January 2014 life update

I have started more detailed posts about how the kids are doing but I don't seem to be getting that done in a timely manner, and some things have been extra stressful so...this is what I can do!  Things have been tough and I find that I don't make facebook posts or blog post when things are extra stressful.  I can't seem to find perspective or flip the "glass is half empty" to the "glass is half full."  In fact I see the glass as pretty much empty.  Rather than complain too much when I have absolutely no business complaining I choose to just keep my mouth shut (or in this case, my fingers still;)  Now that I am back to gaining a bit of perspective again I will write this update!

Beautiful: I cannot believe she will be 17 next month!  We are moving forward with college planning and options.  A fun stage of life and she is our guinea pig lol!  We are also trying to figure out a car for her. Finally, she broke her finger in a basketball game last Saturday.  She played 2 games with the broken finger. It is now in a splint and we will see when she can return to play.

Buddy:  He prefers video games to most other activities:)  Most of his time is spent sleeping, eating, doing school, and playing xbox.  That pretty much sums up his life lol!  He will probably be 6 foot by the time he turns 14.  He is growing fast.  When I look at video of him from just 18 months ago I can't believe how different his voice sounded and how short he used to be:)

Superman:  He continues to be such a friendly young man who love to encourage people.  He is so tender with his younger brother and prays fervently for those he cares about.  He does an amazing job of memorizing scripture and understands spiritual things unusually well for an 8 year old.  He really struggles with auditory information and math.  That makes things tough but we keep trying to keep perspective with what really matters.  We are very happy to be homeschooling and are solidly committed to continuing.  However, we are also very pleased with our local school district and how they help as he spends time there every week.  He has a best buddy and they hang out a lot at his house.  It allows Superman to have time away from his siblings and his friend and that family are great for him.

Grace:  I do not mean to sound like I am complaining so I hope that I don't come across that way.  I want to communicate the realities of life, and I very much realize that it could be so incredibly much more difficult.  The amount of time we spend constantly "on" dealing with "stuff" is exhausting.  I think what is so wearying is that there is no ability to trust her.  We must double check everything and watch constantly.  She has to have a room by herself.  Her room has had most things removed due to her ruining them or she can't keep them off of the floor.  The things we find in there that should not be there is incredible to me.  She can't even have a bed frame as she keeps hurting herself on it.  She has mattresses on a trundle bed so we can wheel it away from the wall once a week and clean behind/under it.  When we took the bed frame out I took a picture of what we found behind her bed as I was so shocked and wanted to remember it and tell her kids about it one day lol!  The constant tattling, chattering, and verbal noise is so typical of ADHD due to the inability to filter/subvocalize but it is exhausting!  Her back talk and arguing and hyperactive energy is constant.  We try to stay on top of it but...it is, again, exhausting!  She hurts herself (and others) almost every day with her inability to pay attention to her surroundings.  Her behavior has been getting worse lately with only about 1 day a week that has been bearable without some big upheaval.  In desperation we tried a new testing for neurotransmitters.  I learned about the testing and the biochemistry a couple of years ago.  I didn't know how to go about getting the testing done or if it would work if we did go through the process so did not move forward with it at that time.  We tested her last week and when I got the results I was shocked.  I cried.  I was speechless.  Every single area that we tested her in was significantly outside of normal levels.  We started a change in meds and we hope that it makes a difference.  She, too, receives great help from the local school and we are very happy that she is making steady progress.

Faith:  Our princess continues to grow up.  She continues to deserve the name Princess too!  We have had our share of struggles with her lately as well.  She is pretty good about flying under the radar while we are distracted with Grace.  It seems that she is entering that "tween" stage.  Grace has not emotionally/socially kept up with Faith so I think Faith flounders a bit without having a "friend."

JJ:  He is eating better.  He is learning to count and his colors.  He is growing up!  He is sleeping better.  Most nights I can have him rocked to sleep by 10ish and he will sleep until between 3 and 5 before he crawls into bed with us to snuggle.  We are doing a lot of work on his attitude (as with all of the kids) and he seems to be getting it.  He must be getting in some molars lately as he has been a bit more grumpy and chewing a lot more.  He has done so well with only getting the pacifier at bedtime (he doesn't take naps) but in the last couple of days has wanted to rock and chew on it a lot more.  It is actually kind of nice to have a kid that I can "fix" their problem with just some snuggling, rocking, and a pacifier.  It is simple compared to the issues of the other 5...

And finally...we check Superman and Faith's biological mother's facebook periodically (not too often as it makes me nauseated to read it).  It appears that she has had another child...sigh...  That is 6 kids in 8 years.  Rose is only 13 months old!  It has made me consider the cycle of all of this.  I am tempted to fall into despair and disgust.  I am terrified for the child's safety.  So many emotions that I won't go into here as I haven't processed them enough yet.  However, I keep hearing God asking me if I DO trust Him.  I just got through all of the emotional process of trusting God with Rose, and now there is another one.  How many more siblings are there from the dads much less how many more kids their mother will have?  It is too overwhelming for me to think about too much.  I need to focus on what I have control over (yet, as you can see from what I typed above I feel that I have no control over the kids in my own house either - and really I have no control lol!) and need to just keep pressing on with what God has given me and trust Him with the outcomes of all of it.  I grieve over the depth of depravity in this world.  I am so sad for the future of this child...and how every many more she has.  I will continue to try to keep my focus vertical, as when we keep our focus on the cross the horizontal is easier to bear:)

As a family we are attempting to have everyone read through the Bible in one year.  I help Grace but otherwise we are expecting that the kids will do the reading themselves and get in the habit of them reading it rather than us reading it to them.  We are hoping they will take more ownership that way.  It is a good way for my husband and I to stay accountable to our reading as well!

