I am starting to become an emotional wreck.

As we move closer to bringing our babies home (theoretically, we are still waiting for new court paperwork) I have started to get a little more detached from them. I know this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but I am so terrified that they aren't truly going to come. I guess it is a survival mechanism I have developed. Not like it would make the pain any less if they didn't come home.

Still, I should know better by now than to watch Gotcha Day videos on you tube, and yet, I still find myself occasionally doing it. And I cry every single time. I imagine our Gotcha Day and what that might look like. I think about bringing them home to meet Ava and Owen, who love them so much already and pray for them every single day.

Everytime I am in the kitchen, which I am sure like most of you, is a lot, I see their beautiful pictures on my fridge and it makes me so happy, yet breaks my heart.

And then this past week, Owen and I made a run to IKEA. No real big deal until we got to that adorable kid section. I started to feel a little overwhelmed at all of the cute things for children, and knowing that we haven't gotten anything for the kids feeling like it is just too soon. Then I walked around the corner and this beautiful little black boy came walking past us with his white mom. It was enough to just about send me over the edge. In that brief moment, I was so clearly reminded of what we are hoping to have, and also so clearly reminded of what hasn't happened yet. It was like looking at my future, only it seemed so far away, and right now, so unattainable.

I would appreciate your prayers as we wait for our paperwork to come back. We are so close, and yet so far away. Once we have those papers, we can file with the US govt., which is the last step before making our embassy appt. and going to get our children. I am hanging in there the best that I can. Some days I feel like I spend much of my time praying that God will give me the strength to get through these last months of waiting, but it has been a lot for me.

All Things "Green"

Okay. So I really have no excuse for not trying to "green" my family's life. It is somewhere between a mix of laziness, and how expensive those green items are. I know that I should be using no VOC paint, and given the frequency of which I change colors (our teal bedroom is back to beige) I could benefit hugely from the no toxic smells, but darn it, it just costs so much more!

But after Chris scraped off the mother lode of teflon out of my favorite pan, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and look into cooking ware that didn't give off toxic chemicals. First, I will admit that google is not always your best friend when it comes to making yourself smart. Mostly I know this from googling health things that I am worried about with my kids, and of course the worst possible case scenarios are the ones that I always find, and then you take them into the doctor and they are like "we see this all the time, it is nothing to be worried about." Which I follow up with something smart like "but google said...." (can you just hear the exasperated sighs from the doctors?!)

Anyway, so I googled cooking ware. Turns out teflon is a very scary thing, especially if you heat it too high, or scratch the surface. (check and check) Aluminum really isn't better, there have been studies linking high levels of aluminum in Alzheimers patients. This left us with stainless steel, and castiron. Chris found an old castiron pan in our garage that was designated for the good will. We buffed that puppy up with some salt, although we need to scour it with one of those metal scrubbies to get all of the rust off. The good news is it works great. The bad news is the pan is too small.

As fate would have it, the one big soup/boiling water pot I own is stainless steel- I had no idea, but yeah for us! Unfortunately, stainless steel is uber expensive, and because we already have a huge pot that is stainless steel, it doesn't really make sense to by one of those 10 piece sets. Plus I do almost all of my cooking in a huge 6 quart deep covered pot, which is not included in any of the sets I could find. So I think we will be buying piecemeal to complete our collection. This will definitely cost us more, but then we can get exactly what we need and not have extras.

I would LOVE any advice on cooking with stainless steel, I have heard it is a big pain, (think food sticking and stains) as well as with cast iron. I would also love it if anyone has any other "green" ideas for the home. examples: kitchen stuff, hair products, etc. Somehow with more kidlets coming, I feel I need to be more responsible with all of the nasty things that can be in all the stuff we use.

The good news is that we know the changes to our court paperwork have been given to the judge. The bad news is, it will probably take 1 to 2 weeks to get it done, and then it has to be translated. We also learned from a family that traveled that the judge wrote everything out by hand on carbon paper. When was the last time you saw anybody write out pages and pages of legal documents on carbon paper? Crazy. A very good reminder that much of the world does not have the convenience of computers and lots of modern technology.

I have this thing about not decorating my house with family picutres. I know, it sounds terrible, and completely un-motherly like of me. It's not that I don't love them, or love their faces, I just don't like plastering them on the walls. My hubby thinks this is a weird trait that I possess.

Right now our fridge is covered in family pictures from Christmas cards. I think I may have reached my breaking point in time alloted for them on the fridge. They are all haphazard and stuck up any old way. Maybe that is my issue with family pictures on the wall. You have to put them in those huge frames with no real organization to them. As I am typing this, I realize that I must sound like an OCD person when it comes to organization. The sad truth is I am one of the messiest people I know. But maybe, deep (and I mean deep) down in my subconcious, "organized" Jess is dying to come out.

