belated posts

Edited to add where you can get these cool things for yourself!

Day 3 at my mom's house. Hopefully we will be home tonight or tomorrow:) Here are the cool presents I received for Christmas....you can tell who was on our minds!

The Product Red Nano:)

Compassion's Global Food Crisis Tee It says "Please" in Amharic!



This shirt my friends found for me at cafepress.com


This necklace helps support adopting families! find it here.

I was very excited to get these wonderful things to remind me of our little girl.



Now for some of my favorite pictures of 2008.....only 4 days late:)

Jackson's first haircut


In March Jackson turned 1


Then we went to Orlando for my friend's wedding. We went to Sea World and had breakfast with Elmo.





First trip to the zoo

Our family picture taken in May

Just some of the chaos of all the wonderful donations to our Adoption Garage Sale in June.

Jackson and Daddy at the lake in Chicago for July 4th

Silly Boy

Jackson's first day at Mother's Day Out

At the Plano Balloon Festival in September

Our Dossier mailed out October 1st!


Jackson chowing down on some Ethiopian food...we have a to-go ethiopian restaurant by our house.

At the State Fair in October


Hosting our 3 sweet boys from the Ugandan Orphan Choir

at the pumpkin patch

somewhere between october and christmas I obviously forgot we had a camera....I'll do better this year!

Hope you enjoyed....Thank you for following us on our journey to add our little girl to our family! We can't wait to see what 2009 brings! (Other than termites and broken pipes!)

Homeless!

So this is what my living room looks like today..... A few days before Christmas we noticed the carpet was wet and the wall was also changing colors a little bit. So today our friend came over to look at it and our whole wall is drenched with some huge pipe leaking behind it! There is also a huge hole in my closet wall upstairs and in Jackson's newly remodeled bathroom:) To make things even better the moisture has made our house a home for TERMITES!!! Lots and Lots of nasty little bugs are eating at my house as we speak. Not only does the dry wall have to be removed but studs and all kids of craziness. So we are now living with my mom for who knows how long:) I really didn't want to start the new year out with moving back into my parent's house.....yeah. And this is not really helping my pocketbook either. Thanks for listening to me vent..... I guess I am thankful that I have a house for termites to eat!

Happy New Year!

Well, we had our annual (well 2 years running now) New Year's Eve party last night. We have a little party with our friends in our small group and their families. It was fun watching the kids run around like crazy. We make cheese and chocolate fondues and everyone brings different foods to dip into them and we all eat entirely too much. Then it was time for the kids to go up to bed and for the adults to play games. The guys had a wii mario kart tournament and it was really fun to watch. Here are some pictures of the night, unfortunately I brought the camera out after the littles were in bed.

I forgot to mention it is a super fancy party......Oh wait no, that was the A-List party Ann and Bill went to before coming to ours:)

Amanda chatting:)

We get a little wild and Matt passed out......actually he is just a tired father of two toddlers:)

Ann Marie and Steve

Jeff and Beth

Brad and Ashley (who was having some late night morning sickness!)

yummy goodness:)

So in all it was a great night! Thanks everyone for coming over and spending the New Year with us! And Happy Birthday Brad:) Maybe tomorrow I will post my favorite pictures of 2008.....

Christmas Update

Well, I decided to take a break from blogland over Christmas because my wonderful hubby took a lot of time off from work so we had a lot of family time. It was the best way to spend the Christmas season. Crud...now I can hear Jackson waking up from his nap so I will just leave you with some pictures as I try to corral him:) I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and I can not wait for AGCI to open up next week!

decorating the tree with daddy
nothing like playing in a box

decorating the gingerbread house

No mommy, I am not eating ALL of the M&Ms

you can tell his mouth is full of candy....

it was supposed to be a gingerbread church with stained glass.......

our gingerbread family minus one.....



That's Rex from Toy Story....he was carjacked shortly after this photo


He didn't have on his cute Christmas jammies because he was sick and well we will just say they were dirty:)

I got some awesome gifts this year and will post about them next time:)

Amy Bottomly inspires me again:)

Amy and her husband Josh have written a book! I just went to the website and read the introduction and I can not wait until it comes out! This is really going to be great......but I have come to the conclusion that everything Mrs. Bottomly does is great:) Check it out.

Traditions

Well, the tree is up, the decorations are all out, most of my shopping is done, and the lights are on the house (but at this moment not working due to some blown fuse? ask my husband). I absolutely love this time of year because we try and spend all of our time enjoying each other and really trying to remember why we celebrate this holiday. I am a huge fan of traditions and we have started many that go on throughout the year but Christmas traditions are my favorite.

Since this is only Jackson's second Christmas we don't have many traditions yet or I guess the things we did last year will become traditions when we do them again this year:) My favorite is Advent. We light the candles and read the passages out of the bible after dinner and talk about what they mean. Then we sing some Christmas carols (Jackson absolutely loves to sing and we are always singing pretty much 24/7). This year we got Jackson the little people nativity set and we have been acting out the Christmas story during advent as well. Last night though, I found one of the wise men in Mary's spot in the manger so we still have some work to do:) Some other things we plan on doing again this year is making our own gingerbread house from scratch, making hot chocolate and going out in the car to look at Christmas lights, going to see Santa, and watching lots of Christmas movies together.

I would love to add some more fun to our holiday and really be able to teach our kids that Christmas is not all about presents. So, help me out, What are some of your families traditions? What do you do to show your children the reason for the season?


These pictures are all from last year but I promise to put up current ones before Christmas:)

We tried to make a replica of our house. We even made our
gingerbread family:) Jackson's is crawling with a diaper on.

just a quick update

Ok I have been gone for like a week, well not really gone just not writing:) I have a post in mind but haven't gotten the time to write about it yet! So anyways, the point really is that we are UNOFFICIALLY 15!!! Yep that's right we made a huge jump down yesterday! I am so excited I can barely breathe! We are supposed to get our official numbers today but they won't be correct since they had like 6 referrals yesterday and you don't officially go down until all the families get their paperwork turned back in so that is kinda a bummer, but if my subtracting and stalking is correct we are sitting pretty at 15!

Kristi J, my darling, I can not believe you are a single digit!!! Are you like 6 or 7 now?? AHHH!