7 Years Ago...

was our wedding day. It really doesn't seem that long at all. Literally in a blink of an eye, I find myself living in VA, married to an amazing man, with two sweet small sons. How did I get so blessed? I really do love married life. It isn't perfect but it is exciting and rewarding. Anyone who knows Ben, knows that life with him is adventure. He is an endless source of energy. He pushes me and challenges me a lot to reach and achieve high goals for myself and I like to think that I round off his rough edges. I laugh at how well we know each other now. Here are some of the major life events in our last 7 years

We have lived in four different states and survived 3 deployments. I have worked as a substitute teacher, a Junior High Science teacher, a barista, a kindergarten assistant and a nanny. Ben has gotten his Masters, become a Lt. Commander, worked with the Marines for two years, and was an Admiral's Aide. We have traveled, camped, explored and hiked in some amazing places. A highlight was taking a vacation using military air and having no destination and two small back packs. We ended up in Sicily and had a blast exploring the island. We have weathered the storm of infertility and came out of that with a much closer relationship to Jesus and each other, and of course our two precious sons.

Yes, married life is worth the frustrations it might hold. I look forward to many more years with this adventurous, intelligent, funny, kind, Godly man that I call husband.

at the time of our wedding we had 7 nieces and nephews with one on the way. We now have 12.

My favorite wedding shot.
I love that my Dad wore a kilt. It suits everything about him.
My wonderful pastor and his wife - the first church in America that I found to be a home for me. Ironically the Pastor was English and his wife is Filipino.
The whole gang.

A joke a day, month, year....

Ben told this joke to the boys about a month ago and now they tell it almost once a day. It isn't that funny but it sure is funny to hear them tell it all the time. Their favorite thing is to hear Daddy tell it as he get so silly at the end. Enjoy a smile on us:).

Pet Peeve Rant

I am normally the sort of person who falls asleep the minute my head hits the pillow. Last night I couldn't sleep so my mind started wandering. For some reason I got on my soap box, in my head of course, about one of my pet peeves. I just couldn't get off this topic in my head and it took me forever to get to sleep so I decided to post my pet peeve and get it off my chest so to speak:). I don't even know what made me think about it to begin with. What is this awful thing that terrorizes a poor mother out of her much needed sleep? I'll tell you, three little words "O my God"

Isn't that ridiculous? Aside from the fact that I think it is offensive to God, I just can't stand that expression and we were watching a tv show last night and someone used the letter version of this, OMG, which is even worse. It is like we are slowly losing our ability to communicate eloquently and now we use text abbreviations of the mutilated english language to share joy, pain, excitement, ect. If you start listening for this expression you will hear it ALL the time. There is just nothing worse that an American twang yelling, "Oh my God". It is such an inane saying and with over 1/4 million words in the English language there has to be a better way to express all the myriad of emotions we experience on a daily basis.

This is just my personal pet peeve so don't be offended if you say "oh my god". Nearly everyone does at least occasionally. I am sure I do some annoying things that are your pet peeve, maybe more than I would care to know:). This is just my way of getting this out of my system, so I can go to sleep tonight. My new favorite quote on this came from the movie Definitely, Maybe by a character named Professor Hampton Roth. The movie was ok and the character Hampton was a pig but the quote is so relevant to my topic today that I have to include it. He said, “The most endangered species in our nation isn’t a big woodpecker or some freshwater fish. It’s the tongue in our heads. Listen to the bastard truncated language of today, the average vocabulary is a third of what it was 100 years ago. Words fall out of our mouths and die at our feet. The landscape of vocabulary is being hacked down and grubbed up by the dribble of pop culture, poisoned by lazy obscenity, infantilised by a youth-obsessed media…”"

Thus ends Moira's rant for today. Now I can once again go to sleep the instant I climb into bed. I hope it did offend too many of you. Feel free to share your favorite pet peeve with me in return:).

Leppard Cat Night

Last night we had our first official Leppard Family Night. I have been planning to do this for so long, but just never got around to it. I found this blog before we even had the boys and loved her ideas for family nights. This one was a bit thrown together at the last minute but turned out to be a blast. Yared went to bed thanking Jesus for Cat Night so I think it was a success.

Cat Night started when Dad got home. We made cat ears with hair bands and paper, cat plates with paper and pens, and cat tails by stuffing tissue in a sock. We then drew cat faces on each other. The boys loved it. They are a little obsessed with scissors so they thought this was wonderful.

Yared's dinner plate.

I love seeing my engineer husband being creative. He is such a GREAT sport.
Happy Cats.
Sneaky Cat.
Hissing Cat.

As soon as craft time was done the boys put on their ears and tails and immediately started crawling around the house meowing.

I put bowls of milk in the kitchen and I so wish I had the video out for this. Yared did a perfect job licking up the milk but Nati stuffed his whole face in the milk and began making loud slurping noises. It was hilarious.

Cat night continued with a game of cat and mouse... also known as hide and go seek. This again is a lot of fun with a toddler who giggles when you get close so finding him is very easy. They love this game so I am sure it will be incorporated into many a family night.

Dinner was salmon on our cat plates in the living room watching Tom and Jerry.

