Project RC Track Complete

Last February Dustin and I took on the monumental task of building from scratch, with just some blueprints and home depot lumber, a playset in our backyard for the kids.  We finished it in April and it has been sooo much fun for everybody (and we had a blast building it!)

This year I had sworn off any new projects - projects and two year olds don't really go well together in my book.  But Dustin got the itch and put the big kids to work last month as they created a remote control car race track on the side yard of our property, to the left of the playground in the above picture.

First came laying out all the piping and staking it in with metal spikes.  Next came the delivery of dirt.

 And the fun begins...

 Trent worked really hard alongside Dustin...

 Kate and Penny pitched in too..

 We eventually gave Penny the job of picking up rocks and throwing them in the woods - fun for hours!

 The track was complete within the day - and the boys go back there after dinner to race each other almost every night.  Kate has even joined in and has her own smaller RC car...

 Another view of the finished track...

 Trent's car making a lap...

I did pretty much nothing to help with this project, unless you count bringing water and cheering on the cars in their first lap.  Some projects I feel confident with - this was not one of them.  But our kids are so so blessed to have a Daddy as awesome as Dustin.  After working 12 hour work days all week, he spends his weekends coaching baseball and building remote control tracks - love that man!

Penny Love is 2!!

On January 21st we marked a special day in the life of our baby girl - Penny turned 2!  (Yeah, I know.  I'm only three months late in blogging, but I'll catch up eventually!)

In the five months she had been home with us, she had blossomed into a little girl that has enough charisma to start a fire.  I couldn't believe it had only been five months and at the same time, I couldn't believe that much time had already passed.  As Dustin and I watch her personality unfold and learn what makes her smile, here a few of the things that I adore about this special little sunshine girl:

Penny wakes up as happy as a Meadow Lark EVERY morning.  Now, to me, this is just plain 'ol inspiring.  Trent and Kate both race me to her room every morning when we hear her start singing to herself on the baby monitor.  And when we walk in the room, she greets us with a "Hi Mamaye!  Hi Chent!  Hi Kate!" in the most enthusiastic voice - love, love, love.

She has the deepest belly laugh and even gets my jokes, which is just crazy!

When she comes up to me while I'm loading the dishwasher and pats my hand while she looks up at me and says, "I luh you mama."

Her ability to run almost as fast as her ten year old brother - sad for him, awesome for her!

The way she "reads" a book by babbling on and on any time I pick up a book to read aloud to one of the other kids.  She thinks if I am talking incessantly, she should be too...  biggest reason why we now do read alouds while she takes her nap ;)

Her determination to "do it I-self" - little Miss Independent wants to do it all.  Like today when she wanted to put on her clothes on her own.  I walked out of the room and twenty minutes later she came in to show me how well she did while I folded laundry...  Six shirts in various sizes and colors all draped over one another with one arm stuck half way over her head and the other one unable to move away from her body at all.  But she didn't care.  "Oook!  Mama, I did it mama!"  Yep, yep you did big girl!

When I brush her big sister's hair and she comes by to hold Kate's hand and says, "Sshhh.  No urting Kate.  Mama no urt you.   It nice!"

On Penny's birthday she got a tricycle from her grandparents that ended up being a bit too big for her so they made the most of it.  Kate rode her up and down the hallways and they had a blast!

This girl loves to talk on the phone and mostly look at herself on FaceTime:

Birthday girl gets a pony (llama?) riding lesson from Kate:

Time for some birthday cake!

I went back and forth on whether to have a big party for her 2nd birthday.  Since it was January, there just weren't many options and the weather was kind of crummy so we're opting to wait to have a big celebration for her "Gotcha Day" on September 5th.  In lieu of a big party, we invited our sweet friends, the Thomas family, to join us at an Ethiopian restaurant in Charlotte for dinner.  It was the perfect end to our celebrating Penny's 2nd birthday!  The girls dressed up for our night out.

 The baby magnet, JT, reading "Snuggle Puppy" to Penster - it's now her favorite book ;)

The whole gang (minus Dustin - he never gets in a photo, poor guy!)

Happy birthday Penny Love!!

Garden Newbie

The moment I decided to homeschool I swore to my friends (whom I had already decided were going to be sipping lattes at Starbucks while I listened to my kindergartner read Cat in the Hat 50 times a day) that I would draw the line at homeschooling... that meant the following:

1.  I would not wear denim jumpers
2.  I would continue to enjoy me some good rock music
3.  I would never wear handmade wooden apple necklaces (or insert holiday of choice)
4.  I would allow my children to participate in activities with the "public school kids"... duhduhduh (evil music played here)
5.  We would not take a wagon train trip across the midwest to commemorate Westward expansion
6.  Bread would continue to be purchased from the grocery store - homemade bread is out of the question
7.  I will never grow an organic garden

Well, scratch #6 - Dustin got me a bread maker for Christmas and I LOVE IT!  I am addicted to the smell of freshly baked bread in the morning. (Yeah, you can even set a timer at night so that your dough cooks in the middle of the night and is ready, warm and ready for slicing at dawn!  How cool is that!)

