Kid funny

Over the weekend Jory took the kids to an international festival at our church. The point of the festival was to introduce the church to all the missions we support (both state side and international) and give us the opportunity to learn about and how to pray for each one. Afterwards the kids called me (I was away with friends for the weekend) to tell me about their evening, and Louisa wanted to tell me about the Turkish missionaries she had learned about, so when it was her turn to talk the first thing she said was "guess what Mommy! I prayed for Turkeys!"

Gobble Gobble.

I told you she was the prankster in the group.

winter princess

Yesterday we were graced by a lovely little snow shower. As the girls were coming in from their little winter frolic in the new fallen snow I was taken by how beautiful they looked all covered with the fine white powder. This is Louisa, who was quite tired of the snow at this point, but was willing to stop and let her crazy mother take just one more picture of her all covered in snow.

Grateful to complain

This past week I've been a little bit frustrated with life, a little freaking out about stuff I can't control, just a little grumpus about life in general. My life is worse than everyone else's, no one understands how stinky my life really is. Ever had one of those days? I thought so.
By day 3 of my self induced pity party, I was tired of hearing myself complain. I woke up determined to have a joy-filled day. By about 10am, my day was already on a downward spiral. The toddler I was babysitting was screaming nonstop, my kids were bouncing off the walls, the house was already a disaster, and we hadn't even started school or cleaned up from breakfast yet. I was clinging to my joy with my fingernails determined not to let go.
That's when I decided to play a little game called "what is there to be thankful for here". I quickly passed through all the obvious answers - happy kids who are loving and helpful, a great husband who provides so I can stay home with our kids, the opportunity to help out a friend by watching her little girl... after I got to the end of my list I managed to think of a few new reasons to be thankful I thought I'd share:
* I am thankful that this screaming toddler is not a barfing toddler.
* I am thankful that this little house (which in my opinion is too small for a family of 6) doesn't have 17 people living in it.

* I am thankful that my house is a mess because my children have been actively engaged in their surroundings. I'd much rather clean up the blocks (again) than debris from a bomb that went off in my front yard.
*When I look at the spectrum of things people on this planet have to complain about, I am so, so thankful that one of my biggest thing to complain about is the kids jumping on the couch (after being gently reminded 16 times that we don't jump on the furniture).

We all have things in our lives that we should be grateful we can complain about them. What are yours?

Dress the gift - little girl style... part 2

So yesterday I talked a little about the bags and garland I'd made for the girls birthday (that I never got to use) I also made these fun little gift tags. Which, admittedly are a little more elaborate than I had originally intended them to be, but that's the glory of not waiting until the last minute to make something.


The first one I made was for Miss Louisa. I picked up this book about doodle stitching from my local library, and was immediately inspired by the cute, quirky designs. For her tag I used a scrap of blue cotton fabric, and some white and purple fleece for the base. Here's a great tip - if you're going to make a cute little embellishment like this, and don't want to have to worry about the ends unravelling, use felt or fleece, they don't unravel! When I had my circles and L cut, I stitched the pieces together with a colorful thread. Then I found these cute little flower sequins that I bought in a scrapbook store years ago. The sequins already had holes in them, so I secured them with a seed bead and a little bit of thread.


So this is the one I made for Annie. I used pink and white fleece for the base. I used some colorful thread for more doodle stitching, then dug through my scrapbook stuff to find the "a" charm, flower sequin, and flower paper clip. I stitched all the embellishments on by hand, but I think fabric glue would have worked fine (I was too lazy to dig mine out). To make the hole for the ribbon I used a crop-a-dile to make the hole and set an eyelet for a little added strength. I had originally intended to use the hole to put a nice twine through and wrap it around the gift, but it was just cuter this way :)


When I was done, I pinned the tags to the packages with a safety pin, and they were all set for the gifts that my girls never picked out.

Dress the gift - little girl style... part 1

After all that Christmas crafty stuff we did last month, my wheels were spinning with ideas for the girls birthday. Earlier this month I pawed through my stash and came up with a few fun ideas for dressing up little girl packages with reusable style. Unfortunately the girls decided they didn't really need gifts this year, so I made all this great stuff for nothing. But I had so much fun making it I thought I should at least share what I made before I packed all this great stuff for next year...

I made the bags the same way I made them for Christmas. (Someday I'll learn how to make a different style of bag, but for now, these are so darned easy.) When the bags were done, I started in on the fun part. I went with garlands again, figuring that the girls could decorate their room with them when they were finished.

