Anna's first Daddy-Daughter Date

Anna had her first daddy daughter date with Ken today. They went to Costco. She got all dressed up for the occasion.

 While she was waiting for Ken to be ready to go, she sat on couch. My friend's son, Tyler was on the couch too, and I had to take a picture because the look on his face is too funny. I'm not sure if he didn't want her there or if he just hadn't seen that much pink on one person in his life, but he was a little confused.

They had a good time and spent our life savings at Costco...again.

Anna dances

We went to a baptism on Saturday night and during refreshments Anna was teaching the missionaries how to dance hula. She's got a lot of rhythm in her little body. I wish I had a video of this because her tongue moves just as much as her body when she dances. Too cute.

Anna and Elder Berger

Juliett, Anna and Elder Berger

Anna

Today while Anna was watching the Sound of Music she was a little bit wiggly. What 4 year old isn't?  Anyway, here are just 2 of the ways she was 'caught' watching the movie (after I remembered I can take pictures on my phone.)

We love her!

When I grow up I want to be a stay at home mom.

Here are some things I have encountered lately as I carry out my life's ambition to stay at home.

Huge wads of toilet paper (thankfully clean) have been randomly showing up in the kids bathroom and the hallway. This started approximately November 18, 2010. We aren't sure of the culprit yet. :) I did suggest to one of my children that it's a good idea to stop playing with the TP. We'll see how it goes.

I helped Matthew clean his room today. I found a casket a key, an ID tag for a dead person (which Matthew made for himself last time he went to work with Ken, including his day of death - which thankfully has already passed,) and the top half of a sock. Apparently there was a big whole in the sock so he cut the bottom off and said the top part fit perfectly on his arm. There were several other 'gems' but those I thought deserved mentioning.

I am not a psychic. I don't have eyes in the back of my head. BUT, I know when you are sneaking out of your bedroom to play in the water in the bathroom. How do I know? I can HEAR you!

Nicole can almost play 'I Lived in Heaven' perfectly. She's been practicing it a lot. I'm so excited for her!

Matthew brought me a polaroid of him at age 1 at the Mexican Restaurant in a sombrero. He asked me if he was a Mexican. I told him yes. He started counting in Spanish but couldn't remember 10. (Diez) I told him he was a dumb Mexican. He called me a racist.

Being a stay at home as a child meant I got to stay home from school and watch TV all day, even though my mom did A LOT more than that during her life as a stay at home mom. The laundry was always done! folded and put away too.

Being a stay at home mom as a stay at home as the mom means cleaning up the same messes over and over again, day after day. Always having 2 more loads of laundry to do and wanting to take a nap way more often than you actually get to. It means hugging your child goodbye in the morning, missing him all day when he's gone and being so excited when he gets back home at the end of the school day while working on 7th grade at home and learning everything you can about fractions, number lines, graphs and grammar during my school day. Recently I've re-added teaching the alphabet, musical alphabet, counting and coloring in the lines to my list of requirements.

I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open. It's 100 times more work than I did when I worked full time in the classroom. It pays A LOT less.

I'm pretty happy with my position.

You threw off my groove.

Watch from 1:55-2:10 please...or you may watch the whole thing but take special note to those specific 15 seconds.

My groove has been thrown off.  Big Time. and I want a theme song.

Life has taken some amazing turns this month. It started out uneventful. We attended band concerts, parent teacher conferences and gone to the park a few times. (I consider going to the park with the same regard I use when speaking of band concerts and parent teacher conferences. I don't heart the park. At. All.) We've make cotton candy for the holiday bazaar at the school to earn money for the science club and we made it again at the church for the primary carnival. EIGHT people in our family had birthdays this month. I hosted the book club in my home and we've had some friends over for dinner. I'm still playing the organ in Sacrament Meeting but Ken got a new calling. Ward Mission Leader take 5. That's right people, it's his 5th run. (Insert evil laugh here.) All uneventful.

Going to bed on a Friday night after a full day of house cleaning, book club hosting and having friends over for dinner only to wake up to a call from my friend Becky--amazingly life altering.

We were gone for 5 days. We left in a rush after Ken went to the leadership broadcast at the church. While we were gone we met with the social worker and talked about home studies, walk threws and other boring but mandatory things. I told her I could just call my neighbor and have her let them in. I didn't even need to clean first, unless it's a against the rules to have one bedroom that looks like a hoarder lives there.  Another time, another post. Anyway, no walk through was necessary, we were able to come home.