If you have been to Branson, MO I am sure you have heard about or taken in the Sight and Sound Theatre.  We saw Joseph there last year.  We bought all of the productions and have been enjoying watching them.  They have been good platforms for discussions with the kids and it really has helped bring the stories more alive for the kids and has given me much to consider as well as they "flesh out" the story line adding content that is not in scripture but is interesting to ponder.

So many things to juggle on top of working full time hours.  Trying to keep my eyes on Him and His priorities:)

A Weekend of Basketball - 2 days in our life:)

Friday we drove 1 1/2 hours to watch Beautiful play basketball.  They won their game!  It was a game that last year we had taken Rose to, so it brought up some memories for me but thankfully they were "factual" and not too emotional :)  After that we headed another 1 1/2 hours to the next city where she would be playing basketball.

Potty training JJ as been more fruitful.  He stayed dry the ENTIRE weekend!  However, during our drive from location 1 to location 2 he decided that he needed to go potty.  I told him that we did not have any options and he would have to go in his pull up.  That led the big kids to tell me what a terrible parent that I was for sending him mixed signals...  So, I told him that he would have to "hold it."  He said, "OK Mama," handed me his ipad, and immediately grabbed his crotch to..."hold it!!"  It was hilarious and I was at a loss as to how to fix the problem.  We all laughed a long time before I found an ice cream bucket for him to relieve himself (we keep buckets in the van as garbage cans).  Of course JJ thought it was novel and wonderful to use the bucket so for the remaining 20 minutes to the hotel he tried to convince me that he had to use it again ;)

 We checked into a hotel at almost 11 p.m.  We got 2 rooms and let Beautiful, Buddy, and Superman be in a room by themselves.  We wanted Beautiful to be able to get enough sleep before her day of basketball on Saturday and I am glad we made that choice.  My husband and I had the 3 youngest and after an hour finally physically separated the girls as far as we could and they fell asleep after midnight.  We got adequate sleep. I am used to 6 hours of broken sleep by now so I guess it was pretty typical.  Buddy, who by far is our latest sleeper, knocked on our door at 7:30 saying he was heading down to breakfast.  We are trying to figure out how to replicate that at home lol!

The Holiday Inn Express we stayed at had very comfortable beds, was quiet, and the breakfast was great.  It is always nice to be pleasantly surprised when paying a lot of money to stay somewhere!  Swimming was less successful...although we were very thankful that Superman lived up to his name and saved his sister when she got too far over her head and panicked.  JJ was terrified of the pool.  As soon as we walked into the pool room he stopped in fear and demanded that I carry him.  He clung to my husband or I the entire time.  He is so fearful of all novel experiences.

We did a "quick" trip to Sam's Club to get butter...and ended up filling the cart.  We try to do our big shopping trips every 8 weeks or so, so I guess we are done for awhile!  We got to the location where Beautiful was playing basketball and set up in a relatively uncrowded area.  We need a space of about 10 feet long by 4 bleachers deep to manage all of our family and stuff.  I had made Fri and Sat bags of snacks for each of the kids with their names on it so they couldn't eat anyone else's food and they could not complain "but he got a ____ and I didn't!!"  They hardly ate any Fri night (and refused to finished the concession food I finally bought them when they insisted they were starving!)  Saturday was another story.  I had brought homemade "lunchables."  They were quite incredulous that I thought that crackers, cheese, and meat was supposed to be lunch.  I had to smile that they didn't know what a Lunchable was;)  They ate the rest of their snack bags within an hour and pretty much the remaining 4 hours was a broken record of "I'm tired, I'm bored, I want to go play, I'm hungry, I don't want to just sit here, etc."  If we could find a place for Miss Grace to go during every basketball game (or even some of them) we would take the opportunity...

Buddy was thrilled that we happened to sit right next to a wifi hotspot so he could check nfl scores and there was a power strip so he could keep his ipad plugged in lol! He was thankful for those small things as much as he wished that he could have been left home:)

The basketball games were quite competitive.  Friday night the referees hardly called any fouls, etc.  The referees on Saturday called fouls when a player was thinking of causing a foul.  Beautiful was laid out on the floor a lot and is full of bruises and scratches from both of her games.  She has never been that banged up before after a game.  We need to remember antibiotic ointment and band aids for future games...  A girl also got in her face and called her names that I cannot type here.  Beautiful tends to be quite competitive on the court anyway...so that really got her riled up...

We ended our evening at Chic-fil-A which was quite the treat for our family (first time!)  I saw another family with an adopted toddler so introduced myself and we swapped adoption stories.  Love doing that:)  JJ had fallen asleep within the first mile of leaving the gym and slept in my arms all through supper and almost 2 hours into the drive home.  Thankfully he fell asleep again within an hour of us getting home so I got to sleep about the same time as normal:)

The 3 hour drive home went OK as long as the kids had movies playing on the ipads...not so much afterwards.  Two days being out of schedule for Miss Grace was not a good experience.  We have just completed some new testing on her this week and are anxious to get the results and see if some other things may help her.  I am very hopeful about this testing.  I learned about it at the Trust Based Relational Intervention training I attended at TCU 2 years ago.  I will post about it when we get some results both from the testing and its recommendations effectiveness.

Today...recovery and play off NFL games:)  While we have basketball games almost every Friday and Saturday until the middle of March we are thankful that no more will involve hotels until March.  There is no place like home!