The first one I made was for Miss Annie, the queen of all things pink. To cut the felt circles I used a 1 1/2 inch circle paper punch and punched a circle out of a piece of scrap paper. Then pinned my paper circle to the felt and cut out the circles. I did the same thing with a 1 inch circle so that I could layer them. Then I threaded the felt circles onto silver thread and dug through my craft supplies to find some brads, buttons, and embroidery floss for embellishing.
The other garland I made for Louisa was super simple. I found some cheerful looking pompoms, and some felt flowers that I found in the scrapbook section at Hobby Lobby a few years ago. Using a needle and silver thread, I made a simple pattern of pompoms and flowers. Orignally I wanted it to be more pompom-y, with less flowers. But when I went searching I realized I had more flowers than pompoms, and I wasn't about to go to the store at 10 pm to get more pompoms. So I used what I had, and I loved the way it turned out.

Oh and we discovered another fun use for the garland, decorating random toddlers that happen to wander past. She loved it!

Double the Birthday, Double the Fun

Being the mother of identical twins is a little tricky around birthday time. On my not-so-good at mothering days I have a tendency to lump the girls together as a single entity. They look alike, play alike, they are almost a perfect carbon copy of each other, so thinking of them as one and the same is not a challenge. (Give me a break, I'll bet 90% of my friends can't tell which girl is which anyway). Come birthday time I get a little on my high horse and demand that we celebrate each girl as an individual. 2 girls, 2 celebrations. 2 days worth of party-ing, and 2 birthday dinners. Or as Annie so accurately put it, "my birthday, and my other birthday". Only a twin could get away with claiming she has two birthdays.

Anyway. All that to say that we celebrated the girls birthday last week. Twice. Their actual birthday was on Thursday. We started the day with a scavenger hunt that ended with little debbie snack cakes hidden in the microwave. The kids all had their school work done in advance, so they all had the day off from school. Which means we had lots of time for playing, and baking birthday brownies. They managed to agree on dinner at the Chinese buffet, which made life a little easier. Normally we would have done birthday gifts after dinner, but this year the girls couldn't think of anything they wanted, so we went grocery shopping instead.

Their other birthday was on Saturday. Jory's gift to them was a trip to the roller skating rink. We'd never taken them before, but they received roller skates for Christmas, and were itching to use them. Turns out both girls are naturals. Alex, not so much. But we all had a fabulous time zipping around the rink. After skating it was time for pizza and a quick trip to the library.

From Russia with Love

Our friends recently traveled to Russia to visit Katya, the little girl they are planning to adopt from Max's orphanage. For political reasons, they were not allowed to go to the orphanage, but they were still able to visit with Elena, the orphanage director who traveled with Max and his friends last summer. In addition to giving them this drawing Max made for us (we think it says Mom and Dad on it), she was able to share with them how Max already knows about our plans to adopt him, and that he talks about us nonstop.
We are so grateful that the orphanage director shared that information with him. We are grateful that he has hope for the future, and a promise of good things to come. Additionally, I am thrilled to have something tangible from my son to hang on to. It's not a secret that our family is creatively inclined, so a part of me is thrilled that someone gave him a paintbrush and encouraged him to create something.

On a side note, we passed our fire safety inspection, which was the last item on our homestudy for the adoption agency. We can now move on to our next round of paper work - the dossier, which is basically a copy of all the legal paper work (marriage liscense, birth certificates, health exams etc.) that we gathered for the homestudy, but it goes to the American and Russian governments. I'm sure there are also a few fun surprises involved in that process that I will try really hard not to complain about.

Life Lesson Learned from a Flower Arrangement

I had this article published, I though some of you might enjoy reading it!
(click on the title to find the article)

Letter to Louisa

Dear Louisa,
You are my precious, spunky little girl. You always have a twinkle in your eye and a song in your heart. You are the clown in this group, always making us laugh about something. I love the way you look at life, and the way you make me look at my own life.

You are also the most laid back child in this group. You're the one who's most likely to just roll with the punches, which makes my life that much easier. You will go far in life, knowing when to pick your battles, and knowing that life is much easier when you don't freak out about stuff that doesn't really matter. My prayer for you is that you will let God show you which battles to fight, and when it's time to just roll with the punches.

It has been a joy to watch your faith develop along with your sister's. You are also becoming quite the prayer warrior, which makes my heart sing. I love it when you share your spontaneous prayers with me. You melt my heart with the sweet innocent prayers that come from your little heart, and I can only imagine how they touch God's heart as well.

