A Difference

One thing that I've been thinking about is that everyone in this world has something to offer. One might look at all the good to be done and rate it in order of importance. I think that is something that is completely inaccurate. Everyone gives in different ways. Adoption is not, nor should it be everyone's mission. Donating money is not, nor should it be everyone's mission. Volunteer work is not, nor should it be everyone's mission. You get the idea. There's too much out there to do for everyone to be expected to do it all! Some times the smallest things can cause the greatest good. I think of examples in my own life. Things that could seem small to some, but were huge to me.

I will never forget when we first moved to Idaho 9 years ago. When we got there, even though we knew people, I still managed to feel alone. I was 9 months pregnant, had 2 children ages 1 and 2, was staying in a temporary apartment for what we were told we could only have for a few weeks, and trying to get acclimated. I wasn't sure if this was where I wanted to be. Then one day at the grocery store a stranger was simply friendly to me. It was enough to totally change my spirits and make me feel great about our move and I never looked back. This person I am sure has no idea of the affect they had on me. But it was a great blessing and something I will always be grateful for.

Those little things mean so much!

When we decided to adopt a second child from Ethiopia, our financial reserves were almost gone. Because of my oldest sister and her husband's financial generosity we were able to move forward and pay for that second child referral. I hope she isn't mortified of me mentioning this because I know she did it without any desire for reward or praise. But if it weren't for their help, it's possible we would have missed out on the chance to get Hana! Which the thought itself rips my heart out! Their help was so generous, and so profound in our lives and the life of our Hana. I jokingly tell them Hana is 10% their daughter now. Which I hope they remember when it comes time to pay for her wedding. :)

Maybe a kind word, or a note is the thing that actually saves someone from suicide? You never know. I love the scripture that talks about the body (of Christ) and how every single part of the body (member) is vitally important. This makes more sense when you are sick, or you lose the functioning of the smallest body part. Have you ever done something like smash your thumb? And then when your thumb was something you could go weeks without ever thinking about, you suddenly realize how life without it working right is quite difficult?

I also think of Helen Keller. She was both blind and deaf. If you compared what she accomplished in her life alongside what many people in this world have done, you wouldn't think it was a big deal. But the fact that she did what she did with her limited capabilities, has made a huge impact on thousands upon thousands of people.

We all have different resources. We all have different lives and circumstances. That's why comparing yourself to others can never be done fairly.

Everything good you do, no matter how small or big you think it might be, is IMPORTANT. It makes a DIFFERENCE!

I hope and pray that I never make anyone feel that they are not good enough or aren't doing enough. If I have, I am so sorry! The life of those around me are such a vital part of my happiness. Just your association with me makes a difference in my life alone. Thank you. Keep it up.

Make someone smile.
Help someone out.
Hug your kids.
Tell someone you are thankful for them.
Give what you can. Whatever that is.

Everyone has a different mission in life. Find it and love it. My mission is no better than yours. I guarantee it.

Blog Change

I was blog surfing today and found a couple of really inspiring blogs. (Thanks Nina & Em!) I have gotten a large amount of help in my personal life from visiting random blogs that discussed various topics that concerned me at any given time. It got me thinking about my blog here. And other people's blogs. It seems a blog defines a person in a round-about way. Whether we realize it or not. Blogs typically talk about the same kind of things, or follow a similar vein of ideas or purposes. And as a result, you associate those topics or feelings with that person. Which I think is totally fine. For instance I love love LOVE visiting Jespy's blog for the purpose of entertainment, and a really good belly laugh that brightens my day. (Thank you Jenny! What would I do without your happy medicine???)

I think my blog barely touches on some of the things that occupy my thoughts and concerns most of the time. In an effort to not be judged or not to be too personal, I feel like I can't be me some times. So it's kind of taken the joy out of blogging. And I know some people that actually DO care, have missed that. I'd like to get that back. There may be people that are put off or annoyed by me. And as much as I care about them and what they think or feel, I don't know how to fix it. So I don't want to let that determine how I blog anymore. Nobody HAS to come here. Nobody HAS to read this. Nobody HAS to agree with me. I do want people to come and I do want people to appreciate it. But not to the point where I'm walking on eggshells here. I'm ready to move on I guess you could say and whoever wants to come along, that's great!

I want to organize my blog a bit differently among the things that matter most to me; as well as the topics that seem to be getting the most hits, (like miscarriage and adoption.) I know there are many people (my counter is currently over 25,000 visits,) who come here to read about different things and I want to make that a bit easier to navigate. So I'm gonna start working on that now. You can do that easier now with the tabs above. I sincerely hope you enjoy.

This guy is my hero

I've watched this over and over again and it never gets old. So inspiring!

Little Updates

It's been a month since I've posted. Goodness, this blogging thing is getting harder for me as times goes on. Life has just been very busy. All with good things of course, but BUSY.

Just a couple of things here.

