2013 Recap

One of my favorite New Year's things to do is go back and read some of last year's posts.  That's one of the reasons I love having a blog.  I love be able to recall not just what happened, but the emotions, joys and challenges that went with big events or the mundane days.

But first of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!  We hope 2014 brings as many joys and fun family time as 2013 did!  We had a great year, filled with lots of highs, and of course a few lows.  Our New Years Eve celebration was a little dull, as I was recovering from the stomach bug (thankfully it was a 1 hour bug, the recovery took all day though).  So instead of the party with my family that we were planning on, we had a simple pj party and went to bed early :-).

The kids made hats to celebrate!  And they started singing "Happy New Years and you know it, clap your hands!"

They drank my family's NYE traditional drink, cherry 7up.  The kids called it "spicy soda".

We also played a family Wii game, and Candy Land for the first time with the big girls.  They loved it!

Overall, it was a fun night and the kids enjoyed our celebration.  All kids were asleep by 8 and I was out around 9.


And now for the recap:

January:  
I wrote this post about Life and how blessed we are that our children's birthparents chose life.  I still mean every single word and with the March for Life approaching in a few weeks, it's always on my mind.

February:
We celebrate Anna's 2nd birthday!

March:
March is always busy with lots of birthdays and Anna and Anthony's birthday party.  Jeremy's birthday is in March as well.  We also enjoyed the process of electing our new Pope and Anna still loves to talk about Pope Francis!

April:
We celebrated Anthony's 1st birthday!  I also wrote a few posts about Infertility as April is Infertility Awareness Month.  This one on Isolation in particular.

May:
Jeremy had a big job change in May.  It has been an amazing career switch and a true blessing for our family.  I'm grateful that he had this opportunity.  It has given us better financial security, more time with the family, less stress about job security, and a much more "family" atmosphere.   We also started PT for Anthony to get him up and moving! 

June:
I wrote a post about answered prayers and rereading it, I can only smile as God did it again.  He answered our adoption prayers with a big fat "yes" after asking us to wait a short time. 

July:
We celebrated our 5th Anniversary this month!  Apparently I had lots of time on my hands because I wrote a few posts that month about things going on.  I wrote about motherhood and hair, a topic I'll have to revisit soon, as my life with three girls and their hair is a little crazy!

August:
August brought some trials as my sister miscarried her second baby.  We know JP's looking out for all of us!  I didn't blog about it, but it definitely was a challenging time for our family.  We still miss him and know he would've been a great nephew and cousin to our kids.  I can't wait for the day I can see him in heaven! 

It was also the month of my niece's first birthday!  Cecelia's such a sweet little girl and I'm so blessed to be her aunt!  She's an awesome cousin to the kids and they just love her.  In fact, this morning Anna said, "I have 1 brobro, 2 sisters, and 1 Cici!"

I also posted about our adoption wait and how that was affecting me at the time.  If I'd have only known how soon our precious girls would be joining us!

September:
My birthday month!

October:
This was a huge month for our family.  In just a few short days, we found out about, met and brought home our two newest daughters!  They have adjusted so well in such a short amount of time and we feel so blessed to be their parents.  We can hardly believe that we're the parents of FOUR children!

November:
November flew by as we tried to adjust as a family of four.  We also had Mya and Agnes baptized.  We celebrated National Adoption month with our four adopted children and went to our agency's Adoption Potluck.  I don't think I blogged about it, maybe I was jut too shaken up, but that day there was an F4 tornado that went through a town about 40 minutes from us.  That same storm passed right across the interestate where we were driving.  Thankfully we were about 10 minutes ahead of it.  On our way home, we passed lots of destruction.  We were thankful that we were safe, but we said lots of prayers for the many families whose homes were completely destroyed by the tornado.

December:
We continued to adjust (it takes some time, that's for sure!).  We also enjoyed preparing for Christmas with the kids, as they're finally getting old enough to understand a lot more!  We celebrated Christmas as a family of 6 and we're still trying to get our house back in order after the influx of toys, clothes, and treats!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

We've had a very wonderful Christmas so far!  We can hardly believe that we have four kids this year!  We feel so incredibly blessed to be parents to these four beautiful children!  It's so fun to watch them experience it all.  Anna and Agnes could really understand the story of Christ's birth this year and we did a lot of fun Advent activities to prepare. 

I don't have any pictures to post at the moment, although we took some cute ones.  My cord happens to be upstairs and since all four kids are sleeping, I don't dare go up there!

So when I can get them loaded on our (new!!) computer hopefully soon, I'll post a Christmas post about all of our fun activities and travels.

