Nesting

I am in full on nesting mode.  "But you're not pregnant" you might say.  You are right, I am not pregnant but I am expecting and so excited.  Having a home that we have only lived in for less than 6 months and feeling the need to frantically get the whole thing ready for more kids is driving me slightly crazy.  I just can't do it.  So I need to get real.  I've decided to just work on the kids' rooms.  If I can just get them painted all the rest will come. But the decorating is the fun part and I can't even do that because I don't know age or gender of the children coming.  So I spend my nights on Pinterest seeing how I can make my color scheme work for boys or girls.  We did say that we preferred sisters age 0-3 but in the world of God making families, it is almost never what we "prefer".  We know that we will get placed with the children who are perfect for our family if we just trust that God will take care of it.

  Why am I so frantic?  We have our final walk through in 3 DAYS!! I can't believe we are already here. Our social worker approved us at our last meeting and is working on our home study which we will sign once complete.  After that and our walk through we will be officially certified.  That just seems so surreal.  Life has been so crazy that I haven't really thought about it all that much.  Now writing it down along with the mad dash to get our house finished it has really hit me.  Once we are certified the timeline is unknown.  We said that we are willing to be respite care providers while we wait for our children.  Respite care providers take care of foster children for a few days so their foster parents can have a few days away, or travel for work.  Whatever the need may be.  Within the foster care system there are rules to who can care for foster children over 24 hours.  Being a certified home we would be able to offer that to other parents.

  So after Thursday we wait to hear from our social worker to sign our home study and then we just wait to hear of a potential match for our family.  I really appreciate having gone through surrogacy before doing this process.  Surrogacy is a hurry up and wait process just like fostering to adopt.  You get all your ducks in a row and then just wait.  I hope I've become a more patient person in all of this.  I also think it has helped prepare myself and my boys to understand that families are made all different ways.  They understand that mommy has carried babies for other families and now other mommies have carried babies for our family. We have interesting conversations and I just love how they want to learn more and are so excited for this too.

  Well, off to get my kiddos to bed and finishing painting one room.  The patience thing may be getting a little better but the procrastination has not.  

6 Year Old Superhero Party

Sometimes I wish I wasn't a procrastinator.  Especially when it comes to planning parties. My life would be a whole lot easier if I could do things ahead of time but I clearly haven't gotten that down yet.  Hudson and I had been talking about what kind of party he wanted for quite awhile and pinning ideas for months. Now that he is in school he was so excited to invite his classmates.  His actually birthday is April 27th but with scheduling conflicts we moved it to May 10th.  Whew, it gave me 2 more weeks to plan. Well, life got busy and I finally started shopping and making decorations the week of the party.  Sounds like me.

We recently planted seed in our backyard so we decided we couldn't have a bounce house on our new seed.  So we ended up having it at the park behind our house.  It was so perfect to have all that room to ourselves.  I just love "our park".


We rented a bounce house and it was going to be just that.  But then the weather report said it was going to be 94 degrees we just had to upgrade to the waterslide bounce house so the kids wouldn't be too hot. As the party got closer the weather said 84 degrees and then the day before it said 79.  Guess who doesn't care what temperature it is outside to play in water?  All of the kids.  Their little lips were chattering but they didn't care.  They had a blast.  We had such a wonderful time celebrating our little 6 year old.  It breaks my heart a little that my baby is 6 but we are having so much fun with the boys at this age.  Thank you to our friends and family who came to celebrate with us.  We are very blessed to have so many people who love Hudson.

My handsome little dude and me in our superman shirts before the party started.

This was the perfect sized bounce house for all the kiddos.

What's a superhero party without your aunts and uncles showing up in their superhero garb? 

This was a fun idea in theory until the wind blew.  

  

Spider webs of course.  

Look at this cutie!

I ran out of time to do anything more than this for the cupcakes.  Procrastination problems. 

 Hudson with one of his good friends warming up on the slide. 

 Their lips were so blue.  

But that didn't stop them from making funny faces. 

Make your own mask station.

Cute masks boys!

My favorite part of the whole party.  Instead of goodie bags I made all of the kids capes with their initial on the back

 This is the cutest superhero I've ever seen. 

Even my niece got a little one.  

Thank you to all our superhero friends!!

We were exhausted but it was so worth it!

My year in a nutshell

I miss writing. I miss sharing what is going on in my life. The last year has been hard to get back into it. I've let the fear of sharing too much keep me from sharing anything. So I go about my life in private and I don't really want complete privacy. I want my experiences to help others if they can. So I'm coming back. I've also felt like I need to update the last year if I want to start again but then the task of actually updating feels too overwhelming so I let more time pass.

So here is the last year in shorthand. I delivered a healthy baby girl on April 24th and now we are sneaking up on her 1st birthday. I can't believe it has almost been a year. The relationship didn't end up how I expected it to but it has been a learning experience for me. I have constantly struggled with having high expectations and then when other people don't live up to my expectations I come crashing down. What right do I have to expect other people to live up to MY expectations? That is something I have to work on. There was a precious baby girl born, they are completely in love with her and that is the only thing that is really important.

So besides that, my baby started kindergarten and my big boy turned 7. Am I even old enough to have a 7 year old? The wrinkles in the mirror say yes. We went to Disneyland for the first time and celebrated my first surro-girl's 2nd birthday. We bought a house and got a puppy. I've started a new job as a parent educator and I love it. We are slowly trying to work on our new house but there is a lot to do.

But our biggest news is:

We would love to have you come along us in our new journey.  Please pray for our family, for the child(ren) that will be coming in to our home, for social workers and other team members that will be looking for the best situation for those children.  We are adopting from foster care which means this will be a long process and a lot of people involved.  We know this will not be easy but we know that if God has called us He will equip us.