Celeste was mentioned in an article on the cover of the local newspaper! The article is about our Serving With Smiles humanitarian group for kids. I will just type here the little blurb about her here:

"The blog website administrator is an 11-year-old named Anna Celeste, whose mother is one of the group leaders. Anna is responsible for posting updates about the SWSSS group to the website. As she writes, she does so from her own perspective which brings a fresh approach to the stories..."

So cool. Now maybe I can get her to go on there more and do some more posts that have her fun writing personality in them. That's been a bit hard to get her to do lately. Her first post was really great, but since then, she just isn't in to it.

Also, on an entirely different topic...

We got our court dates for our Ethiopian kids! But I must say that as excited as I was to get the dates, I was disappointed and shocked by the lateness of the date. We aren't sure why we were assigned such a late date, and there isn't anything we can do about it. But we are excited to have the date and to start making our travel plans!

The court date is Feb. 1st. Which means we should probably be heading over there around January 28/29ish. Just as a reminder, this court date is not our trip to pick up the kids. You do that when you go for your Embassy hearing which isn't scheduled until you've passed court. Those Embassy hearings I have been told are typically 6-8 weeks after your court date. That is when you pick up your kids. Which means, we are looking at bringing them home end of of March'ish. Here are a couple of new photos they sent us recently.
In these last updates they told us that Hana is the same: happy, energetic and loving. And Andualem is smiling more, happy and feeling grateful that there is a family that is concerned about him.
I can't tell you how excited we are to meet these kids in the flesh and make them part of our family!

Jonah

I am so proud of myself Jonah! I He has earned his Arrow of Light award. It was a lot of work! And I he earned it several months early.
At the ceremony we were asked to give a little presentation about him and how he has displayed the various values Cub Scouts hopes to teach. As I wrote these up, I actually got emotional because Jonah really has come so far in the past 5 years. Looking back, I am not sure I would have been able to envision him accomplishing achieving Arrow of Light and graduating from Cub Scouts. I also would have had a terribly difficult time being able to point out any examples of him displaying the following values. He still has his challenges, but I'm so thankful for his progress! He's a really good boy.

Here's what we said at his ceremony:
1- Wisdom- Jonah shows wisdom in thinking about the things he wants and planning ahead on how he will work for them, or make them happen.
2- Courage- Jonah's courage has increased this past year as he has overcome some fears and pushed himself to do things that he used to be afraid to try.
3- Self-control- We are so proud of how much Jonah has grown in this area. He handles himself in a much more mature way. He is also very good to come home from school and immediately without being asked, get his chores and homework done before he does anything else, which exhibits a lot of self-control.
4- Justice- Jonah has also learned a great deal about accepting and understanding the need for consequences for our actions. He wants to live a good life because of his knowledge about justice.
5- Faith- Jonah has a great deal of faith. In our family when we have difficulties or stressful situations, he is often the first one I will turn to to ask for his prayers because I know that his faith often exceeds mine. Time and time again, special little miracles for our family have happened because of his prayers.
6- Hope- Jonah has a lot of hopes for his life. He is confident in his hopes for all the great things he will do in the future. He knows that his hopes, combined with his faith and hard work, will happen.
7- Love- Jonah loves his family a lot. He often will say “I love you” just because. He gives us and his baby sister plenty of hugs and shows his love by trying to help and lift us up when we are down.

:)

Got this photo in my email today. Guess they let the cat out of the bag and told these two that they are being adopted and are soon to be brother and sister.

A special girl

I have the opportunity to work with the Young Women in our ward. I really enjoy it. I love all of my girls so much. I am so excited for one of them because she's on the cover of the new Jenny Phillips CD that's coming out! She's the girl in the center.
This girl is really special. I've never met a girl that is so good through and through. She is such a good example to me and I have been incredibly impressed with her since the moment I met her. I really appreciate her example for me.

Things I've heard my kids say recently that I don't want to forget

Driving home from school the other day Becca yells out "I love Jesus SO much!" ...pause... "So much you can't even believe it!"

About a week ago Steve and I were sitting on the couch together and Jonah walks in the room. Just out of the blue he says, "Dad, I can tell that you really love Mom." I thought that was a pretty sweet observation. I hope the reverse is apparent to him too.

Finally, today Becca decided she wanted to write a letter to God. I was really surprised to read what she wrote to Him. Here it is:

"Dear god i love you what is it like to be in Heven what do you do in Heven i dont rille (really) like you(r) berd (beard) and Hair but i still like you do you Have food in Heven? love Becca."

Personally I think His beard and hair are just fine, but some girls just don't have a taste for it.

On a more happy and exciting note...

We've told a lot of people, but not everyone. You ready for this???

