Hoping for another little miracle

Actually, we don't think adopting another child would be a little miracle at all- adoption is always a huge miracle. Last Friday, we were officially opproved for a second adoption! We are so excited about this. We know, Gabriel will only be eighteen months old in a few weeks, but we're ready. When we adopted Gabriel it was 18 months from when we applied to when we took him home. This is pretty much average. We started our application for a second adoption the beginning of September, so if the average holds it will still be a while until we have another baby placed with us. However, it could also be tomorrow. We would love for it to be sooner rather than later.

Gabriel has been the most beautiful gift in our lives. Even as he becomes an obstinate toddler, I still look at him and think "You are so precious. I love you so much." We don't have any concern about loving another child as much as we love him. He has shown us how love simply grows rather than dividing. We are so excited to share the love we have in our little family with another child.

We are working with LDS Family Services, which is the agency we worked with when we adopted Gabriel. One of the great things that our agency does is provide counseling and support services for birth parents without pressure or judgement. If you or someone you know would like to know more about adoption, please go to itsaboutlove.org. This is a no pressure way to learn more and you can be directed as to how to speak with an adoption counselor in your area who can help you to decide if adoption is the right option for you. You can also see our profile at www.itsaboutlove.org/ial/profiles/23704159/ourMessage.jsf .

To our future child: We can't wait to meet you...we love you.

He sure is thorough

It's 10:10pm on Saturday night. Mark and I have to speak in sacrament meeting tomorrow. I've been done writing my talk for about an hour now. Mark will not be done for hours yet. I'm a little nervous about how things will be when he is in school and he has to write papers. I am afraid we will see him even less then we see him now and that's not very much. At least he's thorough. So, while I am sitting here I thought I would take the chance to write another post.

Last Thursday evening I went out to dinner with six of my friends from high school. We get together occasionally and catch up on one another's lives. I personally think that it is pretty great that we all still get along and care about each other. We had a good time.

My friend Audra asked me if Gabriel has hit the terrible 18 months yet. She said whoever said it starts at two lied. I absolutely agree! While generally Gabriel is a pleasant child, he is definitely becoming more moody. A week ago Friday was especially difficult. He woke up and said to me "who is it, Daddy?" (he calls Mark "who is it" because I use to ask him this question every time Mark came home. He has recently tacked on Daddy to the end.) He continued to ask for Daddy all day and he grew increasingly irritated with me when I couldn't produce him. He would not eat lunch at all. For those of you who have seen my son's belly (which he loves to show off) you know that skipping a meal is not normal behavior for Gabriel. He was just plain contrary. After his nap I still had not eaten lunch so I made myself a grilled cheese. I decided to make an extra one and formulated a plan. I told Gabriel "this is Mommy's and you can't have any". Of course, he ate an entire sandwich himself because of this statement. By the time Mark got home, I was exhausted emotionally and physically. It is amazing how a 17-month-old can wear you out so much.

One day this last week I was trying to get Gabriel to do something and he just wouldn't listen. Finally I said to him "am I just talking for my own entertainment?". He turned around, looked at me, and shook his head yes. I'll admit, I couldn't help but laugh. I guess better that than screaming, right? He is better about doing things for Mark, but the truth is he throws a huge fit when I leave. To be honest, I love that just a little. I just hope he does okay when we start leaving him in nursery in a few weeks. Wish us luck.

Here's some pictures of the last few months. I'll try to limit how many I post.

Halloween was fun. Isn't our little lion adorable? He won cutest boy costume at the church kids fashion show. This costume has been through all six boys on Sarah's side of the family.

Bringing home the Christmas tree, opening presents, and Sarah's siblings. Aren't they a handsome group?

I know how to handle food.

Walking around in Mommy's shoes. So cute!

And now I'm going to bed. Good night!

Last year I didn't make any New Year's resolutions. This year I unofficially have three. One is to blog more often, two is to take my LISW exam, and three is to loose weight. I suppose writing about them makes them official. Anyway, it is now the...what day is it?...it's the 13th of January and I am just now writing a post. I've been wondering why I feel so much more overwhelmed with accomplishing anything lately. It seems any task takes me twice as long as it use to and unless something is really important, it is not likely to get done in a timely fashion if at all. I've especially been thinking about how much more I had on my plate last year with an internship and classes, but how I seemed to be able to get everything done. Well, today I randomly saw this article and it gave me some insight as to why I'm feeling this way. It also helped me realize that I'm not defective and I'm not the only one.

