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...

It's been awhile, but then it's been kind of a crazy while. After I got my grades in for the semester and recovered from the Dallas Marathon, it was time to finish Christmas shopping and get ready to head off for Christmas vacation. The day before we left, Maddy had her school Christmas party, we did a Christmas gift exchange with a close friend, and then did our family Christmas that evening. It was a little overwhelming, tespecially for Maddy who didn't get to play with any of her gifts but was rushed from one event to the next without time to breathe.  Maddy loved giving the animals their stockings.  On the morning of the 21st, we got up bright and early--well sort of. I forgot to mention that Aaron had gone on a business trip to NY and only gotten back Wed. evening. His plane was almost 3 hours late so we did not get in bed until 2 a.m. Then we had our crazy day of parties, presents, and packing and got in bed a bit late that night. So, all that to say that we ...

The big, sadistic run party took place on Sunday, December 9th, 2012. That's right. For some reason, back at the end of the summer, I let my husband talk me into voluntarily torturing myself for 26.2 miles to complete my first marathon ever. We got up at 4:30 in the morning, ate a quick breakfast, gathered our running gear, and dropped Maddy off for a day of fun with friends at 5:30a.m. Talk about some amazing friends to be willing to get up at 5:30a.m. to take care of Maddy so we could go kill ourselves. We arrived at the American Airlines center right on schedule to drop Tammy off to catch the bus for her relay. They changed the course from Fair Park to the Dallas Convention Center this year, so we were worried about parking but it all went great. We exited the freeway without spending more than about 5 minutes in traffic and came off practically into a parking lot right in front of the convention center. We went into the Convention Center to do our pre-race rituals and to ...

My life during finals week:

 A few pictures from Thanksgiving:  We put our tree up the last day of November. Maddy got to open her advent calendar and an ornament from Granna the night we put the tree up. I love putting the tree up. 70-80% of our ornaments are homemade and 90% have a special significance. There is the snowman cowboy we bought in Sedona on our honeymoon, there are the ornaments made by Aaron's great grandmother at the turn of the last century (1900). There are ornaments his mom made him when he was growing up, and the ornaments from my first Christmas. I still have an ice cream cone that I made with a silk Christmas ball ornament in 5th grade. The whole class chose a red ornament to make their ice cream cone except me and one other kid. We chose yellow. There are the ornaments I've made Maddy each Christmas and the ornaments Maddy's grandmothers have given her. I was pretty crushed this year because Maddy broke a sand dollar ornament to bits that was from my Sunday school t...