ANd.... Yep, scratch #7 too.  Oh for the love of all things pure and holy!  Seriously?  I have now succumb to 2 out of my list of 7 things - I am going to grow an organic vegetable garden!  What is this world coming to?  Crazier still, I think I love it too!  I've always loved the feeling of dirt and don't mind dirt under my finger nails so the idea of pulling weeds and cultivating the land to grow my own produce for my munchkins actually doesn't sound half bad.

It took me far too many hours on Pinterest (blast you Pinterest!  you have stolen so many hours from my life - and I am certain it is not my fault :-)  but I have finally got the raised bed of my dreams thanks to my amazing husband and one weekend devoted to pulling it all together.  If you are interested in the details of the raised bed garden we made, read on.  Otherwise, check back when I check #1 off my list and start wearing denim jumpers to go swimming in the backyard.

I knew I wanted to grow a variety of veggies and Dustin loves tomatoes so I started by making a list of what I would want and then figuring out how big I would need to make the bed based on the number of plants I wanted to put in.  I went to a site that saved my life called Growveg.com garden planner.  It is a site that allows you to plot out your veggies and tells you how much space you will need and wear to place specific plants in the garden.  It is $25 for a yearly membership but the first month is free with no sign up necessary so I plan to just take my money and run at the end of the month because I just needed it to help get me started.  I printed out a color coded plot map and seed planting bar graph from the site to have for reference and it was very simple.

We figured we wanted to have about 50 square feet of garden space so Dustin bought 2X8" beams and attached them horizontally with 1x1" pieces that we predrilled into the beams and then screwed in.  We made the bed 4x12' and attached the four sides with galvanized top edge corner brackets from Lowe's.  

Once it was all together, we realized it was pretty visible from the street so we went back and bought some green spray paint so that it would blend it better with the surrounding woods.

Because we have quite a few deer and rabbits in our backyard, we knew we would need a fence.  The bed is 16" tall so we thought using a plastic mesh would be sufficient for the rabbit issues.  We made the fence 4 feet tall (the same height as the mesh fencing).  We stapled the fencing around the two shorter sides of the bed and along the back side and then staple gunned the fencing to each 1x1" post on three sides as well.  When it came time to do the last side, we left an opening and didn't use the staple gun at all.  I pulled it tight while Dustin put in screws along one of the middle 1x1"s.

Now when I want to get into the garden to weed or pick veggies, I just pull back the wire mesh to the side.  Oh, another thing I am learning as a newbie gardener: at least for me, growing from seeds is a big pain.  I bought a billion seeds and only used a few from each packet and then bought one of those dirt seedling kits.  The plants have done ok and the transplanting went fine but they are just so tiny right now. I was at Walmart today and I had plant envy and ended up buying large, more mature plants to replace a few of my peppers and tomatoes.  I planted the tomatoes, bell peppers (red, green and yellow), jalapeños, sugar snap peas and blueberry bush along the north end of the garden so that they don't crowd out the lower growing plants on the south facing end for morning sun.  On the south end I planted a row of carrots and two rows of lettuce along with radish and cucumber.

So what is up with the soda bottles?   Alas, Pinterest has failed me on this experiment.  I read a great idea of using 2 Liter bottles to provide your own cheap version of a drip irrigation system.  I put small holes along the bottom and sides of the bottles and then dug them into the soil.  The idea was that I would fill the bottles and replace the cap, allowing water to slowly leek out of the holes and providing a deep watering to the plants.  The problem is, my plants do not have mature root systems yet and so when I fill the bottles the plants do not get the water.  The bottles only seem to get about a 6" area around themselves and it didn't work out like I'd hoped.  I pulled the bottles out of the garden today and bought an adjustable rotating sprinkler that I'll just turn on each morning for 20 minutes or so.

 Dustin had such a clever idea for the left over wood and a few scraps we had around the wood pile - he built a mini-bridge that can be easily lifted over the bed so that I can get between my rows and have great access to the back edge of the planting bed without tramping on our airy, fluffy dirt.  Man, that guy is a keeper!

Here's the view from the front of the house.  The bed is off to the right side at the edge of the woods.  Now that we painted the bed green, you can hardly tell it is there (which is great for us, because our neighborhood association requires raised beds to be behind the sight line of the house and ours technically isn't.)

What fun to make salad with our own veggies this summer!  Come on over and share some... unless I'm busy making my children recite some poetry in French and Mandarin.

