Amazing Opportunity

I want to talk about all our Spring happenings, but I think this part deserves its own post. I had the incredible opportunity to go to Kiev, Ukraine the first week of March. Why would I want to go to Kiev, you ask? Because good friends (I'll call the husband "L" and the wife "C") of ours adopted 3 beautiful little girls! It was an incredibly long process for them...way too long to document here. They were "expecting" for 9 months (and that's after all the paperwork was approved) and had many complications along the way.

The end of the process should have taken 6-8 weeks, but they spent months in Ukraine (L is originally from there but a U.S. citizen now) and made 3 trips over there. L could do most of his work from over there, but had to get home for important meetings, which would have left C to bring home 3 very active, excited girls, ages 2, 3 and 4 by herself. That sounded pretty scary to me so I went over to help her bring them home. The girls are so precious and very loving! It breaks my heart to think that if they hadn't been adopted there's a good chance they would end up doing drugs or be involved in prostitution. I am so thankful to the Lord for giving these girls the best possible parents they could have here on earth!

We were able to stay with some American friends in Kiev...this is at their apartment.

At the airport at 3am with a very helpful Ukrainian friend.

The whole family watching July 4th fireworks.

Winter 2010

I'm not sure the following events are in chronological order, but this is what happened in Jan & Feb of 2010...

Sam had his first basketball game right at the beginning of January. He improved a lot over the course of 2 months of practices and 8 games. We love the Upward program because it incorporates the gospel and scripture memorization. And the coaches have all been amazing...extremely patient with the kiddos! It's hard to get a good picture, but this one was the least blurry. Sam is the one attempting to dribble the ball.

Right before his 5th birthday, Ben learned to ride his bike without the training wheels! He was a little timid at first, but he picked it up quickly. For all you Northerners, this pic was taken on Feb 1st (note Joe's short sleeves).

I decided it was about time to get some decorations up on Abby's walls in her bedroom so I decorated these letters for her room. I'm not a crafty person, but I had fun with these because I just cut scrapbook paper to fit the letters and then glued it and other fun things to the letters. She has really enjoyed them and now she knows how to spell her name backwards b/c that's the way she always reads them.

Ben turned 5 in February and he got to have a fairly big party (at least by our standards). We've decided that the kids will only get to have big parties on certain birthdays (most likely at 5, 10, 13 and 16). That will keep us to about 1 party per year, which feels more managable to us, both financially and sanity-wise. Sam had his 5th birthday at the splash pad, so Ben wanted to do that too, but even in Texas it's a little too cold for that in February. So we rented a bouncy house and let the chaos begin! (It turns out you can get a good deal on a bouncy house in Feb.) We had Transformers cupcakes and lots of fun. Below Ben is showing off his new Bible, which was something he asked for as a gift, along with a scooter and cowboy hat, of course.

 

 

 

On Valentine's Day, Joe officially became a deacon at our church. I'm so proud of him and so thankful to be married to such a wonderful, godly man!

Of course Zach was busy exploring and beginning to roll around during this time. Here are a few pics of him.

And Abby is into her "bee-you-tee-ful" dress phase. She wants to wear a dress every day! Note the red, sparkly shoes, too.

One of the most exciting things to happen was probably that we got SNOW at the end of Febuary! It snowed a few inches in 2008 and the kids had so much fun and they kept talking about how they couldn't wait for it to snow again. I kept trying to tell them that we hadn't had that much snow in our part of TX since I was a little girl, but they didn't get it. I was trying to figure out how to explain it to them, but then it snowed again this year! They even got to build a snow man.