We are going to adopt TWO children from Ethiopia. At the same time. You've all heard about Andualem, who we call Andy, but you haven't heard about Hana. (I think we'll keep her real name.)
She is a 5 year old cutie who seems like a sweet and happy little girl. She's very healthy and lives in the same orphanage as Andy. Both of her parents died of AIDS as well. :(

The most frequently asked question we get is "When will you get them?" I'd like to know that myself. It's been almost a year now since we started this whole adoption process. Right now we have been told it looks like we will be going over there some time in December for the first court date. Then we should go back 3-6 weeks after that to have the Embassy date and take them home. So I guess that looks like January'ish. But it could be sooner or later. Who knows.

So yeah, pretty exciting stuff going on here!

Isaac

I'm not quite sure how to write about this, especially as I've tried to avoid getting too personal on our blog. I even thought of going private so that I wouldn't need to worry about what I should and shouldn't say here. So please forgive me if I say too much. I just want to make sure that our family blog does discuss something that is a big deal to us.

So a couple of weeks ago we were anxiously awaiting our appointment to go in for our ultrasound to find out if our baby was a boy or girl. I actually was so excited I could hardly sleep even days ahead of time!
For a couple of weeks before this appointment I was having a lot of pain and contractions and my nausea was getting worse. I was sent to a high risk doctor to check things out when I was 14 weeks pregnant. That doctor ran an ultrasound and said the baby looked fantastic, so she was not concerned and sent me on my happy way.
But when we went in to the next ultrasound later, paranoid me immediately searched for that lovely little heartbeat flutter. But I didn't see it. The technician kept looking and looking and just didn't say anything. She said to turn on my other side and wait a minute while she went to the other room. When she left, I was upset. I told Steve "I am really scared! I didn't see the heartbeat!" He tried to calm me down until she came back in. She looked some more and said nothing until I finally said to her, "I don't see the heartbeat" at which point she admitted the same. She suggested we go ahead and get with my doctor. We immediately rushed over there. I wont go into detail as to how I was feeling or what was going through my mind during this time. But it was difficult.
Basically we saw the Midwife who did an ultrasound. No heartbeat. She then sent in the high risk doctor who did an ultrasound. No heartbeat. They advised me on what we should do next and sent me home to wait to hear when I am scheduled to come in to the hospital. That evening I got the call and more discussion with the midwife who arranged it all. I had an induction scheduled for the morning, with the anticipation that I will likely have a D&E right after I deliver the baby since placenta's often don't deliver well at this point in a pregnancy that has ended in such a way.
Everyone knows I've been through this before. Last time from start of induction to delivery I think took a couple of days. I did deliver the baby, I hemorrhaged, then I went in for a D&E. The whole process was pretty traumatic. So I was worried about the same type of experience repeating itself. It didn't however. We were so blessed. From start of induction to delivery was only about 14 hours. Blood loss was very minimal. When I delivered our baby, the placenta also delivered all in tact without much struggle. No surgery was needed and I didn't feel too terrible. (Delivery was 12:45 am on Friday September 10th.) Right after the delivery the doctor looked over the baby who she announced was a boy. Then she handed him to me. He looked much like Benjamin did, but probably an inch or two shorter? He had all ten fingers and all ten toes, as tiny as could be. We looked him over and held him for quite a while. They brought us in a very nice crochet blanket for us to wrap him in. We did so with such tenderness, expressed our love and goodbyes, and gave him to the nurses to take away. In the morning I was very anxious to go home because our kids at home were sick with the stomach flu. We stopped on our way home at the mortuary where we picked out a little box for him to be buried in. The burial was scheduled for Monday September 13.
He was buried in the beautiful Angel Garden section of the cemetery. The place set aside for babies and small children.

The burial was so nice! The cemetery was beautiful. The weather was perfect.
It was just our little family there along with the people from the mortuary. We did a quick little service where we prayed, I spoke a bit to the kids, we sang a song, and Steve dedicated the grave. The kids each put a little heart by/on his box for him.
This picture turned out poorly because it was on my phone from a distance, but I never want to forget as we were walking back to the car, all the kids were with us except for Celeste who was touching his box and looking like she was praying for him. It was pretty sweet.
In the hospital while I waited those hours in labor, I thought about our baby and what we should name him or her. Surely our child can't be an "it". Our original plan was to name him Samuel if it was a boy and Mariah if it was a girl. That was when the baby was alive. But as I labored I thought of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son. He didn't want to and it probably brought him anguish, but he chose to obey. As I thought of this, I felt that we should name our son Isaac because like Abraham, we would be willing to let our son go even though we didn't really want to and it brought us such sorrow to do so. When I asked Steve what he thought of it, he immediately agreed and we felt good about that. So we named him Isaac. I don't pretend or think that we are anything like Abraham who was a great prophet! I only felt like I could in a very very very small way relate. We gave him the middle name of Swenson because Benjamin was given my mother's maiden name and we thought it would be fitting to give Isaac Steve's mother's maiden name.
Elder Bruce R. McConkie said "Nothing is more universal than the resurrection."
and Joseph Smith said "All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty I have seen it."
We believe these statements and take great comfort in our faith and sure belief that we will one day be reunited with Benjamin and Isaac.