"Neck Doctor"

We headed out bright and early this morning to the ortho. doctor that I've seen for six years. We took along a copy of my MRI (and Julia...and Elijah.) The good news is that my MRI looked better than the x-rays had left him expecting. He is not recommending surgery at this point and just wants me to start using my brand new, home, neck-traction machine. Good times, indeed, but a lot better than surgery.

I do have degenerate disks and I also have some bone spurs, but nothing that is at a crisis level, at least for now. I'm excited to be able to focus on more exciting things, even if I'm doing it while I rest on an ice-pack.

Adoption Update

I'm still waiting to see what Ethiopia's MOWA (Ministry of Women's Affairs) decides about the future of the adoption program there. It appears that the current rate is five cases per day instead of the previous thirty. At that rate, it will take about two years to process the children that have already been matched with families and few places will be jumping on the idea of starting adoptions beyond that. After watching several families lose all the money that they put into Liberian adoptions and never bring their children home, I'm rather diismayed to see several similarites in the current Ethiopia situation.

Today I received an email from a large adoption agency that does Ethiopia and Uganda. The lady stated that she didn't think Uganda would be a good country for us due to the number of children that we currently have (if I had a dollar for every time I've been told that!!!) Apparently, they have one family that has seven children and are having a pretty rough time getting through court. I guess God is answering our prayer to make His will concerning adoption clear. This "door-slamming" happened to us several times before Liberia opened in 2006 as well, so we will plug on until we are sure of the direction He has for us.

In the meantime, there are kids around here to pay attention to. This is Elijah's friend, Summer. On occasion he calls her "my baby, Summer." I think he's a bit confused since we've often spoke of getting him a baby someday.

They were parked on the counter to help confine the stickiness caused by the cantaloupe dripping off their chins.

Bedtime

Our bedtime routine involves group prayer in the living room each night. This was the picture I took last night of three kids with three pets.

Julia sleeps on a loft bed. Every night she hauls Gus up the ladder to bed with her; the amazing thing is that he generally just lays down and stays with her. He really helps make bed-time less traumatic for Julia.

Bad picture (with the shadow), but such a good kitty.

Good night.

Venom For A Deal

I've always been a CVS deal shopper, but even more now that Alei works there. Their prices are way high, but they offer Extra Bucks deals that are quite fabulous each week. Often the item is free once you get your extra bucks, which was the deal last week for this - It's a homeopathic pain reducer that lists necks and backs on the box. The tiny spray bottle is normally $18.99, but was free after EB, so I bought one. It tastes pretty bad, but Alei has decided to dedicate herself to making sure that I use it four times a day as per instructions. So, after days of using it, I finally took a moment to read the ingredient list and the primary ingredient is COBRA VENOM. JD then pointed out that it is called COBROxin; wow, I didn't even make that connection! In case you're wondering, I'm still using it; I didn't die the first several days, so now we'll just see if it works at all.

Saturday High-lights

I spent the entire morning corn-rowing Julia's hair. Later in the day, I observed embedded dirt and asked her what happened. She replied, "Tori threw dirt in my hair." Oh well, it's staying a minimum of two weeks either way!

JD started another one of our building projects. We are installing three solar panels on the roof that should provide all the hot water our home needs. In case you are wondering, these enormous solar panels have taken up a good chunk of unfinished basement floor room since we moved in. Right now, we are using an instant demand hot water heater, so we should see a nice reduction in our monthly electricity bill as soon as they are up and running.

And, here's my new excitement (other than my fruit trees.) This is our first roto-tiller, kind of a necessity when you are trying to become a "real" gardener. I think it reveals something about me that my greatest material wish of lately is a tiller; I'm equally excited that my husband will till my every desired planting spot, since I'm subjected to the neck I have at the moment.

I did not lay grass-seed today, since they are calling for snow tonight and tomorrow (how annoying towards the end of March in Virginia.) We also did not plant our fruit trees since we are working on securing a truck-load of horse manure to plant them with. I guess we'll be out there as soon as the snow thaws.

