should preface this by saying that ever since Kerri watched Toy Story 3 for the first time, she's been completely in love with Jessie. Any money that she's gotten for her birthday or Christmas has all gone to something Toy Story related. Her best and favorite purchase - the Jessie doll. Kerri's favorite thing about Jessie is that she yodels. When we were in Target, armed with birthday money, she saw Jessie, pulled her string and out of the 20 things that Jessie can say, she happened to yodel first. After that, nothing else is the entire store offered even a slight temptation for Kerri to change her mind about choosing Jessie. 

Kerri has carried Jesse around everywhere since November . . . up until about two weeks ago. We couldn't find Jessie anywhere. I wasn't worried for a few days, but then after a big room cleaning day and searching the rest of the house and the van multiple times, Jessie was nowhere to be found. I retraced our steps and called every store or place that we'd been to in the last several weeks. When nothing turned up from that, I visited, in person, the stores I thought were the most likely places where she might have taken her in and accidentally left her (you never know if the person on the phone is actually looking or not...).

Nothing. 

Kerri really and truly 100% believed that Jessie had come alive and was trying to find her way home. She prayed for Jessie. She cried for Jessie. She waited and waited and hoped that she was on her way home. It was pretty sad. I was really beginning to entertain the idea of buying a new Jessie, roughing her up a bit, and letting Kerri find her somewhere in the house.

Whatever happened, she must have worked up an appetite because yesterday Andy discovered her hiding in the pantry! Kerri was giggling like crazy and all of a sudden remembered that, for reasons only known to her, she had hidden her there but then forgotten about her.

Whew! Crisis averted and best friends are reconnected!

 

Latest Adoption Update

I haven't done an adoption update in a while, so here you go. I was anticipating December to be my month of good news about our wait time. We had heard that Bulgaria was supposed to be working on an updated waiting list. I was sure hoping that would mean we wouldn't have to wait as long as we were thinking. Well, no such luck. Apparently, they are working "hard" (comparatively speaking!), and are now caught up to 2009 dossiers. They hope to get through 2009 referrals this year, and if they are still on track, get through the 2010 dossiers in 2012-13. We filed our dossier with them in August of 2010, so the earliest referral we're hoping to receive will be sometime toward the end of 2012. I'm trying hard not to be discouraged. I'm meditating on the story of God promising Abraham a child from Sarah and how long it took for that promise to be fulfilled. At this point, it seems like it's something so far off and distant that it will never actually happen. Hopefully, one day I'll be able to look back on this all and laugh about how perfect God's timing was and how little I knew!

1-11-11

I take a lot of pictures. Actually, a lot is probably an understatement. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good, but that's beside the point. In looking back at the pictures I took last year, I've noticed that I don't have as many as I would like of Emma Lee and Kerri together, probably because it makes it sooooo much harder to get a decent picture! Because I clearly like to torture myself and those around me, I've decided to make a pointed effort to get at least one (1) semi-good picture of them every month until November (11) (which will lead right up to their birthday) of this year (11) = 1-11-11. I'd say I'll try to do it on the 11th of every month, but that might be a little over-committing myself - we'll see! Here's what I can up with today: