Mormons are weirdos

Steve and I got back from "Trek" on Saturday night. It was 4 days of walking, pushing, pulling, sweating, getting incredibly dirty, and learning and growing tremendously.
Mormons are weird because many of them like to dress up like pioneers, travel hours away on buses, and pull around their stuff for many miles in the Wyoming wilderness in handcarts. The point? To kind of do a wannabe reenactment of what our pioneer ancestors did back in the mid 1800's in the name of their faith. These amazing people left their homes and most of their possessions behind and traveled hundreds, some people, thousands of miles to Utah to be free from religious persecution and live together in strength and peace.

These people traveled on foot. Some bare foot for hundreds of miles. Some of these people did so in the snow and many perished. The stories we were told were tragic, and moving. Some so inspiring. They've made my life look pretty darn easy! We felt like wimps when we compared ourselves to them.

We had such an incredible experience!!! Steve and I were "Ma" and "Pa" to these awesome kids. We love these kids so very much now and were so impressed with how well they did! It wasn't easy. We trekked 6.5 miles the first day with these handcarts. We were told we did 11 miles the second day. And we weren't told how far the third, but I think it was about 8 miles.

They all worked hard and had a good attitude. We all really grew from the experience. I have to say the hardest part was being so dirty though and not being able to get clean. No showers, no running water that we could wash ourselves or our dishes with. But it was worth it.

makeovers

I know lame, I'm posting photos of these rather than our trip. Problem is, I only have trip photos on my cell phone which takes bad photos and is hard to download on the computer. That's why. These ones are from the camera. (People with good cameras that took photos at the reunions, email them to me please!)
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The kids love playing in this closet under the stairs. Celeste wanted to paint it. I said "Sure, if you clean and organize our linen closet, the family room and our garage." She did! What a deal! So here's how it looked before as we were taping it up to paint: And after:

They love their new closet/play area!

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I also started coloring my hair a couple of months ago (professionally). Too many grays :(

But a couple of weeks ago, I actually colored it myself for the first time. It's funny, I figured it would turn out horrible. I planned to color it myself to prove to Steve that we needed to fork over the cash monthly to get it done professionally, or I would look awful. I imagined him seeing it and hating and saying "Ok, you're right, you should only trust this to the professionals..." But he came home and loved it. So there you go.

Yadayadayada

Man I don't feel like blogging much anymore! Just not feeling it.

To make matters worse, I'm not even gonna bother to add photos again for this post. BORING.

We got to go to California for a couple of reunions and got back just over a week ago. It was a really good trip. I liked all of it except for *making the trip to the beach with my sick baby who felt miserable, and then being stuck in traffic forever to get home from said beach, and *worrying about our van biting the dust at any given moment. Otherwise, the rest of the trip was splendid. We did Disneyland one day and had a lot of relatives there and it was a blast. Even our little Becca was brave enough to ride all the roller coasters with us. Space Mountain was the best!
We got to see a lot of family and hang out a lot. Good, good times.

Today is Eden's Birthday! (And Father's Day too of course.) It was a bit tricky trying to make the day feel special for not only Steve but for Eden who felt a bit jipped for having to share her day with Father's Day. But she ended up being fine. She's 9! I'll gush over her on her birthday on the private blog I keep for my kids and spare ya.

This week Steve and I are going on Trek with the teenagers at church. 4 days trekking in the Wyoming wilderness, pulling handcarts. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing as we have been anxiously making all the preparations. My very generous big sis Anna will be watching the kids and I'm feeling super guilty over that. (Not so much for leaving the kids admittedly, but for Anna having to take care of another 5 kids for that long.) She and Trent are good sports!

That's all I've got this time. Later

Adoption & Education Update

Here's a bit of an update on a couple things I hear people ask me about most often.

Our Adoption

Well, we've submitted our Home Study and Dossier to our agency and are kind of waiting to see how fast they can do their part. Getting our Home Study done took 7 months! Totally not what we expected. The Home Study wasn't that much trouble for us. We got the agency the list of documents they wanted then waited around for them forever to get it done. Getting the Dossier completed was much more of a struggle for us though. There were so many documents to obtain or create and a few had such particular specifications that it took a few tries to get them right and weeks to get them complete. So glad it's over! We still need our approval from the US Government via some form thingy. Our agency is supposed to be getting our documents authenticated through Ethiopia's Embassy here in the US, then they are supposed to send them all over to their office in Ethiopia for further translating and authentication. Then we are supposed to get a "referral" of our child soon thereafter. After referral, I've recently heard to expect 5-7 months. So it seems it's gonna be a long wait. I honestly have no idea of what to expect though because there is always something happening over there with the government to add some speedbumps into the process. Recently the government has added a couple of laws to the adoption process to make it a bit trickier, as well as de-license many orphanages to halt the process in some cases. So who knows...

Any questions? :)

Homeschool Decision

I wrote about this a couple months ago. I didn't know if I should homeschool next year or not. After much thought and worry over that decision, I finally decided I would homeschool all the kids next year. However, after making that decision, I felt sick. For one reason or another we decided it wasn't the way to go for now. So I then began investigating other options and ended up signing all the kids up at a local Charter School. It felt right and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out. I still would like to go back to homeschooling some day I think, but not at this time. The kids have taken the decision fine. Jonah was the most disappointed. Jonah I worry about the most because he was doing so well at homeschooling, but he has accepted it and I hope he will be happy at his new school.
I was surprised to find on the last day of homeschool I was feeling sad about it! But we are homeschooling each day this Summer for just an hour and so far so good.