Pride, Then Fall. Check!

I know it has been a while and honestly I have no clue why I have not been writing. I could give you the line that I have been way too busy, but the amount of my Facebook entries would bust me on that line. I could say that I have not had anything to write about, but my brain has been exploding with topics.

I will say that I think I needed a time of quiet reflection on some issues and although I adore sharing them with you and all the advice you wonderful bloggers offer, the Lord directed me to just be still. So I was still. Sort of.

We finished the school year and I let out a sigh of relief. I liked this year, I really did. We decided to use a cyber school instead of the more traditional homeschooling we had been using and I think it helped me feel more in control and accountable. I did not mind someone directing my path this year in education. K.Z.'s online teacher this year was a believer and a former homeschooler herself, and that really led to some candid, "off the record" discussions. He excelled in his studies. The "light bulb" turned on. That is not to say that the struggles ceased.

K.Z. is a great kid. Period. I really enjoy spending time with him and seeing things through his eyes. He is fun and sweet and loving. As my first born he was the guinea pig for all things parenting. I found a bottle I liked with him after we stopped nursing. The perfect binky. A great sippy cup and educational cartoons. He cut his teeth on all of that. The girls flowed easily on the canal that K.Z. helped me dig. He was going to be a genius child who won homeschool spelling bees and read Wycliffe and Hus before his Kindergarten studies. My child would be open air preaching by the time he was ten. So sayeth the Mom.

I was proud of my boy. I was a prideful mess. I forgot to consult someone in all of this. The One. Of course I prayed about homeschooling my children. I prayed about the right curriculum, the best stream by which to read Hick Finn, which co-op to join, whether or not he should play with "non-homeschoolers". I never thought to ask for the Lord's guidance as to whether or not I should homeschool and whom. That was a forgone conclusion. Of course the Lord would be pleased. That is what everyone said. Even my beloved Dr. Dobson had talked about the benefits on Focus On the Family. We were set.

Pride ruled my homeschool. My kids were doing great and having a good time. I beamed like a silly, puffed up, peacock. I had all the answers and knew all the "ins and outs". Then my boy started to struggle a little. At first with reading, and then with obedience.

The reading worked itself out this year and he is doing just fine there. He is still struggling with obedience in school. It made no sense to me. I am a homeschooler! This does not happen to homeschoolers! This only happens to those public school kids whose mothers eat bon-bons all day and watch soap operas. Not to homeschoolers with dedicated, hardworking mothers!

Maybe it was his diet. Maybe I should start serving only whole foods with organic millet for breakfast. Maybe I was too lenient with allowing the likes of PBS into our home. Or maybe… just maybe, I was once again, not consulting the One who created my boy.

I fell lock, stock and barrel into the homeschool snare. Let me shout from the rafters that I think homeschooling is wonderful. My second child is thriving from it and I do believe was reading right from the womb. But there is the trap that many fall into. It is the, "your children can only prosper from homeschooling and will wither away anywhere else" lie. And although I believe in homeschooling and can see doing this for a long time, I put homeschooling above my Creator.

This issue with obedience in my child hit me like a pipe to the back of the knees. Thankfully. I needed to be brought down on them. I tearfully prayed this time about what the best path was for K.Z., specifically. Not based on my plan or preconceived idea, but His plan. That is the only one that matters. Homeschooling, albeit a great journey, will not guarantee that my boy will hit the mission field by 17 nor be taking college classes at 14. And frankly, it is not my place to deem it so.

The King of the Universe created this boy and knew him before time even began. He knitted him and formed him in my womb. He knows my child. So now I must trust that He will also guide K.Z.'s path and set him on the one that leads to Glory.

That being said, I am now pricing polos and khakis as we consider sending K.Z. to a local, Christ based school for this school year. If it is to happen, the Lord will open the door financially and logistically. But, this time, I will let Him lead the way.

As scary as that may seem to my mortal and prideful brain...

A New Reader

I have done it! I have hit a blogging milestone! I think I have 5 readers now! This newest reader is someone just a little special to me. It's my Daddy (pause with me for a minute to sigh and collectively say, "awww!").