I thankfully don't have any friends who have expressed this kind of attitude. I also feel like I was considerate to my friends with children before I became a mom. However, I think I have inflicted some unrealistic expectations on myself (I know, big surprise). I feel like I can never get enough done. No matter how hard I try, I cannot keep my house clean. There is constantly laundry or dishes to be done, or toys to pick up. I rarely get to shower before noon. I just took down our Christmas decorations yesterday. It's all I can do to get dinner on the table some days. Little things like going to the grocery store, the doctors office, or the dry cleaners take a lot of planning.

I told myself that it was due to the fact that my husband is working 50-60 hours a week and I'm babysitting a few days a week. While I'm sure these things contribute to my lack of productivity, this article helped me realize that it's because I'm a mom of a 17 month old little boy. I am constantly having to keep an eye on him. It is no exaggeration to say that if I turn my back for more than a few minutes that he will be in to something he shouldn't be. While writing this I have already had to get up and intervene/instruct about something seven times. I especially liked the part about constant use of your voice and teaching virtually everything. It's a lot to be responsible for. I'm exhausted at the end of the day and when I try to explain to Mark why I'm so tired, I feel like I have so little to actually tell about.

Yet, she is right. It is a choice that I have made to stay home with my son. Thankfully, Mark is very supportive and constantly tells me how grateful he is that I am at home. I would not choose to be anywhere else. This coming Sunday Mark and I are giving talks in Sacrament meeting and in one of the conference talks we are speaking on Dallin H. Oaks said, "There is no area of parental action that is more needful of heavenly guidance or more likely to receive it than the decisions of parents in raising their children and governing their families. This is the work of Eternity." This made me realize that even though my days are filled with an endless amount of unfinished work, dirty diapers, dirty laundry, and dirty dishes, they are also filled by the irreplaceable influence that I have on my child and that he has on me.

So, I may not be the perfect housekeeper, the most available friend, or the most influential woman on earth, but I am the most influential person in my son's life. After all the years of struggle to become a mother I need to remember how important and valuable I know the job of being a mom is. I guess sometimes I just need a little reminder and I need to give myself a little slack. I'll keep trying to work on my goals, but maybe somethings are not as important as I make them seem. We'll see how it goes.

Days in the sun

Warning! This post will be long and dedicated to our trip to Florida in June, but first I want to rant a little about technology and how it has slowed me down. I have had every intention of posting again quickly, but my camera had other ideas. I'm not sure how this happened, but my camera has been taking pictures so that they would be brilliant if printed as a 13x19" picture. This makes the digital size huge and impossible to download or even view in some programs without being edited. So, I have been editing all 600 of the pictures on my camera in order to make them usable. Needless to say, this has taken quite a bit of time, especially with my little one plus two others running around my house. Most of the time technology does wonderful things to make our lives easier, but other times they make things much more complicated. Some days I just want to turn off the phone, the computer, and the tv and just enjoy my life. Some days I do just that.

Now, back to my original reason for this post. From June 13th through the 20th we went on vacation to Tarpon Springs, Florida. After being told in Atlanta that we didn't have tickets for our next flight to Tampa and much stressful arguing and then waiting, we were able to get on the plane at the last minute and we arrived in Tampa. Our friends, Val and Jason, who we spent the week with, picked us up at the airport and we went strait to Orlando. That night Mark and Jason wonderfully agreed to watch Gabriel while Val and I went to a dueling piano bar at Disney World named: . It was so much fun. After going I wish that Mark could have gone with me, because I think he would have really liked it. There are basically two two-man teams and they switch places with the other team every hour. They were amazing. People would take up requests written on napkins and they would just bust them out. If they don't know a song, they go back stage during their hour off and learn the song. Then they come out and perform it with amazing skill. It was a great time.

