our dozen beautiful feet

Paul and I are in awe of what God has done in the last few weeks.  If you notice, our thermometer that's tracking donations is up past halfway tonight!  A sweet, sweet woman in a church back home donated a huge amount to us, and she will be blessed by her Heavenly Father for it... she is the most self-less person I have ever met.  I can think of several other things she should or  could  have done with that money.  But she didn't.  Thank you, M! Thank you, Jesus! It is humbling to see the body of Christ working together to love others and give children a home...  to bring our daughter home... blessed, loved, ... 

This week we began by studying the ancient Egyptian civilization.  Here are some photo highlights of what the kids did this week.  It was a great week, and I'm amazed at what we accomplished, and all the arts and crafts we did! Decorating our notebook covers, while pretending to be pirates, for some reason... K LOVES math... who knew?   Writing With Ease copywork. We made Egyptian paddle dolls. This was a big hit, and still is.  Keeping it real.  The house after school on Wednesday... L's  note-booking activity after our history readings.  The obligatory rolling up with toilet paper as a mummy. : ) We made salt maps to learn about geographic terms like cliffs, peninsulas, mountain ranges, deltas, and more. Then we celebrated finishing our first week of school by having donuts today! :) And even I learned a few things...  -Did you know that Egyptians mostly all, men and women alike, shaved their...

Now that L is in first grade, I feel like this home schooling stuff is kicked into serious business. :)  I've got to really be doing a good job, no, a great job... I can't function if I'm not well-organized in things like this.  So I spent a few weeks reading all of the Tapestry materials, looking over the Loom online where they provide helpful hints, assignment charts, extra links, etc.  I devoured my Well-Trained Mind book and took tons of notes.  I'm going to outline the system I came up with implement everything we're doing this year in hopefully the easiest way possible, and stay on top of it all... 1. 9-week planning: I have put together the worksheets, math, phonics, notebooking sheets, student activity pages, maps, and everything for each week in an accordion folder:  2.  Weekly Planning:  Each week, I pull out the stack of papers for that week from the blue accordion folder and file them by student and by day in another black folder. ...

We received sad news today that MOWA, who oversees orphans and adoptions in Ethiopia, is closing or has closed as many as 40 orphanages this week.  This means that any children who came from those orphanages will not be granted letters by MOWA for their court cases to be passed.  Some of these children have already met their would-have-been adoptive parents, and their parents have been to court.  This is a very sad situation for these families. We will be praying for these families and lifting them up in this difficult time of grief and loss, and praying that God would make a way... I'm so thankful to say that our agency was not affected at all by these closures.  Thank you, Lord, for your mercy... In other world adoption news, the State Department posted this week that India is temporarily suspending the acceptance of new dossiers/application for foreign adoptions.  They said India is back logged with cases and hoping to catch up and plan to re-open the e...

We are sensing that our referral is coming any day.  Our agency uses a private Yahoo group for families to communicate with each other.  They send out regular Family Progress Reports, detailing who's where in the process.  It was easy for an obsessive person like me to look at the report just before we got on it and see what families were there and make a list.  As the reports come out and families get their referrals, I've been ticking them off.  So on Saturday, the only other family that was on the list before us accepted their referral.  From what we can tell... we're next or close to next. Every time I stop and think about that I will see her face soon... that I will see that email in my inbox... that I will read her name and how old she is and her general health... I get such butterflies.  The anticipation is so. much. fun.  I cannot wait to see her face!  I wish it would hurry up and come... But at the same time, we've been able to ...

This year, I have one first grader, and one kindergartener.  Last year, we didn't do much besides Phonics, Math, Handwriting, and Geography with L for kindergarten.  But this year, we're busting out the big guns and starting Tapestry of Grace, Year 1.  I canNOT wait to get started! Here's the rest of what we're doing for L's first grade year by subject: Grammar : First Language Lessons by Peace Hill Press Writing : Writing With Ease (Peace Hill Press) and Writing Aids (Tapestry of Grace) (They're totally different and we'll do a little of each Phonics/Reading/Spelling : Sing, Spell, Read, and Write Grand Tour I and II Math : Math-U-See Alpha Music/Piano : Music for Little Mozarts Beginner Piano series Science : Doing our own thing, 20 weeks of Animal Kingdom, 10 weeks of human body, 6 weeks of plant kingdom History/Geography/Bible/Literature : Tapestry of Grace Year One Art : Artistic Pursuits and a few "Come Look With Me" books K's...

So I'm a faithful apple customer.  I've had mobile me for a year and love it.  I loved the easiness of publishing our family website, and that it was different from the blogging world. To my great distress, apple is discontinuing mobile me and will no longer have an avenue for publishing iWeb websites free.  Ugh. So, I'm joining the rest of the world and switching things over here. I'm also planning to use this as a documentary of our learning at home this year.  I am so excited about the curriculum we're using, and have been in full planning mode for a few weeks now.  (I'm hoping that a lot of effort on the front end will yield easy weeks throughout the year...).  We're planning to start our studies on Monday, and my goal is to do a weekly blog report on what we've done.  We'll see if that happens. : ) Hope to see you around my new cyber-space home! 

This week, I received an email from a long ago brief acquaintance.  This man had come from the US to Delhi to adopt his daughter.  He was here for weeks on end trying to get it finished.  His wife was at home giving birth to their third child, another girl.  He came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner.  This was all three years ago.  His wife wrote this week telling me she had just had their fifth child, and he was scheduled to come back to India next month to pick up their sixth, an Indian boy.  She wanted recommendations on where he could stay this time.  I admit, I was shocked to hear they had five kids, and were adopting from India, and a boy at that.  This is the second family I’ve heard of in the last month who is adopting from India.  Both are using the same agency.  An agency I’d never heard of. This has thrown me for a mental loop.  I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it.  I spent two years researching adop...