There's no way I can overlook your creativity. The creativity both you and your sister display puts my efforts to shame. It seems like you are always making something beautiful for the people you love. This year I have enjoyed getting books about world art for you to pour over, and taking you to the art museum to expand your artistic perspective. My dear, you serve a Mighty Creator, and I pray that you will always enjoy connecting to God through your creativity the same way I do.

You are becoming a beautiful little lady, one that I'm proud to call my daughter. I'm so excited to see the woman of God you will become.

Letter to Annie

Dear Annie,

This week you will turn 7 and I thought you deserved to have a blog post all to yourself. You and your twin sister are so similar that it's hard for me to describe your differences to our friends. Aside from being so identical that you have freckles in the same location, your personalities are completely intertwined. You are both sweet and loving, creative and friendly. You both love the same toys, and play super well together. I am so thrilled that you and your sister are so close. And frankly I'm a little jealous of the friendship you have, knowing that you'll always be each others best friend.

But aside from all that my dear, you are growing up quickly. This year you decided you were done with the princess-y dress up games that you loved in the past. Not that I mind. Not being such a girlie girl myself, I was a little at a loss as to what to do with all that glittler and sparkle. These days you would rather play Legos or pretend play with the others. You like to pretend you're on a desert island like the family in Swiss Family Robinson, and you've been known to pretend to be Queen Susan the Gentle from The Chronicals of Narnia (ok, so maybe the princess thing hasn't totally disappeared...)

I am also pleased to watch your faith develop. You are becoming a prayer warrior, much like your Mama. This week you came to me, very much concerned for the people of Haiti, and you shared with me how you felt led to pray for them. Not that I'm really that surprised, you have always had a heart for caring for others. I am looking forward to helping you develop compassion for the needy in our community, as well as God's children around the world.

Repurposed kids clothes - day 3

So you know what happens when you make something cute for 2 of your kids, but not the third. You'd better have a good project lined up for that 3rd kid. Or else.
With that in mind, I went back to the give away bag. I found a cute pair of jeans with embroidery around the ankles that had a hole in the knee. So I took the pant leg with the hole in it, and cut it off below the hole. Then, for kicks I found an old tee-shirt to use as the lining. I cut off the back panel of the shirt and measured it to fit the length and width of the denim piece I had. After I had the lining pinned and sewed inside the pant leg, I stitched the bag shut at what used to be the ankle, and stitched a finished edge around the top of the bag.
To make a strap I took the other pant leg, cut off a long strip, making sure to keep the embroidery where you could see it. To finish it I stitched the edges together and sewed the ends to the inside of the bag.

This one took me a little longer than the other bags, the lining part wasn't exactly necessary. But the size was just right for Louisa's favorite critter "Foxy", and I can see her stuffing a water bottle in there to take with us as we go out and about.

Repurposed kids clothes - day 2

If you thought the last repurposing project was easy, you're going to laugh when you see the one I have for today. This little bag was made from a t-shirt Miss Annabel had pulled out for the give away pile. Even though it was a little too small, I wasn't quite ready to get rid of it yet. So what's a girl to do? I danced off to my sewing machine, stitched the shirt closed at the bottom, squared off the corners and put it to good use. Not more than 10 minutes total. A sweet little bag for a sweet little girl.

Mostly just devastated

This week our neighbor suffered a devastating loss. He owns a small hobby farm with a few acres and several animals. On Tuesday evening his main storage barn burned to the ground. We were eating dinner at the kitchen table when one of the girls noticed the neighbors were having "some sort of crazy bonfire". Jory and I were devastated when we realized it was not a happy little bonfire but a massive 4 alarm barn fire with flames shooting 30 feet in the air. Needless to say, it was a terrifying ordeal, even from the safety of our kitchen.

I can't help but think of the conversation I had with some friends just 24 hours earlier about how God uses life altering events to turn us into the people He wants us to be, and how we should commit to praying for our neighbors. So is it a coincidence that a life altering event happened 24 hours after I committed to praying for this specific neighbor? Not likely.

We felt that it was best if we didn't go over to check on our neighbor right away. We didn't want to be gawkers who were attempting to hide our curiosity behind our concerns. We waited a full 24 hours before we went over. Long enough for reality to set in, and the grief that came with it. There was pain in his eyes as he talked about what he'd lost - 4 goats, 500-600 bails of hay and 3 maintenance vehicles, not to mention a barn larger than my house. We offered what we could, but he was still too devastated to take us up on any of our attempts to help. So for now we pray, and cling to the fact that God is good, even when His plan sucks.