MRI and Gardening

This morning was my MRI; we turned into more fun than that and went to Tractor Supply for grass seed and a new spreader and Lowe's for fruit trees. We got four apple trees, two Granny Smith and two Gala, two peach trees and two pecan trees. I have also designated space for two pear trees, but Lowe's was out of them. Rumor is that Wal-Mart has them, so we'll buy them there if we still have any energy after planting these. It isn't really that tough with the back-hoe compared to the lady we met in Lowe's who's husband was hand digging them; they are pretty big root balls!

Tomorrow is supposed to be clear, so it is possible that I'll be riding around and around in circles spreading grass seed for the 5th or 6th year in a row. In the beginning, we spread with a spreader pulled by the 4-wheeler. Last year, I did it with the push spreader since the 4-wheeler was broken. This year, we are pulling a new spreader with the riding mower. Every year I hope that this will be our banner grass growing year! I also have to clip all the guinea's wings and attempt to keep them in the chicken fence for a while since they will just eat all the fresh grass-seed before it has a moment to grow. They actually recently stuffed themselves in the left-over grass seed bag in the barn and ate 25 pounds of grass seed!

Here's proof that I actually was in D.C. with JD and the kids last weekend -

It's supposed to dip into the 20's tonight - not exactly the spring weather that we were blessed with in D.C. last week.

Attachment Insight

I think I may need to go back to school and get a psychology degree just to get through the next several years of parenting. Unfortunately, I'm dealing with too many "specialties" to have time to become an expert in all of them! Julia is on a five week waiting list for the only therapist any where near where we live that actually files insurance. Here's the big doozy that no one ever tells you when you are adopting internationally - it seems that 95% of therapists for children suffering from attachment challenges, etc, will only bill Medicaid. It seems that they all have more work than they can handle just treating previous foster children and since the state funds those children with Medicaid, they just don't even have an avenue to bill private insurances. The good news is that I found this one psychologist that works with young children that will bill our insurance and we have hope in having a few of our many questions answered.

Guess Who Went?

In the end, we took two little people on our weekend away to D.C. We decided a few weeks ago that I would probably bring Elijah since JD would have already been gone for five days, and as he said, "Dad misses me; Dad wants to see me!" By about Wednesday, it was decided for sure that he was coming since he was constantly asking for his Daddy to come home. Then, there was all the Julia drama and we decided that it would be too traumatic to leave her behind as well. I'm really glad we took them; it was still a very nice and peaceful weekend away. The nice thing is that the kids that stayed home would have prefered to stay home with Aunt Deb than be drug from monument to monument. This morning Julia kind of realized that she missed the Aunt Deb time that she could have had and told me that next time, she wants to stay home with Aunt Deb. We'll see, Julia, we'll see!

After paying $11 an hour to park on Friday evening, we decided to take public transportation. On Saturday morning, we took the hotel shuttle to the metro, the metro to the spot that it shut down for repair, a bus around the construction area, another metro into D.C., switched line colors and then headed to the zoo. All together, the travel still took almost two full hours! There is really just no quick way to get around D.C. (or New York city!) Of course, we had to reverse all that to get back in the evening.

Julia and Elijah were train riding pros by the end of the first day! There were several times that we boarded packed trains and didn't have seats. There was one especially crowded ride that I had to hold a folded stroller with one hand and the pole with the other, Julia held the pole herself and little Elijah just held on to my leg for dear life. If you are wondering, there were always able bodied men sitting in seats watching the kids and not once did one ever offer their seat to me or the kids. I'm afraid chivalry in the District of Colombia is a thing of the distant path. (There was one man on the first bus that did offer me his seat; I had no idea at that point how rare that would be.)

Julia and Elijah got along so well and really enjoyed each others company. I don't think the "normal" family realizes how easy it is to just juggle two kids. We had several people comment how bad they felt for us with the kids and the strollers up and down the escalators and on and off the trains, (we had to unload and fold them each time.) We usually didn't tell them that this was our idea of a peaceful break!

Look at Julia holding Elijah's hand while we waited for the train.

While we saw tons of stuff, the high-light for the kids was the D.C. Zoo. It was perfect weather and while we had been there a year ago, they didn't remember much. When we told Elijah that we were going to the zoo, he jumped up and down and yelled, "that's a good idea!"