Anway, since I have no adoption news to report, or anything else exciting for that matter, I thought I would post the various things I have hung on the wall in lieu of family pictures.



This was made for us in Uganda by a young man we met. It is done on cardboard, and there is a drawing on the other side as well. He hoped to be an artist when he grew up. It is hanging in our hallway.



These are also hanging in the hallway on the otherside. I found this neat old book of drawings by this nature guy, so I took it apart and hung them up. They're kind of hard to see because the only way I could get the picture was to stand in the bathroom doorway and it created a huge glare, plus I couldn't get any closer because then it was too dark and you couldn't see them at all.



This is by our front door. It is a map we got on our honeymoon when we went to Belize. I wish it would have shown up when I zoomed in because there are all these cool drawings amongst the drawing, and it is so gorgeous in real life.

This is hanging above our sofa. I made it out of copper like 8 years ago when I saw a similair one in metal in Pottery Barn but wan't going to pay $100 or whatever the price was. So I went and bought a huge length of copper, put it into shape and started drilling. It is a huge pain to move, and requires several nails to hold into position.

Also in our living room. I just liked the zebras. Plus they were from Ikea, and therefore, extremely reasonable.

These are hanging in our kitchen. I got the prints off ebay and hung them up. There is another wall that has 5 hanging in a row, but I forgot to take that picture.

I also have some seriously cool mirrors that I scored at a thrift shop and spray painted black, but I forgot to take pictures of those too, and this post is probably about a mile long already. If you made it this far and read the whole thing you are amazing!

Hopefully I will get some sort of adoption news soon, so I don't have to make you wonder about what exactly is going on in my head to make me post random things!

Why is it that I can never keep my kids' mittens together? They are like socks, almost worse, because where we live, you can at least shove your feet into your warm boots without socks if you absolutely had to. But no mittens on your fingers and they will definitely get frost bite.

Owen had one pair of nice thinsulate mittens. The kind made for serious cold weather. And then he blew a hole through the thumb so large that it was not possible for me to sew it back up. So I went to Target, no luck, Walmart-nada, I then went to Oshkosh, Carters, and Old Navy. I even went to thrift stores thinking that I would find some there. Nothing. Not a single store had warm mittens. They did, however, have plenty of those silly, thin gloves that couldn't keep your hands warm to save your life.

Finally, on the way up to my parents' house, we stopped at Mills Fleet Farm, which can only be described as the ultimate man store (think hunting, fishing and car stuff), and lo and behold, we managed to find a warm pair of mittens. Price $9.00- that's a lot of money in my opinion for a pair of mittens- but he needed them.

This was two weeks ago. Yesterday, Chris took the kids ice fishing. This morning, I discovered that Owen burnt a hole through one of his new gloves on the heater in the ice house. Chris said he was watching him- clearly not enough. That store where we finally found the mittens? It is two hours away. Oh, and we have several months of winter left.

Okay, so we are keeping our fingers cross and saying a lot of prayers. When they redo court paperwork, it is up to the Judge's discretion whether we have to repeat the 30 day non-appeal period. Here I am going to let my inner child come forth- "No fair!" It was their mistake in the first place, so why should I have to repeat those days?

Say a little prayer that this is something we do NOT have to do. We already will have probably a month delay to fix the papers, definitely don't want to make it two months.

We finally got our court documents to review yesterday. Unfortunately, there were a couple of things wrong on them. They had our marriage date wrong in one place (although right everywhere else!), and they had me a stay at home mom in one place, and working in two others. We think that this will probably set us back several weeks to a month while they retranslate back into French, make the corrections, get new papers, translate back into English, and then have us review it. Another delay. Sigh.

We will just keep moving forward and pray that the mistakes don't take as long to fix as we think it will. Still hoping to travel around June even with the delay, but we will see. I think it is time to pull out my mantra "All in God's timing"!

On the other hand, we received three new pictures of our kidlets, and I just can't get over how beautiful they are! Our son is sitting up now, and our daughter has yarn braids put in her hair! We were shocked, she has this massive amount of yarn hair with 3 huge white bows put in them! It makes us happy because I know that it takes quite awhile to put those in, and somebody loves her enough to take the time. She is also in what can only be described as a prom dress for infants! Our son has more normal looking clothes. They are both so adorable it almost hurts to look at them! And we aren't quite sure, but it almost looks like our daughter has bottom teeth! Our son though has a huge, toothless smile. I will post the pictures later today when I get a chance!