Six Months Home

Last week marked 6 months since we landed at Charlotte International Airport, bringing our newest daughter home.  I remember strapping her into the car seat for the car ride home thinking, "Wow.  She's actually here.  God, you have outdone yourself.  She's amazing."  And she is.  Penny is seriously amazing.

But I wouldn't be honest if I said it was all sunshine and rainbows from that first trip home until now - I mean, the girl is two now ;)  I had read up on attachment parenting, parenting a child from "hard places", post-adoption depression (yes, it is a reality for many mamas), sibling relationships - my list of kindle books is quite a library now!  Needless to say, I felt prepared for the "worst of the worst" when it came to the bonding process with our baby girl.  I had even pictured myself cleaning every meal off the walls when my new daughter would decide to throw her food to establish control (that hasn't happened yet!)  But even with the bonding that has happened in our home and with the joy that a little sister adds to our lives, there are challenges.  And I want to be sensitive to Penny's story and to her asserting her two year old independent will while at the same time recognizing that this parenting thing is sometimes pretty messy.  So here are a few things that have been difficult for me:

1.  Those first four weeks I seriously grieved the loss of our old family unit.  I didn't expect it because I had begged God for our sweet girl and so I felt extremely guilty for feeling grief over the loss of what used to be.  The grief has passed now, six months later, and I can now fully embrace our family and remember fondly what it used to look like (much quieter!)  I also grieved seeing my older daughter go through the same stages of grief that I was in but we are so much better off now.

2.  Extreme weeping from Penny - Now, I'm not talking about the kind of tears you would see from a typical toddler who doesn't get her way (she has plenty of those also).  This weeping comes from deep within her stomach and is accompanied by HUgE crocodile tears.  They can be turned on by a simple "no" when I am asking her to stay away from dangerous objects or when I tell her it is not ok to hit her brother so that he will give her the toy he is holding.

3.  Those tears don't always lead me to a place of extreme empathy.  In fact, sometimes I am surprised at how frustrated or even mad I am that she is being "so sensitive".  We have employed a no spanking, no time out policy with Penny because of her past history and it is at these moments of fits and tears that I have to slow down my breathing and force myself to talk in a whispering voice to keep myself measured and self-controlled (and in case you were wondering, this is NOT the case with my older two... their discipline looks very different than this).

4.  I have been gathering all of Penny's orphanage monthly medical records and notes, along with all the pictures I can gather of her early days at the orphanage to create a baby book for her.  I have the semblance of a baby book on her dresser in her room and she asks to look at it every morning.  Yesterday as we looked through it, we came to a picture of a woman caregiver at the orphanage who was holding Penny and smiling.  Penny asked me, "Mommy, that Penny.  Mommy, who that?" as she pointed to the lady.  I had no idea who it was.  I have sent the picture on to our adoption agency, hoping that they may be able to figure out who it is, but it just was a reminder that there are 19 months of our little girl's life that are lost to us.  I won't be able to tell her when she sat up for the first time.  I won't be able to tell her what her first word was.  I won't be able to tell her when she first smiled and why.  And that just stinks.  There's just no good answer for that.  And the questions she will have will often not have an answer.  And that stinks too.

A lot of people in the adoption world talk about the "honeymoon/ airport welcoming party" phase as a cautionary tale to recognize that adoption only begins there.  It was a leap for me to go from "preparation" to parenting in a matter of minutes.  The preparation is monumental but my biggest piece of advice to future adoptive families is do your homework.  I was so glad I had read up on intentional regression strategies, adjustment techniques, time-ins, potential medical concerns, social emotional public behaviors, etc.  And it is not an easy road.  But it is the BEST road we could ever have taken.

"Normal Hair"

*Make sure to mute my playlist at the bottom of my blog to play video - it's worth it!

Sick of My Status Quo

I came across the following post on a fellow adoptive mama's blog.  She and her family of 9 picked up and moved to Guatemala to help run an orphanage there.  Her post was too profound not to include today, so here it is.
Oh, and I am reading a book that was recommended to me by friends Rebecca and Caleb David (whom we met while in Ethiopia) entitled "Seven: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess" and I must say - my desire to live more than the status quo in my faith is churning in my stomach.  The past month I have literally had stomach aches due to feeling "sick" of my own lack of longing to love until it hurts because of Jesus' love for me.  Not sure what this all means for me yet, but thought I'd share it anyway...

Sometimes, we find it easiest to look the other way. 

Sometimes, we believe He isn't talking to us. 

Sometimes, we figure someone else will do it. 

Sometimes, we blow it off as someone elses responsibility. 

But what if... God meant for you to do it? 

As we were talking to someone the other day about support for our mission work we heard the all to common comment of 'go ask this church- or go ask that church'.

