Baby Talk

I have finally decided to share with the world (by the world I mean the 3 people who actually read my blog!) what I have only shared with a few close friends and family, Justin and I are starting the process of adoption!!!!

This is something that we said we might consider after Kayla was born, knowing that I could not have any more babies....looking back now on that time I wish that I didn't make the choices I did then. I was tired and worn down and not in the right state of mind to make such a life altering decision. Now my heart is breaking that I made the choices I made, my heart longs for another baby in ways that I never thought I would fill again. I think the regret I feel comes from seeing the advancement in the medical field and the new help they can give to PROM patients (google it if your curious) Justin on the other hand firmly stands by the choice we made to have my tubes tied, and yes his is the voice of reason and logic that makes our marriage work so well and deep down I know he is right.

The baby thoughts started about a year ago when Kayla turned 3, and I realized I could no longer really call her a baby (although I still do when her little ears are not around!) It has taken us almost that full year to really think, pray, fast and pray some more about what our options for bringing another baby into our family would be. We have considered every avenue from me having surgery to re-attach my tubes, a sergeant which we both shot down very fast and of course adoption.

Adoption is the only choice that felt right to us, but even after having received our answer I was apprehensive about moving forward. We have gone down the adoption road before and it's a hard emotional process that for me I just needed time. Time to wrap my mind around all that would be required of us again. The second issue we had to face was the financial, let's face it adoption is expensive and we have been credit card free for 3 years now, with very little debt. We have some money saved but not enough to cover adoption expenses and while any baby is worth going into debt for, it is definitely something that takes serious planning and much thought.

Then the answer came in the least likely of places, I was waiting for school to get out and a mom standing next to me (Josie) started telling us that she adopted three of her five kids through the State of California's adoption program. That after she adopted her first baby the agency called her the next two times asking if she would take another. I asked her for more info and the next day she brought me a whole packet of information about her church and how they work with the county of San Bernadino to help place children/infants into homes who are in the foster care program right now. The program is almost completely paid for by the state, which for us will be huge blessing. Josie adopted her first daughter when she was 2 months old, her second was 6 months and her third was 9 months. So no we will probably not be adopting a newborn, for us that does not matter....I just feel a little giddy every time I think about having a baby in the house again I could care less about the age!

We got our first set of papers in the mail the other day and according to the social worker it will take us 6 months to a year to get approved and after that a baby is usually placed within two years. Yes that seems like a very long time to be waiting but we feel it's worth the wait and I know for me I will regret it three years later if we didn't at least try.

I have so many fears going into this, of course the biggest is the whole thing just not working out. This is something we have seriously thought about and all I can say is we have two wonderful girls, we are a happy family and I will always be grateful beyond measure for being blessed with my two little ones. For me I have to know I did everything I could to bring one more child into our family, I strongly feel this is the right thing to do and I know that if it is right then God will make it happen, if it's not meant to be... then that's that and I will be at peace with whatever the outcome is.

So wish us luck and keep us in your thoughts and prayers, and we would love to hear any feed back you may have for us!

A conversation with little girls

This past week I have been babysitting a friends little girl. She and my girls girls get along fairly well, but she is the exact opposite of my girls, and so I find their little conversations very humorous. First thing she does when she gets into my car is demand the radio be turned on...now I know Jenna can be demanding and sometimes forgets to say please or will you, but this little one has down exactly what she wants and is not used to be told no to anything. So I make her say please will you turn on the radio and she does so I put on one of Kayla's kids songs, I then hear her yell from the back HELLO LIKE JUSTIN BIEBER! And this is the part that just made me smile Jenna turns to her and says "We listen to kid songs because we are kids" so I then ask Jenna who Justin Bieber is and she tells me no she has never heard of him....I have to say I was proud of that, I want to keep my girls little for as long as possible I don't want them growing up too fast and I don't want them idolizing anyone like Justin Bieber, Hanna Montana or any other teen idol our society says our children need to worship.

I sat with Jenna and watched a ICarly show the other day and I hate to admit it but I thought it was kinda funny. Then as I thought about it and as I watched a few other of those type of shows I began to realize that 1. they make parents/teachers or any adult for that matter look stupid and 2. I strongly believe the writers of these shows degrade all men in general but they especially degrade the role of the Father and they make him out to be an idiot. This is something that bothers me greatly and something that I have been thinking about lately. For example I got a add in the mail the other day and on the title it said "So easy even a man could do it" now I know their are somethings I am better at than Justin and there are equally as many things he is better at than I am, but if something came in the mail with the saying "So easy even a women could do it" I would be highly offend and would never think of buying that product! I never want my girls to view adults in the way these shows portray them and while I don't like the idea of banning my kids from watching TV I do think waiting till they are older, more mature and limiting viewing time is the better way to go.

I want my girls to stay innocent and little, I don't want them growing up too fast! They are going to be grown ups in a few short years and they will never get their childhood back! I want that childhood to be filled with, fairies, princesses, playing outside and using their imagination! So yes I do smile when asked about DS systems, tween idol stuff and the latest songs on the radio that my girls don't know a thing about them. For me seeing them singing nursery rhymes and playing for hours with little people, ponies and putting together elaborate puppet shows is exactly where I want them to be right now!