"So what?", you say?! "Why is this a monumental moment?"

Because unlike some fathers who have their laptops with them at all times, my father rarely turns on his computer, that sits waiting patiently in his office. He is on the road much of the day and would rather be talking to people face to face than dealing with them electronically. I will give him credit where credit is due however. He has a cell phone and is not afraid to use it!

So anyway, along with this computer that gets no love whatsoever, my father actually has a company e-mail address and apparently has had it for quite a while. Not that his daughter knew about that, however (ahem!)...

After I found out about his e-mail address I simply had to see if this was true or an urban legend. My father has a working e-mail address? That can't be right.

So I e-mailed my dad just a "test" e-mail and true to daddy form, he called me back in reply (I told you he has tight cell phone skills). Apparently in my test e-mail (in which I had not even written any text) was the standard signature I have on every e-mail complete with my blog address. My dad took a leap into the unknown and clicked on said address. And actually stayed for a while to read it. Voila! I have a new reader!

So welcome Daddy! I hope you stick around.

Checking In... Again

I have been blogging for 3 1/2 years now, since March of 2006. For most of that time I have tried to really hard to blog daily, or at least every few days. Lately, more than not, I have slipped on that goal quite a bit. So, once again, here I am checking in with my blog friends and the few who pop in because they think (they know) I have lost my marbles and my life is a sad source of entertainment.

So here is the scoop...

- WE HAVE A NAME! After 16 months of trying to come up with a name for our foster son Iggy (Iggy is just simply his blog pseudonym), we finally sat down and decided on one. I cannot decide if I will post it here as I have never posted my other children's real names, but you never know. I do want to share it with all of you that I have formed great friendships with these past few years but.... Anyway, his name will not be official until we are able to adopt him and...

- WE ARE CLOSE! We do not have a date yet, but it seems like our adoption date is getting closer and closer. I am trying not to take for granted that he is ours, even thought he has been ours for 17 months today. Anything can happen, so I am still holding my breath a little until the judge signs his name on an adoption decree.

-EAZY (almost four year old foster son) has now been with us for six months. He is really changing and emerging and that shy, unsure little boy that joined our family last December has started to find out who he really is and we are glad to be able to see it. We still have no clue what is happening in his case, but we have decided that if he needs a place to call home forever, he can have that here. He is a great addition to the family.

That is about it for now. I want to try harder to write daily, but you may have to put up with one liners or silly rantings from my brain on occasion. With five children it does not always seem to fire on all cylinders for some reason...

A Voice From the Distance

My heart has been a little heavy lately as we head toward the end of the school year. Since the beginning of my motherhood journey, I was convinced that I would homeschool my precious, obedient, perfect, and brilliant offspring while baking homemade bread and making nutritious meals from scratch with whole foods.

HA!

I buy bread, have been known to hit a drive-thru or two a little too often, and have discovered what every mother eventually finds out; my children, while precious, are not perfect, rarely obedient twice in a row and were not born knowing the mathematical constant, pi. Or how to put their shoes on the correct feet. They must be taught. In comes SuperMomma to the rescue. Or so I thought.

Currently I have two of my children officially being homeschooled. C'sa will start Kindergarten next year and then there will be three. My 9 year old son K.Z. was my first guinea pig and we started off with a bang. Then we started limping a little. Then, a shot in the arm and all seemed well again. Then a total blow out. We are finishing up the year and he has done well with his curriculum, but there was a lot of blood, sweat and tears put into the year. Okay, maybe no blood, but certainly a lot of tears. From both of us.

Along came time for student number two, my daughter Xena. She is me, in everyway when it comes to school. She’s a nerd like her mother and loves to read, write and all that fun stuff us geeks love. Polar opposite from her brother who would much rather be playing kickball or with Legos.

Lately, my perfect, precious son has been working very hard to find his role on this planet. For the most part he is still a boy in need of his mommy, not that I would dare tell anyone that mind you. That would make him look so un-cool. Throw that process in the blender with a Lego loving boy, a nerdy Momma who is just as stubborn as her son, and the result is something just a little less scary than, say, Ultimate Fighting. On roller skates.

