Monday, May 30, 2011

Winner, winner, chicken dinner

I felt like a winner because this weekend Chad and I were going to be on vacation! We were going to take Charlie to his first trip to Disney and I was so excited! I bought him a DVD I used to watch as a kid about Disney World and we watched it over and over again. Luckily, we are careful about what we tell Charlie what we are doing because if you tell him "we are going here" any more than 15 minutes before the event actually happens, he will drive you literally insane and think that you have to go right that minute.....Soooo.....We would just vaguely ask him "Would you like to ride on the boat?" "What would you say to Mickey if you met him?" Because a few weeks ago, I started to feel rough. Tired. Sick.
Turns out I have mono. Bad. Not to complain, but yes, I am going to for a minute. Bear with me. I have had a fever for 14 days. That is not natural. I have been throwing up for 7. Once again, that tests what should be allowed for one human to endure. Mono, for lack of a better adjective, sucks. So, our Disney Parade has been rained upon. Que pity party.
Enough of that, I know that nobody likes a whiner. I did, however, win a great prize from Meagan's giveaway! Yippeee Tattered & Inked for this great prize, I originally thought I would get this in red for Charlie's room with "C"s all over it, but the more I looked at his wall space, the more I realized there IS NO WALL SPACE! So, I decided that I wanted to redo the dining room instead.

Our house isn't very beige, but our dining room is one exception. To be honest with you, B.C. (Before Charlie) we didn't eat in our dining room. We ate in restaurants : ) or on our couch in front of the T.V. But now, I've been staring at 4 beige walls and it is making me nauseous. (Oh wait, thats the mono)

So currently, it has one tiny wooden sign that pretty much found it's way onto a rouge nail and a sad, sad, wreath I made during my "Martha" phase. Ugly. Boring. Stay tuned for the makeover as soon as I get my mojo back.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

My new favorite!

I know I keep telling you Fairly Fabulous' latest contest is my favorite giveaway to date, but I really think this is my favorite! Make sure you check out FF party giveaways and enter to win! I mean, it doesn't hurt to try right? It's free and if you win something like my new favorite thing from Sugar and Dots you could always give it away as a gift.
To someone born on October 23rd.
Named Sarah.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Breaking News!

From Tesney's Blog!
GOD OF MIRACLES


WE ARE NOW THE PROUD PARENTS OF GREGORY KIRILL DAVIS. HE IS OURS. THE SUPREME COURT OVERTURNED THE JUDGE'S RULING. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, HIS NAME IS GREGORY KIRILL DAVIS AND WE WILL GO PICK HIM UP IN JUST A FEW SHORT DAYS AS SOON AS WE HAVE THE OFFICIAL COURT DECREE IN HAND. I WILL POST THE DETAILS WHEN I KNOW THEM. RIGHT NOW WE ARE IN A FLURRY OF TEARS AND EXCITEMENT AND WE WON'T KNOW EXACTLY HOW OUR NEXT FEW DAYS WILL GO UNTIL TOMORROW WHEN WE MEET AGAIN WITH OUR FACILITATOR.
THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PRAYERS AND SUPPORT. MAY YOU SEE THAT GOD IS THE GOD OF MIRACLES AND THAT HE IS FAITHFUL TO COMPLETE THE WORK HE HAS STARTED IN YOU.

PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW. PRAISE HIM ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW. PRAISE HIM ABOVE YE HEAVENLY HOSTS. PRAISE FATHER, SON, AND HOLY GHOST!

Posted by Tesney at 7:08 AM

Monday, May 23, 2011

Reminder!