Here's Elijah leaving the zoo; he held in there until we saw the last animal - the kamodo dragon. While Elijah was completely enamoured with it, Julia broke the bad news to him that it didn't have wings, so she didn't think it could fly. He didn't care, he's still asking to go back and see the "modo" dragon.

As I'm finishing typing this, Elijah is standing by asking to please do back to the zoo now. I realize how my greatest joy comes from watching them do things more than doing things myself.

Trust

Sometimes, often-times lately, I feel so beat down by different circumstances in life. It gets exhausting at times to just try to get through that day. Even more overwhelming is the realization at times that no matter what I do, different situations with different children, do not seem to improve.

Alei just finished a book, entitled Trust by Lydia Brownback, from her College Plus advisor. I just started reading it and this was in the introduction -

"Some of us don't realize that we are trying to pull the wrong yoke. We reach toward dreams and goals designed to further God's kingdom and to bring blessing, and our prayer requests are for good things. But how do we react when things don't go according to plan? If, when our plans don't work out or our prayers aren't answered in the way or time we think best, we get frustrated and impatient and worried and fearful, that's a tip-off that something is off-kilter. All wrong views about God result in anxieties and fears about life.The health of our vertical relationship - our relationship with God - will always determine the health of our horizontal relationships - those we have with people, with life, and with ourselves. So the first thing to get straight is our view of God.

Since God overarches everything, we must view our lives and everything that happens to us through that lens. But we often don't. Instead we allow our circumstances to shape our view of God...Sometimes when we cry out in our pain, asking God to make himself known, we can't find him. He seems faraway and distant, and we conclude that he just isn't as good and kind and powerful as we had thought. Our weak faith is shaken, and we wind up distancing ourselves from God, because our own means of comfort and the people who love us seem safer."

We thought we'd been relying on God, but the truth is, we'd actually been relying on our idea of God and on what we were hoping God would do for us to make our lives happier. What we don't see is that disappointments and other difficulties that seem to threaten our faith are really blessings in disguise. They are designed by God to draw us closer to him, to enable us to see him as he really is, and to dispel our misconceptions about him and our wrong understanding of what it means to be a Christian."

I have so much to learn...

My Back

It's really not accurate when I refer to my back issues, because in reality it is all my neck. The pain shoots down my back, but is doesn't appear to actually be a back issue. Long before my blog writing days, I've had neck issues. Looking back, I realize that I herniated the disk way back around 2004; although I didn't pursue medical care for it. I don't know why I didn't; I was in horrible, horrible pain for months and could barely function. That is when I started going to the chiropractor regularly. My documented disk herniation was in 2006, when we were working on Tori's adoption; it was so severe that I didn't do anything for a full month.

I have lived in constant fear of another episode like 2004 or 2006. Since I've had three "flare ups" in the last year, I went back to the ortho. doctor that I've seen since 2006. He did new x-rays to compare the disk to my x-rays from five years ago, and sure enough, the disk is not holding up. He basically said there wasn't anything that he could do other than surgically fuse that spot. Even more alarming to me than that, is that I have three other disks in my neck that are at risk of herniation. I'm going for a new MRI next week, so he can predict how close they are to rupturing.

Needless to say, I've found this whole chain of events pretty depressing. At this point, I have booked a consultation at a laser surgery center in early April. I don't know if my neck is eligible for laser surgery, but it is a far less invasive procedure and doesn't require near as long to be back on my feet.

Although there is never good timing for all of this, it's really leaving some things hanging out there - of course, the new adoption plans, enrolling my kids and/or teaching at Classical Conversations, even knowing how much child care help I can offer to the mom that spent last weekend at our house. So much is balancing on my neck at the moment, but I'm assuming God knew that when he presented all these other "opportunities."

Since you don't want to see pictures of my neck, I'll show the three hour play-dough fest we had yesterday around the kitchen table. I sure don't mind the mess when it entertains so many kids for so long!


Here are the play-dough food creations; the chocolate do-nut looked good enough to eat.