For now, I'll just say that my youngest child has decided that she is no longer okay with wearing a diaper and simply holds it until we take her diaper off and put her on the potty.  I was hoping for another 6 months before I had to walk the potty training walk again but Mya had a different idea.  Without any kind of formal "training", Mya's already going on the potty 3-4 times a day (after telling me she need to go) and unlike Anna who wouldn't poop in the potty for a long time, Mya is a pro at pooping on the potty.  At least Anthony's no where near ready, he'll be the one in diapers till he goes to preschool.....

Christmas Program

We had our first school Christmas program as parents this past week.  Agnes was in her preschool program and man was she cute!  She's a total ham on stage, not a single bit of stage fright in that child!  We're not surprised!  During the first verse, her voice is the one you can hear the loudest!

Not only did Agnes have a blast and look super cute, but her siblings very much enjoyed the show.  Anna was so excited to sing along, since Agnes had been practicing, Anna knew all the words.  Anna sat so nicely and listened to all of the kids and she can't wait for her turn next year!

Anthony loves anything or place where there are lots of people.  We joke that he's our little politician.  He walks around saying hi to everyone.  And kissing babies.  He's especially fond of babies (one in particular, who happened to be sitting behind us that night).  Before everything got started, he walked up and down the aisle waving and saying "hi, how are you?" More than once, people said, "well, he's got my vote, I don't know what he's running for, but I'd vote for him!"   He also enjoyed the concert, but was upset that we wouldn't let him go on stage to dance...  So he improvised.

Mya was her usual, not so easy to handle self.  The silly little girl just gets into everything and cannot sit still at all.  She's a challenge in church or anywhere else where we have to be quiet and sit for any length of time (2 minutes would be too long...).  Hopefully that phase passes quickly...  She did enjoy seeing Agnes on stage and she most definitely enjoyed the cookie afterwards.

I've loved having Agnes in preschool.  I went to this same school as a kid and I couldn't wait to be a part of the school again.  It's been nice to get to know some of the parents and I've enjoyed getting out of the house those days with the kids.  It's also a nice break, having only 3 to run errands with those two hours and I get to do "school" with Anna on Thursday mornings then.  I'm always very ready to go pick her up by the time it's over though.  I miss her when she's not here and frankly, my house is too QUIET without her around.  The sweet girl talks pretty much nonstop...  She keeps things lively and a few hours a week is the perfect break for me to just have the three others.  She LOVES preschool and is thriving big time.  Her progress report last week was wonderful, she's apparently very liked by the other kids and she talks about quite a few of the kids all the time.  It's so nice to see her adjusting so well and thoroughly enjoying her family and school.

Ballet

 The girls are finishing up ballet for the semester.  They've had a blast doing it and they've learned so much.  We've decided to go ahead and sign them up for next semester (in the 3 year old class, instead of the 2s) using some Christmas money that they get.  I can't believe how much they've learned in this short time!  Even Mya's learned a lot and repeats stuff at home and she spends the whole class on my back in my carrier!  And I can't forget my little handsome son.  He loves dance class too.  He just loves chasing the girls and watching them dance.  He's a total ham and has every mom in there wrapped around his little adorable finger!

They've been dancing to the Nutcracker songs the last few weeks and they've learned quite a few of the steps to the dances.  In fact I hear the big girls in the basement practicing their Nutcracker moves.  So we decided to get tickets to our local Nutcracker.  I took the two big girls and since the tickets were cheap, I decided that even if they didn't sit still through all of it, we could at least stay for the first half.

Well, they surprised me and sat great!  They absolutely loved watching the ballet and they are still talking about it.  I was in tears at the beginning, just in awe that I was sitting at the Nutcracker with two of my daughters.  It was so wonderful and such a sweet time with them.  

Look at that smile, think she enjoyed it?

She's constantly doing ballet moves like she saw!

Not letting go of their programs.

Baptized!

The girls were baptized the Saturday after Thanksgiving!  We're so grateful that they allowed us to baptize them so soon!  Agnes was so very excited about it and she still can't stop talking about it.  We feel blessed to have four souls to look after and raise!

Waiting for Dcn to start!

Clean soul club for Mya!

And Agnes

Agnes and her Godparents, my brother-in-law (Jeremy's brother) Joey and my sister, Julie

My and her Godparents, my sister and brother-in-law (her husband), Sara and Kel

Our Catholic family!  I just love this picture!

With Jeremy's family.  I love that there's a new almost-sister-in-law in there!  Joey and Sela got engaged a few weekends ago!

My family, including my grandma who was able to make it up for the baptism!

The highlight of Agnes' day... the cake...