Please pray for the Davis family early tomorrow morning. If you are up at 5:00am EST that's when their supreme court case will go before the judge. It is expected to last for several hours, so chances are, you'll be awake to pray for them in "real time". That is so important right now. I pray that so many people are praying that God will, obviously grant them a positive outcome, but not only that it will calm their fears and make that Judge feel like the weight of the world will crash down on him if he does ANYTHING but send that precious baby home with his mama and papa.  They learned today that when the judge overturns the verdict of the lower court Kirill can go home in 5 days! Awesome! No waiting period (as if the last 4 months hasn't been the worstwaiting period of their lives) and no second trip (or make that fourth trip....) Pray, pray, pray! 

Even if you are not a "religious" person, and I know that not everyone who reads this blog is......send up some love for the Davis family. Pray to their God. Because they are such strong wonderful people and every child deserves a home...

Are you in it to win it?

Remember to head over to Fairly Fabulous and enter for some awesome free stuff! (the button is over there on the side.....) Tonight's new giveaway is from Tattered & Inked and it is by far my favorite giveaway to date. I am running a risk by telling you about it on my blog to get an extra prize entry for myself, but it is a risk I am willing to take. That and this is a testiment to my selfless character. :) I'm humble too.
Anyway, here is the giveway.....It'll be similar to the "H" art, except, you pick the letter and the color. Cute! I want one in red for Charlie's room really a lot! If I don't win, I think this one may be in my future.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Party (like it's Fairly Fabulous!)

Check out my friend Meagan's blog/etsy shop/ and her general lovely gorgeous things (kids, clothes, crafts, etc.)
In honor of her 31st birthday, she is partying like it's 1999 and giving away some more than fairly fabulous freebies! It's easy....
Click on the new Fairly Fabulous Button on my blog to visit her blog------------------>
From there check out the daily giveaways from other fabulous blog chicks
Enter up to four times by leaving up to four comments (one for following fairly fabulous, one for following the featured artists blog, one for liking them on facebook and one for following them on Twitter)
Cross your fingers and toes and pray that you win a fabulous prize! If you don't win- buy one!

Friday, May 20, 2011

Please remember the Davis Family....

They are leaving tomorrow for Moscow for their Supreme Court Hearing. Here is the post from their blog, I BEG you to please keep them lifted up in prayer as they battle to bring their son, Kirill home.

Going with God


We leave in less than 24 hours. God is with us. We are going with him. We are taking peace, hope, and the understanding that HE is writing this story. We covet your prayers. We humbly ask for you to especially pray on May 24th beginning at 6:10 a.m. CST. This is the exact time we will be standing before the supreme court judge. Pray for him. Pray for our lawyer. Pray for Kirill. But above all else, pray that Christ is seen by everyone who hears Kirill's story. THANK YOU ALL! I will update here as soon as we know the supreme court ruling.

Posted by Tesney at 10:30 AM

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Picking flowers for Mama

LOVE this boy!!!

This is serious business!

For Mama

Beautiful boy....

Missed a few...

Abandoning Hope. Pskov: The Russian Region "Left to Die"

I was checking my email last night and this article was the headline. Strange you never hear anything about Charlie's region.....And then this. I celebrate that God has given Charlie has been given a future in America, but it makes me sad for all the people and orphans still waiting....

Abandon All Hope: The Russian Region That's Been Left to Die
By SIMON SHUSTER / LOPOTOVA Simon Shuster / Lopotova – Mon May 9, 7:45 pm ET

Having tucked into his first bottle of vodka earlier than usual, Anatoly Zhbanov goes on an afternoon stroll to buy another one along the dirt road through Lopotova, a dying village on Russia's western edge, in the region of Pskov. It is mid-April, and clumps of snow are still melting at the roadside where Zhbanov, a local artist, stops to peer inside a lopsided cabin, the home of a local bootlegger. In the window stands a plastic jug filled with murky liquid, its neck sealed with a rubber glove that seems to be waving hello. "That's how you know it's ready," Zhbanov says. "The gas released from fermentation makes the glove inflate. We call that the Hitler Salute."
In the past few years, the region of Pskov has become famous in Russia for two interconnected blights: moonshine and depopulation. In 2006, a brew tainted with chemicals killed at least 15 people and poisoned hundreds, marking the first time a Russian region had to declare a state of emergency because of vodka. Last month, when the federal government released the census data collected in 2010, Pskov earned another claim to fame. It is dying out faster than any other region in Russia's heartland.

