At Home in the Mountains

So, as I posted in my last blog, we've been having a lot of religious discussions in this house. We've been answering one of Maddy's questions, "Who is God?", by telling her that God is the one who made everything. Somehow, we failed to realize that, being a 3 year old, she would take this to the far literal extreme. "Why don't my shoes have bows on them? Oh, because God didn't make them that way." On the bright side, she is answering some of her own questions. "Mommy, why isn't there a tiger in the picture? Because God didn't make one there." "Did God make this road?" Trying to explain that sometimes God gives people ideas about how to make things out of what he made just hasn't really computed....at all. The other day she had a little string unraveling from her undies that was bothering her and she wanted me to cut it off. I got the scissors and as I was about to snip the offending string, she cautioned me, ...

Maddy isn't really a baby anymore, but the things that come out of her mouth sure are funny. The other day she was "reading the Bible to me. Second Samuel, in fact. There are some stories in there I'd never heard. One about a "guy" who got a Christmas tree and decorated it with stars and then flowers started coming out all over it and then it "'sploded!" The "guy" had told someone, "No sir. I cannot kill the Christmas tree." She ended the story by saying, "Then he went into his house and told his lady, 'I killed it'." Spiderman breaking windows in a bus and "'sploding" it is also in II Sam., believe it or not.  She asks all kinds of questions. Mostly they start with "Why..." and she asks them multiple times a day for weeks on end. "Why did Aaron (friend from church who is several years older than her) growed to much?". "Why do sugar bugs eat holes in my teeth?". ...

Well, it's been awhile since I updated everyone about how our adoption process is going. Mostly I haven't posted much because it's just been mounds of paperwork, a lot of waiting, and more paperwork. A lot for us to do, but not much of interest to report. Well, things got interesting this week. I don't know if you all have heard about Putin banning US adoption in Russia, but 100's of family have lost their kids because of this. People who had already visited their child several times can not finalize their adoptions because of this decision. Their is a big uproar in both countries about this. Well, while the doesn't directly affect our adoption, it has indirectly affected it. Our adoption agency is a small agency. Over half their adoptions are through Russia, or were until the recent changes. So our adoption agency made the difficult decision to close their doors. So now we have to pick a new  agency and a new direction to go with our adoption. While it is frust...