Moving on

After much deliberation, I have decided to pull the plug on the blog. (I will still update our adoption blog for the time being.) My reasons are complicated and personal, but mainly have to do with the ending of a season in our life. I began with the intention of journaling the processing of T's autism diagnosis and the impact it has on our life as a family. This was for my growth, as well as providing some information for the curious. Time has passed and, while we're still not totally over the implications of T's autism, we are sort of in a holding pattern. I realize that with him in kindergarten, we're only biding our time. As he gets older, things will get more complicated because the differences with become more obvious. Maybe at that time I will take up blogging again. I also haven't felt totally safe using this particular forum, so it really remains to be seen.

That's really it for now.

S.

Perspective

One of my favorite quotes is:

Two women looked through prison bars
One saw mud, the other saw stars **

As we were driving today -- a rare day with blue sky and white puffy clouds -- my 3 year-old remarked from the backseat:

"That cloud looks like garbage."

I kid you not.




**There are many variations of this quote out there. This particular version comes from Calm My Anxious Heart, by Linda Dillow

My 8

I was tagged by Keren for this meme:

8 Favorite TV Shows
(I don't really watch TV, so this is a little tough. I'll just list shows I watch on occasion.)

Mythbusters
Monk
Psych
Bones
Phineas and Ferb

8 things I did yesterday

went to church
took a nap
two loads of laundry
actually had a conversation with hubby
helped teach Sunday school
cooked lunch with hubby
cried at church
sang

8 things I look forward to

summer
picking up our baby girl
ripping up our yucky carpet
meeting fellow adopting bloggers
summer
painting the nursery
having some land someday
the Lord coming back

8 Favorite Restaurants

East West Thai
PF Changs
Rio Blanco
Taco Bell
Aversano's
Hob Nob
Whistlin' Jacks
All Spice Thai

8 things on my wish list

getting our laminate floors laid down
property with some land for my boys to roam
a dog that fits our family
help on how to work with my autistic son
a house that's slightly bigger than the 1750 sq ft we have now
a washing machine that doesn't shake the whole house
a dish washer that doesn't shake the whole house
to pass Ethiopian court in 29 days

Off

It has seemed for the last week or so that life is just a little bit off. You know, like out of whack. Or maybe its just me. Just as we were getting back to some semblance of normal after all the sickness -- back to work, back to school -- we were thrown a snow day. Just plopped right in the middle of the week. The roads were bare everywhere we could see, but the school district still felt compelled to delay the start of school by two hours. Ugh. Don't they know what that does to people? Not only did I miss Bible study for the third week in a row, but I had a out-of-sorts, who-messed-up-my-routine, psycho 6 year-old on my hands. What's a mama to do? Oi.

You know I'm out of sorts when I'm not excited about the Missions Conference at church. I love the Missions Conference. I always love missions-related stuff. But this year it just made me sad. Sad because a piece of me is with a child in another country. Sad because her family doesn't know Jesus. Sad because given the chance to do so, I would gladly pack up and move to another country and do what I could to show them Jesus. Sad because it seems I'm supposed to be here instead. Sad because I don't know what to do with myself here. Sad because I don't know what I'd do with my particular family there. Sad because that leaves me in limbo land where it seems my only purpose is to keep my family intact. Sad because I don't think I'm doing a very good job. Sad because I don't know how to bring God glory in where He's planted me. Sad because I wonder if my desire to participate in missions isn't just a misguided vision of how to serve God.

Boy, I sound like a mess, but really I'm not. My heart is just really heavy right now. And my mind is just a jumbled mess of thoughts.