Of course the rest of the country isn't doing so well either. The population has dropped by 2.2 million people, or 1.6%, since the last census was taken in 2002. These were supposed to have been the glory years under Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000, first as president and now prime minister. And in that time, a handful of cities have indeed prospered, with Moscow becoming home to more billionaires than any other city in the world. But more than 6,000 villages have meanwhile turned into ghost towns, or as the census calls them: "population points without population." About 2,000 of those are in Pskov.

In just eight years, the region has lost 11.5% of its population, a rate of decline more often seen in times of war and famine. This might have been expected in Russia's permanently frozen north, like the region of Magadan, once home to the Gulag prison camps, where the population dropped 14.1% in that time. But Pskov lies on the border with the European Union, and the city of St. Petersburg, Putin's birthplace, is only 100 miles away.

In Soviet times, huge collective farms and machine works were based in Pskov. Village life thrived, and the main city was still famed for nobler things, like fending off the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. But traveling the region's backroads now inspires the creepy feeling that a plague has just passed through. Every few miles a cluster of huts emerges from behind a hill, and most of them turn out to be abandoned, their floorboards warped and splintered, releasing a smell of decay. The fields are overgrown, and old grain elevators tower over them like enormous ghosts - landmarks to Russia's demographic catastrophe.

So by local standards, the village of Lopotova is doing fairly well. The villagers say it still has a few hundred residents (down from about a thousand ten years ago) as well as its own grocery store, where the saleswoman spends most of the day ringing up liquor sales on an abacus. No surprise that the most popular item is vodka, the cheapest half-liter bottle going for 68 rubles, or $2.25. Far from everyone can afford it.

Behind the store, at the end of the unmarked village road, Zhbanov comes across a group of five young men in their 20s sitting on a log in front of a sheet-metal shack. They are not homeless, but they look it. In a week or so, the weather will let them pick mushrooms and berries to sell on the side of the road, the steadiest form of employment they have had since 2003, when the local farm went bankrupt. Aside from that, they can forage for scrap metal or go talk to Zhbanov, who makes enough selling his paintings in St. Petersburg to give them a handout from time to time.

One of the men, a native of Lopotova named Alik Matveev, scratches his head when asked the last time he had seen any sign of the government. "I can't really remember," he says. "There's no hospital, and our school closed in 2006. I guess that was a government building."

That was also the year Putin imposed the policy of per-capita financing for education, which meant that schools with too few students could not afford to stay open. In many sparsely populated regions, this crippled the education system, and young families fled to the cities to put their children in school. Many ended up in Moscow, boosting the city's population since 2002 by 10.9% to 11.5 million people, according to the census.

On April 20, Putin announced a plan to spend more than $50 billion through 2015 on projects to alleviate the demographic crisis. A huge portion of the money would be used to try to encourage families to have more children by offering them one-time payments. But having a baby requires that parents feel secure in their overall standard of living, from medical care to education and employments, says Galina Vyatkina, head doctor at the main prenatal hospital in Pskov. "So offering handouts can only do so much," she says. "It has to be a complex approach."

The new earmarks are also unlikely to change the government's broader policy of urbanization, which is driven by the fact that basic services are much easier for the state to provide when the population is massed in huge apartment blocks. Most villages have thus been left to fend for themselves until they either disperse or die out, says Lev Shlosberg, a political activist in Pskov. "It is a semi-official death sentence for rural communities." (See more on Putin's billionaire boys judo club.)

The regional governor, Andrei Turchak, concedes that many more villages will have to disappear. There are more than 4,000 of them across the region with a population of less than 10 people, he says. "That usually means just one or two old folks living in the backwoods ... We cannot provide for everyone."