Kayla

Little Ms. Kayla has just been making me laugh a lot lately, she is developing this funny little personality that just cracks me up! I love this picture because it sums up who Kayla is right at this moment in time! Today she was playing in Jenna's room with her new jewelry box she got for Christmas from Jenna. She also took Jenna's jewelry box out and has evenly divided Jenna's jewelry up between the boxes. I ask her what she is doing and she tells me "I took Jenna's jewelry because mine only had one, then she pauses and with a matter of fact tone declares....I think Jenna is going to be mad at me!" She says this in her sweet little Kayla voice that makes everyone around her just say "oh how cute!" Well my cute little sweet voiced child has a hidden dark side that is learning to manipulate her cuteness into getting what she wants or using it to negotiate her way out of trouble! She really didn't care if Jenna was going to get mad, and I think she may have been enjoying the idea of making her sister a little mad! But the little charmer worked her magic because I left the room not doing a thing about it, but just smiling because it really was cute....even though I'm sure when Jenna realizes what her little sister has done I won't be smiling anymore!

New Years!!!!!

Well happy New Years!! So apart of me really loves New Years as a time of renewal and starting over....but that last about 3 days then I'm back to my usual bad habits, I then get in a funk of a mood because I have totally failed at the 10 or 15 things I set out to change about myself and end up eating the rest of the Christmas candy and feeling really crappy for the rest of the month!

Historically January has always been the most depressing month for me so I think I have always been doomed to failure from the start! I always have felt this huge let down after Christmas, it always makes me really sad to pack up the Christmas decor, then when we lived in Utah January weather always made me feel all gloomy and doomy, at least now I have sunny weather to help me stay out of my January funk!

But some things just dont ever really go away, and every year comes January 13. That is day I lost our first baby at 13 weeks, yes it happened the first year we were married (13 years ago) but the pain is still there and it still really hurts. I rarely think about it until this time of year, but I loved that baby and I think trying for 7 years to have another made the pain that much worse. After having my girls I think a year or two actually went by when I didn't think about it till that day, but now that my girls are older and knowing my body can't have more babies I find I'm thinking about that loss baby again and the longing for another is emerging, and once again I find myself getting really sad that I can't get pregnant again, but for now I will save the baby talk for another post:)

So for those main reasons and a few more little ones I dislike January!

That is why I have decided to start this January with a totally different out look than in years past! While I have resolutions I want to make I'm not going to. Instead I have chosen two things to focus on, I feel that by changing these two things they will have a snow ball effect on the rest of my life!

The first is getting back to dinner. I was great at that up until a year ago and I don't know what happened but I have become so disorganized in this area that we end up eating out, eating really late or resorting to our staple of PB&J! To fix this bad habit I have created a menu that we will rotate through every month. I'm hoping that it wont get boring or repetitive! I did make room for a new recipe to made every month, but I figure having 21 dinners to rotate through wont end up getting old (I don't cook Tuesday or Saturday nights). This way my grocery list is always planned, I don't have to sit down every Sunday night and plan a weekly menu (I think this has been my downfall) and I hope that by planning more budget friendly dinners I can stick with my budget of 125 dollars a week on groceries! I also planned really well balanced healthy meals that are easy to make so hopefully that trickle down theory will come into play with maybe a little weight loss;)

My second goal is just to keep on top of my 5 daily choirs, a rule I had after Jenna was born to help make me keep to a schedule every day as a new stay at home mom.

The rules are as follows:

1. Make beds every day....a bed made for whatever reason keeps the bedrooms clean

2. Do a load of laundry...my all day laundry marathon once a week if even that is getting old!

3. Organize the mail...I happily can say I have always stayed on top of this one:)

4. spend 10 minutes every night just picking up clutter

5. sweep the kitchen floor after dinner

This is not to say I don't do these things all together they just have not always been getting done every day, and I find that when they don't get done life becomes a disorganized mess! I'm hoping that just by getting back to simple basics and forgetting the rest I can once again lead a more focused and organized life and that by small steps everything else will just fall into place!

I will end with wishing everyone a happy new year and happy wishes that we can all stick to new goals, that this year will be better than the last and that when the end does come we are better people than we are now!!!!

Christmas!!!!!!

I LOVE Christmas!!! I think I am more excited for Santa to come than my kids are!!!! I never could sleep on Christmas Eve when I was a kid and I always thought that when I "grew up" I would get over it, well I'm grown up now and I STILL cannot fall asleep on the 24!! I love the baking, the shopping...oh the shopping! the parties! decorating! I love putting bows of presents! The Christmas cards! taking my kids to see Santa! Everyone seems just a little bit nicer and more friendly! Most of all what I love about the Christmas season is seeing it through my kids eyes! It's amazing how young they make me feel and to see their eye's light up and the excitement in their faces makes all the work so worth it!!! I just feel like screaming to the world CHRISTMAS IS ALMOST HERE!!! Ok I will calm down now...but seriously I don't know if I can stand waiting one more week!

Listen to melissasue13s Playlist

listening to that still small voice

Every year around August I start planning the Christmas budget and this year I decided to cut the budget in half, which for me was hard, but lately I have had the feeling that we need to save every dime we could spare. Now I know why we were to save, normally my kids are really healthy we average maybe one or two trips to the doctors office each year, but this year for the first time since my kids were born we have meet our out of pocket deducable and we have meet it in the space of 8 weeks! First having kaylas heart tested ended up costing about 600 dollars, then we got a medical bill from last year for her that was a couple hundred and now jenna has had bronchitis and was diagnosed with asthma yesterday she is now on a nebulizer treatment every 6 hours, the medicine alone was over 100 dollars!! Plus all the other meds she was given and having to take her to the doctor every week it has become expensive! Im only sharing this because i have to express how thankful i am for all the blessings our family has been given, first justins job in this econemy its truly a blessing, second that my girls are healthy and that all we are dealing with is treatable, third that we have health insurance, and fourth and most important that i listened to that still small voice and i saved the money, still was able to buy a nice christmas for our kids and can pay all our medical bills off with some still left over in savings. This year christmas has been feeling thankful for all that we have and focusing on having a meaningful christmas and giving to others rather than having a big expensive christmas that we really dont need.

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