Mom and Dad had some cat wine:).
Sassy Cat.

We finished the evening up with this disgusting dessert called Kitty Litter. Yared thought this was a riot and kept talking about eating poop. In reality is is brownies with crumbled cookies and chocolate poo:)

This last picture is random but I had to add it in as it is officially from early on Family Night. We met one of Ben's co-workers about a month ago. He was talking to Yared about going to Disney Land. Yared asked him to get him a Mickey Mouse on a motorcycle. We laughed and thought nothing more about it. Well the man didn't forget this and came back with t-shirts for both the boys. Very sweet and the boys were so excited.. as you can tell.

Reunited

When we were choosing to accept the referral of two boys we knew nothing about through an agency we knew nothing about, I was put in contact with a wonderful lady named Kristine. That first phone call led to many more as she became a good friend and an incredible source of knowledge on adoption. She also turned out to love Jesus as much as we do, so we were able to pray for each other and our adoption struggles. While our adoption was amazingly easy compared to many others it still had its fair share of ups and downs. It is such a strange world to enter and really only those who have walked it can understand what it is like. Kristine was the one I would call for all sorts of advice. I had actually found her blog before I found her so I had watched her adoption story unfold online. I even shed tears for this unknown woman when she first met her son. She was the one I called when I felt overwhelmed and a bit sick to my stomach those first few weeks. She kept telling me it got better and that everything I was experiencing was normal. She was right. It got better and better and better and it still is getting better all the time. Her and her husband had a rough ride when they went to adopt a baby girl, and I was glad to be able to be on the other end encouraging her that it would work out. It did and she now has a beautiful baby girl that I had met as a baby when we went to get the boys.

Fast forward to the present and I just got to meet my friend in person for the first time. She was on vacation in NC and realized it was pretty close to us. We decided to meet half way at a beach and spend the morning together. Our boys were in the same orphanage in Ethiopia for a short period of time and Yared remembered her son, Nathaniel. It was so fun to see our four amazing Ethiopian kids running and playing in the water and sand. It was nice to see them happy, safe, content and at peace. We know they have had and probably will have some more trauma with adoption but they really are doing well. The parents are doing well and we are just normal families with a pretty cool tie to a wonderful country. Here are some pictures of our time together. If you are considering adoption, go read Kristines posts. She really researched attachment a lot and gave some wonderful advice. I don't know what I would have done without her.

Here is the one picture I found of our sons together in Ethiopia. I blurred the other faces as I don't know their parents.

And here they are today.. handsome, funny and oh so wonderful.

A close up of Nati's future wife. She is SOOOO cute.

The future happy couple.

Camping on the 4th of July

It doesn't get more patriotic than that to be camping on the 4th of July in Virginia near to where our country had its first successful colony. We invited our good friends Seba and Nadew, known by Nati as Beba and Dew, and another couple from our church. It turned out to be the most perfect camping trip ever. There were hardly any bugs, no rain, warm nights, sunny days, cool water to play in, respectful campers nearby and generally a great atmosphere.

Seba and Nadew had never been camping before but fell in love with it right away. They were great sports about hanging out with little kids and were such a help. They even want to go again with us so I think that is a good sign. Our other friends Terry and Karen are Nati's Sunday School teachers. They have been so great with him through this last year as he learned to trust that we would always come back for him. It was great to get to know them better and to have our kids all hang out. Their daughter and Yared entered some imaginary world and could play for hours. At one point they were playing tennis with bubble blowing devices and a pretend ball. Nati was standing very still in between them while they dramatically leaped for this invisible ball. I asked what he was doing and Yared said, "He is our net." Typical big brother!!

We tried the idea of having the boys stay up late and just go to bed with us. We will not do that again. Yared did alright but on day two Nati threw some of the biggest nastiest tantrums this side of the Mississippi. Generally we try to just take him away from the situation and have him sit somewhere until he can calm down. He will tell us, "Done", when he is ready to be reasonable. Even after he has stopped crying he will often take a few minutes to tell you done as he is still mad. This time he would be mid tantrum screaming "DONE" "DORRY" (otherwise known as sorry) and glaring at me. It is rather humorous looking back but it certainly wasn't funny at the time. When he has a full belly and a good nights sleep he is a really easy going vivacious little boy. But if you let him get tired or hungry then anything can set him off. One tantrum was because Ben didn't let him smell his wine quickly enough.

Other than a few cranky melt downs by Nati the boys had a blast. There was a lake with a kiddie area and a dock right across from the camp. They were in heaven jumping around in their new googles. Nati's don't work at all and he can't see anything as they are always full of water but nothing stops him from wearing them. Yared loves his and spends half his time in the water adjusting them to the perfect position. We had a ball jumping from the dock. I felt like a kid all over again.

By the time we came home we had two dirty, tired, happy boys who are ready to go camping again in a flash. God knew what he was doing giving us these wild, crazy, fun boys. They are always ready for an adventure and just love life to the fullest. I felt very blessed this weekend as I looked around at my wonderful family, my good friends, some new friends, beautiful creation, and an amazing country to live in. Thank you Jesus for all this and more!!

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