ostrich mating dance, chef hats, and celebrations

random weekend number 2, people.

gabe: my biggest little chef. we were blessed by some friends who gave us some hand-me-downs...among them was a home depot apron. -that plus the chef hats from a recent field trip have made my little men very eager to help in the kitchen.

saturday was asher and judah's gotcha day anniversary. TWO YEARS of being a forever family of 6. 

when i wished judah happy gotcha day, he was so excited. when i asked him what we were celebrating, he said he didn't know. --but i'm glad we got the point across that it was an exciting event. ;)

i explained to him that it's the day we remember and celebrate becoming a forever family. -that God let us adopt him into our family. and we are so thankful. i didn't get that far with asher's conversation. i tried to have this meaningful moment discussing the beauty of adoption and he was more interested in gum. i get it. 

this is us at our triple birthday celebration/gotcha day celebration. 

my sister came in and we went to a wildlife ranch. since three birthdays and two gotcha days are in the same month, we combine it and have some family fun. parties take it out of me and can cost some money, so we went a less-expensive way and really enjoyed ourselves!

my sister and asher. at one point, asher was so tired and there were no animals, so he hummed a tune and threw out a piece of food at a time, resembling a flower girl at a wedding. we enjoyed it. 

these are my handsome boys. they were excited that they were all wearing sleeveless shirts to show their muscles. lots of the time they are fighting, but sometimes they work really hard to all get along and help one another. --like working for 10 minutes and changing shirts so they could all match in sleeveless-ness. 

 beautiful.

here's the gun show. bam. muscles galore.

i love the picture below of elijah. if you look closely, he is holding a flower in one hand and a few arrows in the other. 

cowboy hat+arrows+flower=awesome, thoughtful, masculine little man.

chef hats. asher's face is brilliant. 

a sicilian donkey. they were eager to eat and were so sweet. what a cutie.

at one point in the tour, we saw ostriches doing a mating dance, which is funny in its own right, but was HILARIOUS to me because in college i watched the jeff corwin experience or something and it showed the mating dance which consists of the wings being way out to the sides and it throwing its head back and forth while shaking its feathers. --well i decided i could re-enact it anytime i wanted (apparently i had lots of free time in college). so i did. and we have pictures to prove it. and now my whole family got to see it. and now my boys act it out. so we are a rather large family of awesome ostrich mating dance pros.

broadening our horizons one discovery-channel-moment at a time.

that's how we roll.

 hope you all had a blessed and fun-filled weekend.

gotcha party!

(my superheroes)


we had our gotcha party this weekend and man was it fun. i'm tellin' yah...if you put a bouncy house outside... you need NO adult supervision for all the kids. it's like a big, fat, poofy babysitter... that you can JUMP on!! amazing! ;)

as part of the party you were supposed to dress up like your favorite superhero or make one up of your own. the kids and adults had fun dressing up. people are pretty creative.

("i'm VECTOR! i'm committing crime with both direction...and magnitude. oh yeah!")
leanna came as a supervillain because how can you have heroes without villains?
if you haven't ever seen despicable me, get on it. it's pretty darn cute.
PS: leanna DYED this track suit herself AND made this squid/piranha gun herself as well. handy dandy, huh?

(my sister: a medieval superhero princess lady. she's trying to look mean...grrr)

(judah and elijah. look at their big muscles!)

(picture quality here is not great, but 2 of my sons hugging? how could i resist?)

(trust me, you won't like him when he's angry. asher was the incredible hulk. he kept this hat/mask thing on for about...5 seconds)

(don't be jealous. not everyone can be married to batman)

i was supermom. i have no picture, but just picture me in an apron with an "M" on it.

we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ate copious amounts of cake. we gave away action figures and superhero silly bands as favors.

we had a great time and are so blessed to have friends and family who will celebrate with us!
we are even MORE blessed to be done with fostering for the time being. hip hip hooray! :0)

gotcha day

here at the ol' homestead it's gotcha day. 2 years ago gabe became a part of our forever family.
since i don't think i've shared the story, i thought this would be a good time to do it. i was going to write a book about our experiences with this, but since i now have four children, that'll probably never happen. this is long, but i think it's worth it. here's the story of how we began:



gabe came into care just after he had turned one. i worked with him on my caseload when i was an early intervention specialist. i loved his squishy forehead and lovely chubby cheeks. he was the cutest little guy i'd ever seen. in late december of '07 the foster mom let me know he would be available for adoption. without thinking, i let her know that maybe my husband and i would be interested in adopting him into our family. this probably was a bit premature, since my husband had never even heard of this child. we had always talked about fostering and adopting, but we had also talked about WAITING to do it. foster mom liked this idea and got pretty excited, which made me realize that once again that i had spoken without thinking OR checking with my husband. nevertheless, i spent the next 90 minutes of our appointment plotting and planning how i would present this idea to the hubs.

i have been told that i tend to jump into things too quickly. i really enjoy planning outlandish things but then freak out and don't actually accomplish any of them. it's a cycle and i'm quite fond of it. but turns out there's a problem with this because it doesn't require any trust in God.

so as i met with my husband to discuss the possibility of adopting a child 3 years earlier than we had ever expected to start a family, i pretty much vomited out as much information as i could. yeah, i'm definitely not the play-it-cool and wait-till-he's-in-a-great-mood type. once i let him know my plan, he quickly said no. there were lots and lots of reasons why adopting a child at this time would not work out for us, and he listed all of them.

but i pressed on. and not tactfully or graciously, i might add.
by the end of the dinner, the hubs had agreed to attend a meeting with me in january about fostering. after that, we would see.

after that meeting, the hubs was as burdened as i was about fostering, and he said he felt comfortable going forward to the next step of the process. so we agreed to pick an agency. and the hubs let me know that if obstacles came up, that would be God's way of letting us know He was closing a door.

no obstacles really came up. although gabe's casemanager wanted him and was proceeding with trying to adopt him as well, we pursued getting licensed as a foster family to foster-adopt gabe. the thought occassionally crossed my mind that if we got licensed and didn't get gabe, this would all be for nothing, but i trusted that God had His hand in this and that He would show us what to do.

we got licensed faster than any other couple through that agency. 6 weeks. all the pieces fell into place. it was between us and the casemanager. the agency would choose.

i got a call on a wednesday that the agency had not received our homestudy. after a day of panic and hurried phone calls, it got sorted out. by thursday afternoon i had a voicemail from the adoption worker.
--in a serious and hushed tone, "marge, when you get this, please call us back."

uh oh

when i called they said, in a serious and very sad voice, "ok marge, they've made a decision. and...well...i guess i'll just read it to you. ahem. 'we, the state, have determined that marge and her hubs (changed for the sake of privacy) are the best fit for this child."

she was so mean to trick me into thinking we were not being chosen. ;)
well to make a long story short, they had me on speaker phone and i screamed so loud with excitement that several other office members came in to see what the commotion was all about.


and that was it. we found out that thursday, and the following wednesday we had gabriel in our home playing with a train set. and we've never been the same since.

after a mandatory 6 month waiting period with gabe in our home, he was adopted into our family forever. and that, my friends, is why we celebrate "gotcha day."
ps: with this story usually comes a lot of questions. please don't ever hesitate to ask us about fostering or adoption. and please don't hesitate to send friends who are considering it our way. we love to encourage others on this journey.