Having my eldest child so sick for such a long time was really a strange thing to experience. When he's sick, he's almost "normal". Someone should really do some research on this. Its really true. When he's sick, his whole body just sloooows waaaay down (I joked with my mom that its what he'd be like on Ritalin -- a lump of his true self), he takes the time to be polite, he accepts affection without resorting to hitting or name-calling, he acknowledges people when they speak to him like any normal child would. And now we're not only back to his particular normal, we're back to that point in his cycle where he's at his worst. (The irony being that he loves the Missions Conference too, and has just been thrilled at the idea of participating in the kids' program. Kudos to Mrs Carter and Mrs Galle -- two of his very favorite people!) I haven't blogged about him in such a long time. I think its because what we deal with now on a regular basis is just simply too complex to describe. Sometimes its so subtle, other times its these glaring moments when I wonder how on earth he's going to function in the world. I want to blog more about it because it helps me think things through. It makes it a little less abstract in my mind, this crazy thing we deal with on a daily basis.

As we worked through the adoption process, one thing we've been told repeatedly is that we should prepare to become conspicuous. Ha. If you've ever been around our family -- especially at church -- you know we're hardly just part of the crowd. Mama's blubbering over the hymns, one boy's under the row in front of us building a fort out of hymnals, the other boy is jumping from chair to chair like a kangaroo (during service), and daddy's grinning away in spite of it all. Adding a child of another race is only going to make the party that much wilder.

Speaking of the adoption, we hauled our crazy family to Walmart today to use the Coinstar machine to count the change we've amassed through garage sales and our change drive. I should note that we had hoped to avoid the Coinstar machine, as they charge a whopping 9% on each dollar counted, but we ended up with so much change we had few options. We had been told by our bank that we could bring our change to their main branch and they would count it for us. Today we found out that wasn't true. So, it was either roll it all by hand or go with Coinstar. We had over 1000 quarters, 1000 dimes, and over 6000 pennies -- we were not going to roll it by hand! In the end, after a whole lot of clamor and an occasional audience, we totalled $467.76 in change! How about that?!

Even in my "offness", the Lord still blesses....

Again, a Meme

I'm not really sure the point of this meme. Do people really care what books I've read? Anyway, its a list of books that somebody somewhere has concluded that people have read or are likely to read. My job is to put an X next to the ones I have read. So I did. I love to read and I expecially love the classics. (ie. OLDER books) There are very few "modern" books I have found that really should be put in the same category as say Austen or Dickens, but I guess these days "popular" seems to equate with "good", so they all get thrown together. And that's my 2 cents on that.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X (almost all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials trilogy - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zol
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Seven of Seven

Hooray for memes! Now I feel like I'm keeping up on my blog, when I'm really stuck as to about what to write.
Per Amy, I'm to find the 7th photo in the 7th file on my computer and write about it.
This photo was from last year on one of many trips to the Pacific Science Center. (We had a family membership and used it lots!) Here my boys are sitting in a space capsule, one of my eldest son's favorite spots at the Science Center. It doesn't move, but it very loudly simulates the sounds of taking off...which is a little strange to him since astronauts used to splash down in these capsules, not necessarily take off. But that's just him. Our youngest son braves the capsule until the noise of the rockets begins...then he bails. That's just him. Also, note that the big guy is pictured with his good buddy, Moo, who, six years later, is ever his favorite.

In recent news, we are finally coming out of quarantine today after a week and a half of sickness. The culmination was a trip to Mary Bridge Saturday night because we were very concerned about the big guy. He was on his sixth day of the flu, complete with fever the entire time. He wasn't eating and we were getting very little fluid into him. He would just lay there, to the point that we'd have to carry him from room to room. We called his pediatrician's office, concerned that he might be dehydrated. They recommended a trip to the ER. It was determined that he had an ear infection, the second in his entire life. He insisted that he felt no pain at all. (That's very much a spectrum thing.) The ear infection fueled the fever which kept him hot/cold and lacking in energy. Poor guy spent his entire mid-winter break on the couch. Daddy and the younger guy were sick too, so we basically went nowhere for 7 days straight. Ugh. SO glad we're well again!

And that's all the news from here. Really.

Bubble Boys