The next day the five of us went to a restaurant at Disney. And walked around through some of their stores (we didn't actually go into Disney World). We got a few cute pictures of us trying on hats and the cool Lego creations outside the Lego store.

(Mark wasn't very happy about the hat experiment)

(The boys thought this one was really cool- I mean the two big boys:))

We then went to a mall where they had a store called Adrenalina where you could pay to surf in their wave pool. We watched some of their employees and a cutie 11 or 12 year old boy surf for a little while. If you go here you can see a great picture of their store. I wish I could have talked Mark into doing it, but he declined. After a little shopping we headed back to Tarpon Springs, where Val and Jason live. They have two girls ages 9 and 2 and two boys ages 7 and 4 who are super cuties. They were generous enough to give us the boys bedroom for the week.

They have a pool in their backyard (or I should say it is their backyard) and we spent a good amount of time there. Gabriel LOVED the pool. He had a great time playing with the kids and getting tossed back and forth between the adults. He was also the only one of the three of us who did not get a sunburn. We were very careful about reapplying sunscreen for him. I guess we should have been more careful ourselves, because Mark and I were both really burned after one day in the pool. Thus the tee-shirt.

We also spent a good amount of time in the living room playing on their new Wii. Mark and Jason would spend hours every day playing games with the kids and then another couple hours after the kids went to bed of uninterrupted gaming. The night before we left Valarie and I went in the family room and watched Twilight and the guys came in toward the end and told us that they had finally beat the tank game on Wii Play. I'm not sure we showed the desired amount of excitement, but I think they showed enough for all of us. Gabriel also started walking in earnest while we were there and he got his first tooth. He was a champ about the tooth, only being grumpy for one day.

On Tuesday we all went to the beach in Tampa. Since we were on the gulf side the waves were not very big, but it was perfect for taking little kids to the beach. We all had a great time. I think Gabriel didn't like the ocean as much as the pool due to the salt irritating his eyes, but he did like the sand. We forgot our camera, so Val took some pictures for us. I thought these two were really cute.

That evening Valarie's wonderful sister, Tracy, came over and babysat so the four of us could go out. We decided to go to an indoor mini golf place. None of us were very good, but it was a lot of fun. It was a haunted/scary theme and there were black lights, so everything glowed (as you can see from the pictures). Then we went to Coldstone for ice cream afterwards. Yummy!

On Thursday we packed all of the kids in the car and went to the Tarpon Springs aquarium. A few years ago we went to the Newport Aquarium, in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Mark's family. That place is amazing. It takes a couple hours to walk through and the exhibits are really cool. The Tarpon Springs Aquarium was nowhere near as big, but we had some opportunities that I'm not sure we could have at the larger aquarium. They had a touch tank at the entrance where we were able to "pet" several small shark, some horse shoe crab, and a turtle.

In the middle of the building was a 120,000 gallon aquarium where we watched a diving show. This consisted of a diver going into the tank to feed it's occupants, including several large sharks.

On the other side of the building were two large oval shaped tanks. One had stingrays that you could pet and feed by hand. You can see in the pictures we let Gabriel pet them- he loved it! Both Mark and I fed them. It felt really weird. You put the food on the palm of your hand and they come along and suck it off your hand. There was a lot of splashing as they vied for the food, which made me jump even more, but overall it was cool.

In the other tank there were sharks that we fed. As you can see in the picture, there was a wire grate over these sharks, but it didn't look incredibly sturdy. We used the same food for the stingrays to feed the sharks. This time we put it on blue sticks then put it down in the water where the sharks would bite it off of the stick. Mark lost his stick to the sharks as he fed them the last bit of food. It was pretty funny. The guy working there said it happens all the time, which made Mark feel a little better. Gabriel thought all of this was fantastic. I don't know if you can see from the picture, but I held on to him very tightly as we did this.

On Thursday evening Valarie and Jason were wonderful and allowed Mark and me to venture back into Tarpon Springs on our own to have a seafood dinner together. We went to a local seafood restaurant called Rusty Bellies. Sounds tasty, doesn't it? Well, it was amazing. I don't remember what Mark ordered, but I got the crab legs and they were so good. We sat outside and looked out on the water that the restaurant sat right next to. It was beautiful and very romantic.