We were home for FOUR days before I vacuumed again. Have I vacuumed since? Umm, that would be a big fat no. Laundry is piling up. School has been non existent. My explanation for that is winter weather and Nicole's had the flu, but still, we could have done something. My shower is happening later and later, there seem to be toys in every room in my house and I've have made a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

My friend Kelly described Anna as 'Just what I never knew I needed.' It's SO TRUE. It is awesome having 3 children. I thought since Nicole and Matthew were so much older that #3 wouldn't be as hard as everyone has told me. Maybe it hasn't been as hard as could be, but I still doubled my capacity by 50%.  It is hard. I'm repeatedly thankful she is 4 and done with bottles, diapers and all the comes with infants. I love 4 year olds. One 4 year old specifically.

I have been in contact with the social worker from Yakima County and one here in Thurston. They are going to do the walk threw of my house tomorrow. No big deal right? Don't even call, just come over. NOT ANYMORE! I'm freaking out. Now my whole house looks like a hoarder moved in. I will be cleaning all day today...if I can pull myself together.

Maybe I will take before and after pictures and somehow count this as a value experience for my personal progress.

While we were gone:

*Ken turned 35 on the 15th.
*My mom would have turned 63 on the 16th.
*My kids missed a week of school. (and they are still hoping for a snow day tomorrow.)
*I ran 2 minutes straight on a treadmill barefoot. I'll start my 'running' again tomorrow as long as the roads are clear.
*My testimony of personal revelation was strengthened 100 fold.

Two quotes from Anna:

I need to take a bath because my toes are dirty.
I have a big tongue.

One quote from Matthew:
Now you can't call Nicole your best girl because you have two girls. But I'm still the best boy.

One quote from Nicole:
Having a little sister is even better than I thought!

That being said, it's a little after 9 and it feels like it's midnight. I'm going to bed! My goal for this week is to find my rechargeable batteries. I don't have any for my camera and it's dead.

The Long Story

Ken and I want more children.  We never had any intention of stopping at two. Or three counting our baby Robert. Year after year we hoped it would be the year I would be able to get pregnant but it has now been almost 9 years since Robert was born and passed away and we haven't been able to have another baby, even with several rounds of fertility treatments.

Ken has be pressuring me suggesting that we do foster care for a few years now. I have always had serious reservations. (I don't really enjoy other people's children and I was never sure I'd be able to love someone else's baby that way I love my own.) 

Our first inquiry was less than 2 years after Robert died, when we were living in Grandview, WA. The application freaked me out and we never turned it in.

When we lived in Troutdale I had a dream. The four of us were having a little family party and I looked out our front doorway and there was a little girl standing in the doorway. She wanted to come to the party but wasn't invited. She just stood there and watched and I was too tongue tied to invite her in. She was old enough to speak fairly clearly but was not the age of my children who were in 1st and 2nd grade at the time.

After I had that dream I was certain it would finally be the year I got pregnant. It wasn't. Ken told me he got the inpression that it meant she would have to have to come into our family through a different route if she was going to 'invited to our party.' Then he suggested again that we look into foster care or adoption.

I ignored him for two more years.

I finally caved agreed to take the classes as long as I could choose when we started allowing extra children into our home.

We started foster care classes while we lived in Kansas and dropped out. I was having too much anxiety over it.

After we dropped out, Ken didn't drop the topic. He randomly added the subject into casual conversation, leaving me with a desire to pummel him on a regular basis.  I had convinced myself that the number two was perfect. As it was, we were set to empty nesters before we were 40. AWESOME! haha.

Fast forward a little while and we decided to move back to Washington. Ken left 2 months ahead of the kids and me.  One thing I didn't miss was the foster care/adoption conversations. The silence didn't last the whole 2 months. Ken started bring it up again on the phone. I think I only hung up on him once. I did agree to pray about it though.

As I prayed I told Heavenly Father I would do whatever it was that he wanted me to do and I also expressed all of my reluctancy about the whole subject.  My final request was that if I was supposed to be involved in foster care and adoption that the thoughts would come to me at random enough times I would know it was from Him and not Ken.  I had thoughts a lot. I ignored them.