But Turchak's connections have brought Pskov at least some relief since he was appointed by the Kremlin in 2009. A baby-faced ex-wrestling champion, Turchak, 35, is the son of one of Putin's old friends from St. Petersburg and shares the Prime Minister's passion for judo. Both of them are black belts, and in the clan politics of Russia, these ties can help a lot.

Already Turchak has gotten the Kremlin to promise a new state university for Pskov, as well as the region's first cardiovascular hospital, which is a godsend for a place where 67% of the men die of heart disease years before retirement. But the trick will be finding people to work there. With no place to train doctors, the hospital will have to bring in some 400 specialists from other regions, and it has been hard enough, Turchak says, to find farmhands willing to work in Pskov, let alone heart surgeons.

"People know that working a tractor means getting up at 5:30 in the morning, washing yourself, getting dressed, staying sober the whole time, and working a full day at the wheel," Turchak says. "The mentality here is such that people ask themselves, 'Why would I humiliate myself like that?'"

That doesn't seem far from the truth in Lopotova. Around sundown, one of Matveev's friends passes by, drunk and stumbling, having finished a day driving a combine a few towns over. "There goes one of our working stiffs," Matveev calls out to him, and the rest of the young men burst out laughing before they settle back onto their log.

Sober again, Zhbanov shakes their hands and starts the walk back to his cottage, which doubles as his studio. He turns on the lights, takes a long drink of vodka, and begins to dig through his paintings. At 67, he has already outlived the average man in Pskov by nearly a decade, which he has spent recording images of life in Lopotova. In one of his works, a bleary-eyed woman sips vodka and smokes beside a baby in a cradle. In another, Putin floats over a village hell-scape wearing his judo suit. And in several of Zhbanov's paintings, a jug of moonshine hovers in the background, giving the Hitler Salute.

Monday, May 16, 2011

I just googled....

"My dog just pooped out a diaper will they die?"

The fun continues.....

EDIT- (Forgot to mention it happened to be all over the bedroom floor and now my house smells like a toliet and I don't know which dog it was, so both are under observation. Apparently, this happens all the time. Oi. )

Monday, May 9, 2011

How have we been? And I need your advice!