The next day was our last full day. We were planning on just hanging out in the pool most of the day, but we went outside and found the pool infested with bugs. When we looked them up online we discovered that they were water lice.

Yeah, I was pretty creeped out too. Sorry that this is the last picture of this post, but I just had to share the creepiness with everyone. Needless to say, we didn't swim that day. We just played Wii and lounged around. That evening Tracy came over and watched the kids again while the four of us went out. We went to a mall close by, had dinner, and saw the movie The Proposal (which I thought was pretty funny). The next day we flew back home exhausted from our week of vacationing. I always say you need a few days of recuperation after your vacation before going back to work. Still, we had a great time! I just wish we could do that sort of thing more often. Ah well, on we go.

Bad, Bad Mommy

I know, I've been very bad. We have had a crazy summer and I kept feeling like I should blog about everything we've been doing, but I didn't. The longer I went without blogging, the more I had to blog about and the more daunting the task became. So, I'm going to do a series of posts about the things we have been up to this summer. They may be a bit picture heavy, but I'll do my best. I have to say, it has been one of the best summers I have had in years. I have been at home full time with Gabriel since I graduated and it has been wonderful. My house is the cleanest it has been in years and I love seeing Gabriel grow and learn every day. He is such a smart and inquisitive little boy (he's definitely not a baby any more). I know, every parent thinks these things about their child. I am no different. I know my child is the smartest ever!

On the down side, Mark has been working a ton. He has been putting in 55-60 hours a week and there are a days when we barely get to see him. We are really grateful that he has his job and that he is able to provide for our family. We just wish we could see him more. I'm sure there are lots of married women out there who understand when I say I feel like a single mother sometimes. I'm just really glad that that's not really the case. Thankfully, he has been able to join us for a few of our adventures this summer.

The first two events that I am going to mention (even though they weren't first to occur) are the birthdays we celebrated in August. On the 8th of last month our son turned ONE! Over the past few months we noticed the way he was looking less and less like a baby and more and more like a toddler.

One day old

Five days old

Three months old

Six months old

Nine months old

1st Birth Day!

By his birthday we had to admit (mostly, I had to admit) that he is not a baby anymore. Can you believe it's been a year since we brought that beautiful newborn home? I can't. This has been the best year of my life because I have been able to share the experience of being a parent with Mark. I love being Gabriel's mommy. We didn't have a birthday party (more on this later) until the 29th, but we went to a wedding reception that evening, so Gabriel did have cake on his birthday.

It wasn't the strip-the-baby-down-and-let-him-go-at-it event that would come a few weeks later, but he still loved it.

On the 30th of August my wonderful husband turned the big 3-0! He frequently reminds me that I am only 9 months younger than he is, so I won't make a huge deal about how OLD he is. At his request, we decided to have a joint birthday party for the two birthday boys. Little did I know quite how much work it would be to put together such an event. The theme was rockets/space which was inspired by the quilt my mom was making Gabriel for his birthday. I made the invitations. Here are a few examples of what they looked like:

We invited some close friends and our immediate family members which made up a group of 82 people! We rented a shelter at a local park, decorated the tables, and provided a dinner of hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, pop, and other sides.

The biggest amount of work, however, went into the four cakes that I made. Two were just cakes in 9x13 pans, but the other two were masterpieces of love. Okay, really they were rocket ships, but I worked on those rocket ships all day. There was a large one for Mark and a smaller one for Gabriel. Thank goodness I had Mark there to keep me sane. We almost lost both cakes several times and I started hyper-ventilating, but he calmed down and helped me brainstorm until we came up with a solution. In the end I was very proud of my work.

The party as a whole was deemed a success. Everyone seemed to have fun and Gabriel had a grand time destroying/devouring his cake.

One of the best parts was that I didn't have to clean my house before or after the party (except for the cake bits all over my kitchen). I am slowly becoming resigned to the fact that my baby is no longer a baby. He has two teeth, says lots of words and phrases (his favorite being "get it!"), walks like a pro, and is starting to try to climb the stairs (baby gate will be installed shortly). We love him so much and we are so grateful for the year we have had and the many to come.