And I couldn't resist.  Jeremy was excited that him and Cecelia matched.  Cecelia is completely obsessed with her Uncle Jeremy and if he's around, she's with him.  Just look at that adorable niece of mine!

Advent

We've been really intentional about observing Advent with the kids this year.  It's really helped me too, in my preparation for Christmas.  The kids are very enthusiastic about our Advent routines and are very good little reminders of what we're supposed to be doing as we prepare for Christ's birth.  Here's a little bit of how we're observing Advent around here!

We have a few different Advent calendars that we're working our way through.  Each day we read from this book.  It has a nice reflection based off of Scripture and an activity for each day.  Some activities are question/answer type activities and some, like tomorrow are crafts.  The kids love the craft days, we've made all kinds of fun things.  We did this and a Jesse tree last year, but they overlapped a lot and I had a hard time keeping track of the Jesse tree ornaments with toddlers, so we're putting that one on hold for a little while.

My mom found us this cool advent calendar/countdown.  It has pockets with cards in it for each day.  The nice thing was you could arrange the cards to fit different days/schedules.  So I planned certain activities for times and days when I knew we were free. I like that the reflections and Bible readings are short but kid friendly and there is an activity but also lots of good suggestions on how to complete it.  So tonight, we did "see it" and we drove around for an hour looking at Christmas lights.  The kids had an absolute blast and we enjoyed their sweet reactions to the lights.  We have some pretty cool light displays in our neighborhood, one in particular that's set to music and its really cool.

And finally, we got this Advent calendar that I'd seen at a friends.  I've seen a lot of calendars, but I LOVE that this one counts down with the nativity.  We've been alternating kids each day and they are really in to it.  We've talked about each piece and the importance of that part of the nativity narrative.  When we read our Christmas books, the kids are pointing out people and animals that they've seen on their calendar.  They're making neat connections with it.  And of course, surrounding it are the Christmas cards we've received!

And of course no Advent is complete without Nativities!  One in particular that always looks a little like this or a little more scattered.  They love their Little People Nativity and it's nice to have an interactive one.  We have some very nice ones, one in particular that we got while in Italy that's hand carved wood from the Franciscan monks in Assisi that we just love pulling out each year.

Every night at dinner we light our Advent wreath and we have a little candle nativity in the center of the table.  I tried to make things simple for the kids and not overwhelm myself or them.  It sounds like a lot, but in reality, we spend a few minutes a day doing our Advent routine and the kids talk about what they read/learned the rest of the day!  It amazes me how much they actually listen, even when I don't think they're paying any attention.

We've also got our tree up and decorated and the kids love seeing our family ornaments.  We contemplated waiting to decorate it this year, but we've got lots of Christmas parties/gatherings at our house and frankly, we do a lot of travelling/visiting of people for Christmas and we don't spend much time at home.  It's far more relaxing and Adventy here with it up and ready.  I feel like it helps me wait with joyful anticipation as a constant reminder of the beauty and excitement that Christmas brings. 

Overall, we're having a very holy and blessed Advent.  It's so neat to have the girls old enough to really start to understand what it is that we're celebrating.  With Agnes in particular, we've been explaining a lot.  We don't know that she's ever really celebrated Christmas (and if she did, she doesn't remember it) so we're trying to make up for lost time.  We feel so grateful that these girls are home in time to enjoy the beauty and love of Christmas.  And we cannot wait for so much of our family to meet them in a few weeks!

Kid talk

The kids say some hilarious things lately.  I try to record them on FB or IG when they happen.  It's fun to read them later.  But I'm going to try to remember to compile some for the blog so they're easier to find!

This one made me smile and cry all at the same time.  No child should have to feel this way, but I'm glad she knows that we're her family.
Me: It's fun to play with your toys together!
Agnes: It's fun to have a family!





Heard this morning while she was playing in her play kitchen.
Anna: I'm tired of the whining! I'm making grilled cheese.

Agnes: You're welcome mommy !
Me: no, you say thank you mommy.
Agnes: you're welcome!
Me: no, say thank you!
Agnes: thank you
Me: you're welcome
Agnes: why are you saying you're welcome?
That conversation went nowhere fast!

Anthony was excitedly looking out the back window.
Me: Anthony, what's out there?
Anthony: BUSH!

Anna: (regularly) Give me a break!

Agnes: Mommy!  Good job, you peed on the potty!  you can have a sucker.


And updated:
Backstory: We took the kids to Jer's office this weekend for a Santa visit. (We don't "do" Santa at our house, so they really have no clue who he is)
This morning on our way to drop Jeremy off at work.
Anna: Where are we going?
Me: We're taking daddy to work!
Agnes: Are you going to work with the hoho guy today?