The daddy person in this equation has just about had enough. So now we have some very hard decisions to make about next year, to which I have been lamenting to friends about. One very sweet friend was a voice in the dark and I cannot thank her enough. She reminded me of some very important aspects I had been overlooking (Mr. Clean’s role here, as well as some others). I was looking for a burning bush and I wonder now if I was close enough to it the whole time to actually feel the burn, but did not want to see it.

I still do not know what the future will bring for my son’s education (nor my other children for that matter), but I did realize that my agenda was certainly not serving everyone else’s as well as I had envisioned.

Perhaps.

After all, you can’t keep a good nerd down…

What's In a Name?

A whole lot of, "I dunnos". Let me elaborate... We have had three children biologically, which gave us 40 weeks or so to come up with something to call each child. It wasn't terribly hard and to date I cannot think of one major argument fought nor tears shed over the matter. None of our children are still called "baby", so I consider that a huge success.

Baby number 4 came to us pre-named as he was our foster son and they allowed his mother to name him. She must have still been drugged at the time from the epidural, as his name is, well... "unique". There was honestly no nickname we could derive from it that was not as "unique". Later on after jokingly calling him, "Das Baby" (apparently we had been dreaming of German U-boats?), it kind of stuck. We now call him Das quite a bit. It also can be considered a nickname from his given name. Kind of.

Now that it appears we will be able to adopt him, we have had the hardest time with a name for him. We plan to change his name, as it honors his BioDad (in a unique way), who has not honored his child whatsoever.

This child is now 15 months old, and although there was always a chance he could go home, in the back of my brain the wheels have continually been turning on what we would name him if someday he were ours forever. We have yet to completely agree. At one point I finally got Mr. Clean to have the conversation for more than 1.3 seconds and I thought we had nailed it down. Then it changed. Then it changed again. Let's hope by the time we get to adopt this baby (Lord willing), he will have a name other than, "Das Baby".

I Did Not Know Her But...

She was just like one of us. She was a Mommy, a blogger, a sister, a friend, a wife, a MOMS Club member and a beloved daughter. Now she and her babies are gone and it boggles my mind.

She is a friend of a friend from my home State, from the County where I rocked my babies before moving to PA and from the town where my brothers went to high school. One town over from my parents. I have driven by her house countless times. Yet she is no longer there. It is too sad to contemplate...

Middletown Mourns

The Weight of Change

I was chatting with a friend today about a subject that has been weighing heavily on both of our hearts. Irrevocable change. The simple knowledge that life will never stay as it was, and even though you welcome the changes you still deeply mourn the past. I felt that today, as I wearily ran all day long. From here to there. Dropping off one set of kids here, another set of kids there, exchanging car seats with Mr. Clean, picking up children to drop them off again and take another somewhere else. This is not much different from a lot of other mothers; I am not ignorant to that fact. I just miss the "before".

Before, I had three children whom I adored and overwhelmed me to the core. Probably almost as equally as the five I have now. We had been a little family of five for just four years. C'sa was starting to be a little more independent, needing me less for the simple things, like getting her head unwedged from the armhole of her shirt. Xena was almost 6 and ready to let her love of reading take her on amazing adventures and my eldest child, K.Z. was starting his detachment phase from Momma that all boys experience and was gravitating more toward"Daddy".

Then came Iggy. As you may know Iggy is our delightful 15 month old foster son. We brought him home from the hospital at just a mere two and a half days old and we adore him beyond comprehension. He immediately changed the fabric of our family, which is how we knew that if there was any chance he was unable to be reunited with his biological parents, we wanted him. Lock, stock and barrel.

After Iggy came home I got a case of the baby blues (mild form of post pardum depression). I have had it before, after all three of my biological children, so I knew what was happening, but it seemed odd. I thought the baby blues happened due to all the changes in my hormonal balance after spitting out a baby. For Iggy, it happened because of the knowledge that my cozy little family had changed. We settled into life as a family of six, even without knowing how long Iggy would stay.

