OUR PLANS MULTIPLIED: Snow Days

OUR PLANS MULTIPLIED

In the beginning, JD adamantly only wanted two children. I thought that four would be perfect. Once we caught God's vision of putting orphans into families, our plan was multiplied by God. We are currently blessed with 12 children; five biological, six adopted and one more waiting in Ethiopia. Our first adoption was from the U.S., the next three were from Liberia, West Africa, and our last two were from Ethiopia. We are supporting our 12th child in Ethiopia after her adoption could not pass court.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Snow Days

The kids were thrilled with the few inches of snow that we got two nights ago; thankfully, JD went out and took pictures for me.

Elijah sampling the snow

Selah's second year of snow play

Bella

Julia

I don't particularly enjoy the snow - by the time I find snow pants, boots and gloves for everyone, then rewash all the worn items, my time invested in snow fun is greater than the actual time they play in the snow.

Today I have plans to go through the snow gear, get rid of anything too small for Bella and make the system more user friendly. Since we have a decent sized coat closet and cubbies for hats and gloves, I may be able to not have to pack it all away to the point it's an all-mom event to get it out.

Just one of the doors at the moment!

Beyond snow, JD is working on the ceiling in the unfinished section of the basement. It will be such a relief to finally finish the construction, but I'm trying to not getting my hopes up that it will all be completed this winter. (But that's still what I'm hoping!)

installing lights

Once I show this picture, there's nothing to left to hide if you were to come visit in person! This is our unfinished "game room". It contains our currently unusable pool table, ping pong table and air-hockey table in addition to all the remaining building supplies. Beyond that, it has this horrible, horrible ability of hording STUFF that no one is currently using. I am going to make another sweep through and list some items on Craig*list.

I spent the majority of one day reorganizing these school cubes. The top five baskets are now labeled with the five younger children's names and they hold their Playmobiles. This has proven to be a good system of controlling extra mess and lost pieces for things that I'm unwilling to release to the down-stairs playroom. We get the baskets down and they play away in the school room, but then they all get put back up when the session is over. As soon as the game room in the basement is done, we are creating a "Legoland" that will have a small bookshelf and plastic baskets for each child's Legos and free the bedrooms from that mess as well.