Once we were here in WA and settled, Ken started pushing again. I hadn't told him about the thoughts I  kept having. Finally, sometimes this summer I was driving home from the store with my kids in the back seat and I was feeling frustrated about then arguing and the thought came to me as clear as a regular speaking voice, 'Look into foster care.'

Okie Dokie. That was random enough I guess. At least it got my attention. the next day as I was saying my prayers, I told Heavenly Father that I am going to be obediant. I repented for ignoring His promptings and asked what the next step was. When I finished I asked Ken for a priesthood blessing. I told him I needed specifics because I was really nervous about the whole topic.

He gave me a blessing and it was so specific I hoped he would stop. He described a little girl, all her 'problems or issues' and went into more detail about a perfect stranger than I felt comfortable with. When it was over I told him I'd do foster care. He ordered the info packet that day.

A short time after that I was talking to my friend, Becky and I told her about that blessing. I felt like I should tell her the whole thing and after we talked about that, our conversations easily moved away from it.

Ken and I started the foster classes. We went to orientation together. I went to one class with Nicole and I HATED it. The next day I didn't go to class because Ken had something going on and I didn't want to go alone. After that, we just never worked out the dates that we would go back and I never brought it up. I didn't want anything to do with those classes.

Last Saturday, our home phone rang at 7 in the morning. This struck me as odd for a couple reasons.  #1, only 1 person has our home number., my dad and he never calls us on the home phone. When it stopped ringing, I called him to see if he tried to call our home and he didn't. While we were on the phone, the home phone rang again. Ken got out of bed and answered the phone and it was my friend Becky. She lost my cell number and called information to get our home number. Good thing Ken answered.

She told me the about Anna's history and what was going on in her life at the moment.  It's not a pretty story and definitely not one that needs to be published on the internet. The important part is that life in her adoptive home was not going well at all and the family was done trying. That's where we came in. DSHS asked Becky is they would take her. Becky and her husband Scott have 6 children and didn't feel that it was right for them to adopt Anna, even if they wanted to. But she said as she was praying that Ken and I came to her mind. I immediately said we'd take her but she had to talk to Anna's mom and see what they thought.

We were requested to come for a visit as soon as we could by the adopted mom, so we left that evening. What started out as an overnight visit turned into 5 days of anxiety, stress and emotions ranging from the highest highs to the lowest lows.

We met her adoptive parents, the social worker and many people in the area that are in Scott and Becky's ward that know Anna. We heard good stories about her as well as bad ones. We saw raging tantrums (not by children) and pure Christlike actions.

Anna's adopted parents turned over their rights to Ken and me on Wednesday evening. Thursday morning we met the social worker on Thursday morning and we were able to ask any questions we had. That afternoon at 3pm there was a meeting at DSHS about Anna's family. One of the decisions that had to be made was whether Anna could go home with us that night or if we needed to clear it through superior court first.

After waiting for 2 1/2 of the longest hours of my life we got the verdict that Anna was gree to come home us. Under no circumstances would they let her go back into the care of her adoptive parents and we were free to higher an attorney and persue adoption.

So, we left E. WA. 10 minutes after that phone call was over and brought our new family of 5 home. I may be leaving things out. Feel free to ask me questions and I'll fill in any blanks that I may have left out.

Sorry for the typos.  I'm not proofing this. I'm tired and want to get it posted. Below are some pictures of our sweet Anna Rebekah.  We love her!

Reader's Digest Version

Long Story Short...(Long Story coming soon.)

We have become legal guardians to a 4 year old little girl, named Anna that we are hoping to adopt. Our trip to Eastern Washington was to meet her, get her adoptive parents to sign over their rights to us and then wait and wait and wait for DSHS to give us the green light to bring her home.  We got said green light last night at 5:30 and we were in our car on the way home by 5:45. It has been an amazingly stressful week with some of the highest highs I've had in my life and some lows that left me wanting to throw up and cry my eyes out.

I am now starting to find a good attorney so we can expedite the adoption process. We need this little girl in our family forever. 

I am VERY thankful and overwhelmed. Scared to have a little one in the home again and thankful that she is not in diapers or drinking bottles. I'm not sure I could have handled that. Photos and the Long Story will be along shortly.

Until then, here is the first 'funny' she said to me:
I am stronger than crabs!

ummm, ok. haha!