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.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

The Last Two Weeks

The last two weeks have been fast paced! It started with Alei's crack of dawn flight to CO only to return the following day with Alayna, Nathan and Samuel. Gabriel is at three months of schools around the country before they relocate from Colorado to WA State. Since Gabriel had to miss Nathan's 5th birthday, they decided to come to Mimi's house to make it special. 

Here's Alei after the return flight. 


Nathan is very outgoing and loves his aunts and uncles, so he hit the ground thrilled to be here! Glacier and Jewell were happy to entertain the little carrot feeder. 


Samuel had a pretty nasty cold, so didn't feel too great at the beginning of the trip; he perked up by the end. 


They were visiting over two weekends, so we had a combo Bella turns 10 and Nathan turns 5 birthday event, with some Bella friends and more of Nathan's family. They both had a great time. 




After dark we did a fire with smores and used some leftover wedding sparklers. 



The babies did pretty well sharing their mommas and their Mimi and Grandad. 



Elijah, Selah and Bella are constantly playing the piano; now they have some competition. 


 The lapacas came to expect the little carrot feeder to come every morning. 



We had some decent weather for walks -

Chris and Samuel 


Samuel was feeling better after a few days. 


In spite of sharing all the toys, Oliver managed to not catch Samuel's cold. 


 Here is our cheering squad at Tori's last basketball game of the year. She played JV for the high school team. I managed to call her Tori at school, but Alayna and Moriah just kept yelling, "Go, Bugs" which has been her long term nick-name. 



Samuel really liked his Granddad; poor little guy is very attached to his Daddy and misses him so Grandad was a good substitute. He learned how to open the office door and come on in and visit during the day while Granddad was working and often on the phone. 


On Sunday, I did the get up in the middle of the night to get to DC for the first flight out with Alayna and the boys. 


I had one full day in CO before returning on Tuesday again - I'm about 110% sure I could never hold down a "get up at 4 a.m. job"!!!

It was enough time to build a few legos and duplos, take Nathan to school, grocery shop with Alayna, make cookies and watch Mr. Rogers movie since Alayna and I were the only two people who wanted to see it!


See the cookie evidence?


So, all these years of breeding goats and me coming and going, I have never had baby goats born while I was gone until this time. Monday morning, Selah found Agnus in obvious labor. My friend, Katy, spent most of the day in the barn reading a book and waiting. She had to leave for an hour in the evening and in that hour, Selah assisted with the birth of FOUR babies; JD was there as moral support for Selah. She handled it like a champ. 


Since there are four, the kids and I are working on getting them to take a bottle to supplement Agnus' milk twice a day. It takes a few days of work! It's E year so meet Edward, Esther, Eleanor and Edith. In spite of saying that I wasn't keeping any baby goats this year, I'm pretty enamored with Edith's dark colors!


One more picture from the last two weeks - 

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Finally Tile

 Believe it or not, the tile was the toughest thing to pick out on the whole renovation project! Any pattern was too miuch for the counter top and anything glossy was out, as the counters are leathered and not glossy at all. Those two things took out about 90% of the tile on the market. I ended up buying individual slate tiles from Wayfair. It took three rounds to get them all to us not broken. Then we realized they weren't quite consistant in size. We had to make piles by size and try to keep the rows even; they aren't in a few places but overall it looks great. 

JD did the tiling; I just came in as the grout and tile scrubber. Works out well as I can say "we did the tile" now. 





Our last item is to rock the fireplace, but it will be about a month before we tackle that as we have hooked it up to use for the rest of the winter.

This is the only thing I love about winter -