Lux et umbra vicissum…

That’s really what she looked like yesterday after I braided and beaded her hair and had her all dressed for church. 🙂 Eli insisted on being in the picture, too…

Charis (sitting at the dinner table): My food will help me grow up!

Me: Yes.

Charis: And then I will get to wear pull-ups! And then I will get to wear panties! (At this point she starts getting very excited and clapping her little hands) And then I get to go on the POTTY TRAIN!!!

I haven’t figured out quite yet how to break it to her that potty training doesn’t involve an actual train…

I so much want to call someone and chat right now.  It’s not that I have no friends in the world, it’s just that the two or three I’m closest to aren’t home right now.  Cursed jobs that take my friends away from their telephones!

My back is bad again.  I twisted it a couple days ago searching for a book that Alexis had lost.  (Somehow I managed to pull a muscle in my lower back by climbing her bunk bed and trying to avoid hitting my head on the ceiling fan.)  Anyway, I’m limited in what I can do which is frustrating.  The older three folded my clean towels for me (folding is a chore they still enjoy, especially towels which they can do without help), and the younger two switched my laundry with me supervising.  Since I have the front load washer and dryer now they can pretty much do it themselves (though half of the time that it takes for them to put the wet clothes in the dryer is spent pushing the button that turns the light on and off inside the drum).  Anyway, they were a good help for the laundry chores, but now that that’s going I can’t think of much else that I can take on with or without their help.  I have cleaning I want to do, but it all involves bending or twisting. 😛  Well, maybe it’ll be feeling well enough in another day or so to get more things done.  In the meantime… look out ebay!  I’m on the hunt for clothes for the new girls!

Swim lessons…

A (chicken) pox on Eli!

And this past week was VBS. I volunteered to work in the nursery, but due to there being plenty of workers in nursery and my almost-kindergartener throwing a fit, I ended up transferring to kindergarten. I learned something very valuable – large groups of small children don’t scare me like they used to. They still exhaust me, but they don’t scare me. I actually had a pretty good time helping in their class, even having a few little troublemakers in there. (Yes, there was one fist-fight, but I broke it up right away and the parents of the children involved didn’t seem surprised.)

My grandmother has gone through at least 3, maybe 4 times where the doctors didn’t think she was going to make it. The most recent of these times was last week when they found she had developed a perforation in her colon. They had to do emergency surgery to remove her colon (she now has an ileostomy) and the doctor didn’t think her body could take another surgery. But there was a lot of prayer going on, and God brought her through it. Since then, she’s improved dramatically. She can now sit in a recliner some days, she’s responding more (nodding and shaking her head, lifting her hand sometimes, etc.), and it seems like she’s trying to talk sometimes. She has a trach in now, so she can’t talk at this point. They’re planning on putting on the flappy thing that allows the person to close the trach and talk, but the first one they tried was too large so they need to get a smaller one fitted. We’re all looking forward to that. At this point we’re not sure how many people she actually recognizes or if she’s just responding to people sweetly like she normally would without knowing who’s talking to her. Once she can talk we should be able to find out. 🙂 She’s still in ICU for now, but maybe they’ll be able to move her to the step-down unit soon.

And we’re almost finished with our adoption paperwork. We’ve finished the required training now. We just need to get a couple more clearances and letters from agencies and I think we’ll be done. We’ve looked at several vans, too, but we haven’t found the right one yet. (In other words, they’re all too expensive or too… er… well-used.) Anyway, the main thing now is to somehow come up with the more than $15000 we need to send in our dossier. I can’t wait to find out what this testimony will be! 🙂

A new friend came to visit today! Here’s a couple of pictures of him…

Though we enjoyed the visit (the kids loved it!), we decided that our friend should probably be moving along his way. Joel and I then spent about a half hour chasing him around the yard trying to catch him in a bin so we could relocate him. He started out not minding us at all (he was a very mild mannered black snake), but after we had tried to direct him by poking him with pieces of wood and such he started getting annoyed. The way we finally got him was by taking advantage of his coils when he got upset. Joel managed to slip a long narrow board under one and he lifted him up bodily and dropped him in the bin at which point I very quickly threw on the lid. (We had gotten him in the bin at least twice before that but couldn’t get the lid on fast enough.) Joel then took him back into the woods a ways and let him go there. I’m sure he’ll like his new home. 🙂