We are good. We have bad moments, but never bad days. Regular stuff. Three year old stuff. I have come across several three year olds in my illustrious career with children (from preschool teacher to children's ministry worker and a few things in between) and from what I can tell, my kid is pretty much on track.
I knew I would be second guessing myself with the way I parent, but luckily I have a great network of moms that I can talk to. From what I can tell I am normal (relatively speaking) and Charlie is doing just fine.
Would I like him to be able to sit through the entire church service? Of course.
Would I like him to stop peeing in the car seat? Definitely.
Could I live without having all of my shirts stretched out of shape because he thinks I am an awesome human-shaped jungle gym? Darn Tootin.
Would I like for him to stop putting random things in the toilet? Yes.
But overall, I feel really blessed to have such a joyful, active, healthy little guy in my life. We are celebrating the small victories-
He is sleeping through the night 90% of the time now. Turns out we weren't keeping his room dark enough for his liking. Here we were putting brighter lamps in, leaving hall lights on and he just wanted a cave-like room.
He still likes 98% of the food we put in front of him. The only thing he isn't crazy about is carrots and a few kinds of fruit. Other than that- the kid still puts a hurtin' on some Chinese and Thai food! Go figure. Of course his favorites are the kid usual- french fries, hot dogs, chicken nuggets and pizza.
Potty training- This week has been our first full fledged "in underwear all day" all the time. I'm sure we drive him crazy with the "do you need to go te-te?" a hundred times a day. He's doing really well with it though. Before he goes, the negotiations start. How many M&M's for #1s and #2s. This may be TMI for you, but yesterday he tried to convince me that because the "business" was exceptionally, shall we say "large" that he should get three M&Ms. Hilarious.
I need your advice on this one: Speech. We've been home for 2 1/2 months. His English I think is going pretty well. I don't know if he's completely on track or how much I should worry. Our friend is the speech therapist for our district and she said he is doing great. She said if he's 7 and still having some of these issues, then we should be concerned. It's just baffling to me what he can say and what he can't. Like today we were watching Sports Center and he proclaims "Basketball" as clear as a bell. But you ask him what a cow says and he looks at you like you have three heads. (Then on the 80th time we ask, he'll squeak out a "oooooo" leaving off the "M")
Please comment: AP's was your child diagnosed with a speech delay in their first language? And if so at what point did you see a big difference in their second language and/or decide to seek speech therapy? If you went ahead with speech therapy, did you see a big difference immediately? If your child is shy around new people (like Charlie is to a point, unless he REALLY likes you....) was the therapy beneficial? I ask that because I can't see Charlie opening up and speaking to someone he's not crazy about at this point.
I guess I don't really know what I am asking, I just need your advice on this topic. I know at this point he understands practically everything we say to him, it's incredible! But I just don't know how much he should be saying.
Right now our strategy has been constant talking and conversation, reading an obscene amount of books and using flash cards.
Words he says on a regular basis:
Hello (both as a greeting and his word for the telephone)
Bye-Bye
Yes, Yup, Yeah
No, Uh-uh
Oh No!
Done
Gone
1, 2, 3 (will say the rest up to 10 if he repeats after you....)
"Too" as in if someone has the same thing
Just about every part of his body (head, hair, eyes, mouth, teeth, elbows, knees)
He calls dogs "ruff-ruffs" and cats "nene" because his aunt nene has a cat!
More
Juice
Yum-yums
Alex & Annie (our dogs)
Rory ("Orrie" my sisters dog)
Several friends names- Joe-Joe, Dale, Dave, Joyce, Nene, Jana, Emma, Sam, Seth, Blair, etc.
Clean
Dirty
Big!
Loud!
Semi
Stuck (Used for multiple purposes, as in I'm stuck or I'm frustrated)
Inside
Outside
Choo-choo
Movers (his favorite show on TV)
Drive
Keys
Mail (sometimes says "ail")
Books
Read
Zoo
Monkey
Lion
Bear
Bunny
Bird
Day
Night-night
Sky
Sun
Moon
Stars
Robot
Ball
Shoes (Still calls them their Russian name sometimes too- Ooboofs)
Shirt
Pants
Shorts
Socks
Funny
Brush
Work
Church
Chicken
Meat
Up (Ketchup)
Banana
Colors- Blue, Green, Red (ed) Yellow
Baby
Wet (et)
Dry
Trash
Cheese! (for the food and the camera)
Florida (lorida- where his Babas and Dadas live)
Go!
Move!
Stop!
Will say "please" and "thank you" but only if there is chocolate involved.
Luv oooh. (I love you)
And his Russian words that he holds onto-Ca-ca, Ribah (fish) Mama, Papa, Baba, Dada, and "Stas"
I'm sure there are a few more, but that's all I can think of right now. Now that I type them, it seems like a lot! If I need to just chill, please tell me that too!

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Happy Mother's Day

To all the new Mama's
Old Mama's
Almost Mama's
Wishing to be Mama's
Waiting to be Mama's
Mama's that are in our hearts because they are in Heaven.....
Happy Mother's Day!


Sunday, May 1, 2011

Fun on the Farm!

Today we had our end of the year party for our discipleship party at Jenn's farm. It was so much fun- the girls had a great time riding horses, going on a hayride and having a cookout. Charlie was so excited about the horses. He kept saying he wanted to pet them, but really it was a ploy to try to climb into the saddle. He watched all the girls have their turn, then FINALLY it was his turn! He climbed up with Caroline (our experienced rider!) and the smile didn't leave his face the entire ride. Caroline said the whole time they rode he giggled. So precious! This was a great first to witness.