Eleven months later came Eazy, our three year old foster son. And while I did not experience the baby blues again, I did panic a little. My cozy family of five from just a year previous had just now exploded into a family of seven. It made me sad. I thought I was a little bit crazy.

We wanted these boys. We signed up to be their parental units for as long as they needed us, yet I was panicking about losing the little family dynamic that we once had. Selfish vacation plans that had been made were thwarted, the need of changing vehicles due to necessity made me bitter instead of grateful for my expanded family. I felt like I was losing my mind.

(Please do not misunderstand. I firmly believe that children, in whatever form they come, are an amazing blessing. The opportunity to bring them up in Christ, and the fact that you have been assigned that crucial task for this particular creation, is humbling. I had a grasp on this the whole time, ironically.)

You feel alone. It is hard to explain to someone, that you are waiting for this new change to feel normal, all while mourning what was your normal. I could have cried when my sweet friend revealed to me a few weeks ago that she had been struggling with this too after giving birth. It is a strange emotion and as much as I hate that she is experiencing this, it is comforting to know, I am not the only one.

Life Defined In Lipstick

I am a lipstick kind of girl. I don't worry too much about eye shadow and the like on a daily basis, but I do love me some lipstick. And for any of you who have this obsession you know that when you find THAT color, you stick with it. Even if it means selling your firstborn and throwing your grandmother in front of the bus to race by her and get it.

I found my color about 12 years ago as a free give away from Estee Lauder. I bought a gift for someone and was treated to a free lipstick. I did not get to pick the color, it was more than likely a new color they were introducing. Well, Hello Dolly! It was a perfect fit.

Against my mother's raised eyebrow (she has been a Mary Kay consultant for many moons), I gladly paid Ms. Lauder's staff of make-up maidens for the privilege of wearing, "Alfresco Brick" lipstick. All was right with the world.

Two years ago I went to buy more, as I was running low. I was hit with an alfresco brick to the head. The color was discontinued. Dis. Con. Tinued. It took all the grace I possess to not take the sales lady by the lapel and shake her. Hard. And then hold her hostage until they agreed to re-continue my discontinued addiction. It was not to be.

I scoured every department store within a three state radius (I am not kidding) as well as eBay. My color was gone forever. Life would be irreconcilably less colorful than before the ultimate betrayal.

I searched for a color that would match my previous lipstick's glory. I searched Mary Kay (I think my mother secretly gloated and snickered behind my back), Arbonne, all the department store lipsticks, and even the brands I would literally have to sell my firstborn to simply afford. There was no comparison. My beloved was gone. I had to settle for a different color altogether, but it did not have that "wow" factor.

Fast forward two years (give or take a few months) and I found a stick in a forgotten drawer with a smidgen of lipstick left. I whipped out a lipstick brush as quick as you please to scrape the remnants. That was it, the obsession was back. I decided to search eBay again. I knew it would be fruitless. After all, Estee Lauder The Great Betrayer had discontinued my color over two years ago or better and failed to contact me personally to discuss this. All the other junkies would have certainly torn each other apart by now to get the last stick.

There it was. A small light in the darkness. One "Alfresco Brick" lipstick left on eBay. I prepared myself for battle. It was going to be mine. I checked all our bank accounts, money markets and retirement funds to see just how much I could spend for this last glimmer of hope. There were already bids, but I am proud to say I beat them all and did not have to mortgage the house to do so. The other junkies must have all died from lipstick overdose by now, as I got it fairly easily.

All I can say now is that the mailman better throw it from his truck and keep on going, to prevent attack when I see that bulky envelope. Life is good again.

Until this stick runs out...

Not That Anyone Is Counting...

In eleven days. Eleven short days until we will take a major step forward in making Iggy a member of this family forever.

Last month Iggy's biological parents signed a consent to have their parental rights terminated. It came as a shock to everyone as they were in court that day to have a judge hear the county's case for termination. It never made it to the judge.

Out of left field BioMom and all of the BioDads involved in this case (there are several siblings) signed consents. We were floored.