I set up an etsy site. 🙂

http://beadsnwood.etsy.com

Thanks for the suggestion, Nat!  I made it so that Joel can list some of his woodworking there at some point, too.  Now I’ll have to try to finish up a bunch of my UFO’s – unfinished objects!  I’m building up quite a collection of them at this point.  The only thing I have listed for now is the set I included here on my site.  Most of my other pieces are pendants that I hadn’t decided how to hang, etc.  And some sets that I haven’t finished.  And some bracelets that I hadn’t decided if they were finished…  you get the picture. 🙂

I haven’t felt much like blogging lately.  My grandmother took a turn for the worse a couple days ago and they were sure she wasn’t going to make it.  She rallied a bit, though, and is still hanging on.  I’m just trying not to get my hopes up too high.  The whole thing is incredibly stressful, and if it feels that way to me it must be even more so for my mother, my aunts, and my grandfather!

Anyway, here’s a jewelry set I just finished.  I’m planning on charging $26 for the set.  It’s made out of gold plated beads and wire, swarovski crystals, fresh water pearls, and crackle glass nuggets along with some less fancy clasps and such. 🙂  I like how it turned out.  Might have to use this pattern again.

Items accomplished yesterday:

notarized numerous papers

got money orders for background checks

kept track of five small children

mailed background check requests

mailed requests for reference letters

bought many, many stamps

set up sleepover for Alexis for tonight

finished fund-raising letter

wrote down over 250 names of people to send letter to

created and printed post-placement report pictures for Desta and Eli

Things still to do:

go to sheriff’s office for local background check

go to different branch of sheriff’s office for fingerprints

try not to go crazy

meet with social worker Monday for final home study update visit

fill out financial info for home study and dossier

send employment letter to ABS main office for signing and notarization

request bank letter saying we’re in good standing

retain as much hair as possible

make copies of last three years of taxes

address envelopes for fund-raising letters

mail letters

pray pray pray pray

do internet adoption class  to satisfy training requirements

make more jewelry

apply for tax ID for selling jewelry

pray some more…

She went in after a routine biopsy gone awry.  They were biopsying a lump on her breast – an outpatient procedure, normally – and somehow they nicked an artery.  They didn’t know she was bleeding at first, but her blood pressure dropped, she started struggling to breathe, then she went into shock and her heart stopped.  A nurse anesthetist performed CPR on her for 45 minutes while others worked frantically on other areas to get the bleeding stopped.  She was bleeding into her lungs.  They pumped 3 pints of blood from her lungs and she was still bleeding.  They reopened her, found the “bleeder” and tied it off, but her lung collapsed.  She may have had a stroke, but they’re not sure.  She now has a blood clot in her leg and possible clots in her lungs, and she has pneumonia.  She’s been on a ventilator and has been kept sedated for the most part so she doesn’t fight the equipment that’s keeping her alive.  When she’s allowed to wake up a little bit she’s been able to nod and shake her head in response to questions, but they don’t let her get that awake very often at this point.

I’m planning on traveling to visit my parents this weekend to visit Grandma in the hospital.  We’ll be up there for the week of July 4th anyway, but things are just so complicated right now…. if she didn’t make it until our planned visit I’d feel terrible.  She’s only a few hours away.  I’ll drive up Friday night and stay for Saturday.   I’m planning on taking my jewelry things with me so I can work on them a bit when I’m not actively visiting with Grandma.

Please pray for peace and comfort for Grandma Louise and for my family.  She was in quite good health before this so it’s been a complete shock.  She’s also the youngest of all of my grandparents.

I know that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills,  but I don’t understand why some of them are so skinny.

BBC News Report

One place I’ve found that’s trying to help is Unicef.  AWOP could also use your help as they try to feed the children in the orphanages, care for sick and dying people in the area through their newly forming hospice program, and seek to bring food and education to families that can’t afford it.