Repurposed kids clothes - day 1

I recently cleaned out the kids dressers in an attempt to make room for the new stuff they got for Christmas. After sorting out all the stuff that was still nice enough to pass on, I had a few pieces that I wasn't quite sure what to do with. I had several pieces that were still cute but had stains or holes, and a few old favorites that my children absolutely loved that I was reluctant to get rid of. So I pulled out my sewing machine and started experimenting. I ended up with several pieces that I'll share over the next few days.
The first one is a little sack that I made for Alex. I started out with a pair of well loved brown sweat pants that had a hole in the knee. I cut the one pant leg off (the one with a hole in it) just below the hole, and set the other leg aside for another project. With the piece I'd just cut off I stitched up the side that I had just cut to be the bottom of the bag. Then the other side already had a finished seam on it which I thought would be perfect for a drawstring, so I just made a small opening and ran a piece of ribbon through it. It took me about half an hour at most.

So we ended up with a cute little bag for Alex to keep treasures in. At first he was a little miffed that I'd cut up one of his favorite pairs of sweat pants, but his initial annoyance quickly passed and he was thrilled that instead of just pitching them that I'd put them to good use. It quickly became a sleeping bag for one of his little stuffed pals that he sleeps with.

Mama's bird house

At our most recent den meeting for Alex's boy scout troop The Powers That Be decided it was time for the boys to learn how to use power tools. Or more accurately, time for their parents to teach them how to use power tools. Now if I had been running the show it would have been something fun and simple like here's some scrap wood, now go experiment with it. But no. Not long after we arrived our cruel scoutmaster handed us a pile of wood and some nails, and told us to go build a bird house. No directions, no sample bird house to copy. Guess what. Mama doesn't know how to build a bird house. Fortunately the meeting was packed with Dads that did... I tried the old "Maybe if I stand here with a drill in my hand and look helpless they'll take pity" tactic. Nope. This Mama was on her own. The good news is that I wasn't the only helpless mom in the room. I buddied up to another clueless mom and together, with a lot of spying on the dads, we built birdhouses for our sons. With the boys help of course.

So without further delay, here is the beautiful birdhouse my son and I made. Be sure to notice it's key features - the dribbles of wood glue, and corners that don't match up. Awesome, I know. I'm particularly fond of the indentations in the wood left by the hammer. But yet it stands as a well earned trophy. Mama wrestled with the power tools, and came out victorious.

My apologies to my father, the tool man, who is undoubtedly groaning over this post.

a case of the sillies

After I was up all night with a sick Louisa I could use a little chuckle. I thought you could to. These are from a few days ago.

I don't know what it is about this one of Alex, to me it just shouts CREEPY OLD MAN!

Again with the creepy shots of my children. I know. But this one of Louisa made us all laugh.

And finally Annie, my most photogenic kid - um. No comment.

100 days of school

I think it's a day every class in every grade school in America celebrates. 100 days of school. Every year we celebrate it here at home. We've done necklaces with 100 beads, artwork with 100 stickers, and so forth. This year we decided to take a different track. Instead of making another useless art project we decided to make something useful. I had the children string cereal to make these little garlands that will not only decorate our winter trees, but will also provide nourishment for our little woodland friends.

I counted out 100 pieces of cereal for each kid, and let them pick out their own thread. We used cheerios, because they were easy to string (and we had a brand new box). We also tried to use natural threads that will either decompose or become a part of a bird nest at some point, so that we won't have to go collect it after the cereal has been consumed.

recording our goals

I've been searching for a method to record the children's New Years resolutions and goals for a while. I recently realized the answer was right in front of me. I pulled out another one of those empty plastic photo books from Walmart (the same kind I used to have the kids write the stories they gave as Christmas gifts) and got to work. I made a simple template in Microsoft Word to get the kids started, it had a space for their name, a prompt about their goals for the year, and the year typed at the bottom. Then printed the templates and let the kids write and illustrate their own goals for the year. The idea is to have the kids enter new goals as the years go by, and by the time they are ready for college we'll have a little book full of sweet plans that my children have made. (Yes, Louisa's goal for this year is to eat ice cream. Awesome.)

Yes, Mom and Dad are being held accountable as well. I wrote out a goal using the same template I used for the kids, but I also thought I could add a 4 x 6 print out of the resolution graphic I shared last time.