They have 30 days to change their minds and revoke the consent, but on day 31 if that has not happened, my little Iggy will be free and clear for adoption. That isn't to say that "Uncle SoandSo" or "Aunt Wherehaveyoubeen" cannot jump out of the woodwork and try to get custody, but it will be harder for them.

We have already been contacted by the adoption agency charged with this case and the wheels have been set in motion. It just might be time to start pinching myself...

Christ The Lord Is Risen Today

Hallelujah!

I Am Feeling a Little Spoiled...

I have a new love. Her name is Truvy. She is my laptop.

I have been wanting a laptop for a long time. Mr. Clean has always had one supplied to him by his company. I sit and drool while watching him on it as I sit at my desktop. I know; "woe is me".

As a homeschooler I dream of vacations to exotic locales with my trusty laptop by my side to educate my children and pull up curriculum all while sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. That did not sell Mr. Clean on my need.

I started to whine that it was kind of difficult, as our curriculum is web-based, to jump up and down constantly from my desktop computer to the table where the kids are doing their workbook portion of the lesson. Nope, this did not work either.

And then it happened...

The day Mr. Clean was my substitute teacher. And he used my desktop to accomplish this task. He immediately agreed I had a true case. I ordered her on Thursday afternoon and she arrived ready to go on Friday. Just as Spring Break is coming to a close and a new school week is looming ahead.

So she is here. All shiny and new and fast. Oh, so fast! So I decided she should be called Truvy, because she is all lacquered up. I have never seen such a shiny laptop, keys included, but I like it nonetheless. Let me know if you can make the connection to the name! If I wasn't broke from buying a laptop, I would treat you to a coffee or the like if you get it right. But you will have the satisfaction of knowing, you rule.

I Apparently Did Not Get the Memo...

Hello blogger world! It has been a while, as I have been swamped scrubbing floors, dusting and beautifying my picture perfect home playing on Facebook and eating copious amounts of Cadbury Cream Eggs while kicking dirty laundry under the beds. But I have decided it was time to check in with the whole 4 people who actually read this thing. Because frankly, I miss you!

Eazy (foster son #2) had a visit today with his BioDad. And because the world tends to be, well worldly, I never thought for a minute that the fact it was Good Friday would alter the plans we had to have Eazy's regular visit at the courthouse. After all, if you will not acknowledge Christ at a governmental level, it seems pretty hypocritical to me to take a vacation day on a day so important to Christianity. But I digress.

I showed up at the courthouse and because I am a "county" foster parent, versus going through an agency, I get the privilege of parking in the garage below, like I am important or something (at which all foster parents will laugh and tell you I am delusional). So the guards waved me in like normal (I am there so much they do not even bother to have me sign in half the time) and I found a killer parking space right by the elevator. First clue something was amiss.

In our courthouse you take two sets of elevators. One from the garage to the lobby and then after going through security, another set to get to your final destination. The garage elevator came astonishingly fast. Another clue.

Up in the lobby, it was a barren wasteland. No security guards stuffed into uncomfortable polyester uniforms ready to check your bags and "wand you" when you set off the metal detector. All I have to say here is, "under wire". Gets me every time. So much so, that I usually get waved on through after a discreet whisper of, "under wire" from the guard on duty. As if I was unaware, since he told me that last week and the week before. I digress again...

At this point is was quite obvious that the courthouse was closed for the day. But I had gotten this far so I figured I would go upstairs and double check. Yep, barren wasteland there too. I got on my cell phone and called the visit supervisor. I was NOT going to have to make this visit up, if she had simply forgotten to tell me about the courthouse being closed today. She hadn't.

She was downstairs with BioDad, locked out of the courthouse (she is not as cool as I am and not allowed to park in the garage). Just then the fire alarms started going off, as they apparently were taking advantage of a closed building to test them for the day. Needless to say, Eazy and Iggy (15 month old foster son) were none too pleased. We got down into the garage and out quickly to rendezvous with BioDad and the visit supervisor outside.

Kind of long story short, Eazy had his visit. A little unconventionally, but we had it anyway. I like BioDad. He may not be great Daddy material, but he is a nice guy. Had it been BioMom...

That's a story for another day.

My Boy Is Nine!