But what I sometimes think we forget is WE ARE THE CHURCH. 

And often times we use the church as our excuse to not have to do what we are called as individuals to do. 

We hide behind the title 'the church' and forget the church is made up of individual Christ followers who are all to do their own part. 

Because after all, He is a personal God. 

Personal to me- and personal to you. 

While the church as a whole is powerful enough to knock out the orphan crisis- it's going to take all of us to do our part to make it happen- or it never will. 

And yet all too often we sit and we wait... 

For someone else to take care of the problem... 

For someone else to give... 

For someone else to serve... 

For someone else to do something about it... 

And we excuse ourselves of our individual responsibility. 

When perhaps He was talking to us all along... 

In the past I have talked a lot on my blog about our ties to money- and what the Lord has been teaching us. As we are raising funds for missions, more than ever before, our eyes are being opened to our cultures connection to the almighty dollar.

And more than ever before- I see how clearly it is the one thing that is bringing us, as a nation, down. 

Our love for things... 

and our love of self... 

Over our love for Him. 

I came across this picture the other day and I felt like someone punched me in the gut. I wondered how someone could just look the other way and go on without doing something to help? 



But then it hit me.. 

Aren't we, in essence, doing this exact thing when we- choose that $6.00 latte over giving to missions? 

When we choose to take a family vacation instead of giving our tithe? 

Choose to have a pedicure over sponsoring a child in need? 

Choose to look the other way as the homeless man sits on the corner begging for our help? 

Choose a bigger house over adopting a child? 

Choose to do nothing- when we could do something?

Choose not to respond.

Roman 14:12 tells us "Each of us will give an account of himself to God."

Belonging to a church isn't enough. 

Each one of us, individually, are accountable to God for what we have done for the poor, the helpless, the widow and the orphan. 

I once heard someone say the only thing worse than being lost- is being lost and knowing there is no one looking for you. As the body of Christ I believe the Lord is calling each one of us- as individuals- to open our eyes and LOOK. Look for the need and act. 

Give. 

Serve. 

Love. 

Take it personal- 

Because He does. 

Legacy of Love - My Grandma

2, 438.77 miles separated me from being with my family at the bedside of my "Grandma Wenner" today as they honored her in her last days until Jesus takes her home.  She's staying with my parents now and is being cared for in my childhood bedroom.  Distance at times like this just isn't easy.  I wish we lived down the road so I could have been there today: to cherish her, to bless her, to encourage my mom, to praise God with my family this afternoon.

My mom, dad, aunt and 3 cousins, along with their spouses and kids, sat down around Grandma's bedside today to say goodbye.  My cousin, Tim, played hymns and worship songs on his guitar while the whole family sang along and shared their love and admiration for the woman who has left a legacy of faith that will be carried on for generations.  Grandma mouthed the words to "How Great Thou Art" while the family sang around her bed.  Great-grandchildren gave requests to Uncle Tim as they sang out of hearts of gratitude for the woman of God we have had the privilege to call Grandma.

Grandma has a heart after God's very own.  There has never been a conversation with her in which she has not told me, "You know, I am praying for you and for your family every day."  She served as a special education teacher in her career and then in her retired years, served as a short-term missionary alongside my grandpa, with Wycliffe Bible Translators.  Some of my best memories with her are hearing her tell stories of her travels as a missionary.  I caught my admiration and wonder of the continent of Africa from Grandma.  Going to her house was like walking into an international kids' museum - international because she had artifacts and photographs from all of her travels (which were extensive) and "kids" because most of them were within reach to be touched (and sometimes broken).  I remember playing on her green shag carpet with wooden safari animals as a child and beginning to dream about going to that far away place some day - only God knew...

Grandma's love for other cultures, along with her endless passion for seeing people come to know Jesus, have left a legacy of love for generations - my little Penny Love is a part of that legacy.  God used her to soften my heart for the proper time when we would decide to travel to the continent of Africa.  I am so grateful and blessed by her legacy of love... for the world, for her family, for Jesus.

Her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren rise up and call her blessed.  (Proverbs 31)  The miles may separate me from experiencing the blessing first hand but I know Grandma is only the blink of an eye away from being where her heart has longed to be since God breathed life into her.  She has always been a woman that fully embraced the words of the spiritual:

"This world is not my home,
I'm just a passing through.
My treasures are laid up
Somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door.
No, I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

Just up in Glory Land we'll live eternally
The Saints on every hand are shouting victory.
Their song of sweetest praise drifts back from Heaven's shore
and I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

Grandma - I love you.  I wish I could sing this to you but I know it is not necessary because you know these words better than anyone I know.  You have left a legacy of love and faith for generations to come and I am forever grateful.