Tag Archives: Reed

Everyday Life, Project 365

Project 365- Day 3

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I’m going to share a few photos from today, since there are some things I want to remember…

My mom gave Lena some adorable rainbow striped gloves when we were visiting. I got Lena some really cute rainbow striped socks at Target last week ($1 and they have no skid things on the bottom, go check them out!). This morning, I laid out all L’s clothes for her, helped her with her shirt and asked if she wanted me to help with the rest. Nope. I thought I had laid out a shirt, pants, and a pair of socks. Instead, she comes out like this…
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(Those ARE the gloves, in case you can’t tell) .

Oops, so I gave her some socks, but she wanted to keep the gloves on anyways and wore them until about 3pm.

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(Please ignore the real life that is my dining room in the background. I really need to frame these shots better.)

Again, ignore the “real life” that is my dining room. I am in the process of purging and the dining room is the area I’ve dumped everything in.

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He drew this for me. Love that kid!

The other big thing of the day is that I finally cut my hair… YAY! I loved having long hair, being able to pull it back, etc. But, it was heavy and I just wasn’t doing anything with it everyday. So, off to the stylist I went.

Before:

After:
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Our House, Project 365

Project 365- Day 2

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I got the idea this weekend that I wanted to do a little gallery for the kids’ artwork.  I grabbed every extra frame from around our house and spray painted it. Some of them had broken glass, so they were just laying around. In those ones, I put cork, so the kids can hang up things they just made. The big black thing is a chalkboard that Aaron built for them to color on as well. This is a really terrible camera phone photo, but it gives you some idea.

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Adoption, Second Adoption

An Update

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I’m sorry I haven’t updated in a week. Life has gotten kind of crazy.

We back to the US last Saturday in the evening. Sunday night, we began the 20 hour drive back to Kansas. Both kids got sick in Pennsylvania. It really seemed to get bad on the way home… for the second half of the drive, they couldn’t sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time without waking each other up coughing and crying. They’ve just been kind of all around miserable since– sleeping tons and grumpy when they’re awake. Lena especially also seems to be struggling with the fact that we left her for a week. The four of us just haven’t been having the best time together this week, between exhaustion, illness and attachment issues.

This was also an exciting week for us. Tuesday was our one year anniversary of court in Ukraine. Wednesday was Aaron’s birthday. He’s really old… Reed’s guess was 50. Yesterday was Lena’s 4th birthday. I’ll update more on L’s birthday in another post. She slept for most of the day, but she still had a chance to be a princess.

Our adoption has taken an interesting turn. I am not going to share the details here, but we had a bit of a rush this week trying to get some paperwork together and sent off. Please pray about this adoption, Helen’s future, and peace and clarity for us as we figure out what’s going on.

Everyday Life

Geocaching and Mario Karts

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This is my first post, a while ago Molly asked me to explain more about geocaching. Somebody once defined it as using multi-million dollar satellites to find tupperware containers in the woods. That really sums it up pretty well. A geocache is some sort of container such as a Lock&Lock container, an ammo can, a pill bottle, or some other container that somebody has hidden. It might be in a park, on the side of the road, on a hiking trail, in a crowded city, anywhere that they want to place it that is legally allowed. After they’ve hidden this container, they post the coordinates on geocaching.com and the coordinates can then be downloaded to a GPS. Once they’re in your GPS, it tells you which direction to go and how far away it is. From there you just follow the arrow, and once it gets close to zero then the geocache should be close, most of them are within about 30 feet of where the GPS puts you. A lot of the containers in the woods are larger and covered with rocks or pieces of wood, the ones in urban locations are usually smaller. Once you’ve found it they contain a log that you can sign and some of the larger ones also contain toys that can be traded. More information is also available here.

I’ve found that what works best for the kids is to look for ones in parks that are larger containers because they can find them much easier and they also like to trade out little toys. I also prefer walking in the woods to a crowded spot in the city. Winter is really the best time to go because there’s not all the bugs and growth. We’ve been doing this for almost five years now and we’ve found over 1000, but we haven’t been that active recently. Last year we found 71, and we’ve found 85 this year, you can see our profile here. This is a picture from February when we went to pick up our dog from Texas:

Also, here’s a video I took last night of our kids and their cousins in the basement. We were using their plasma cars, and it reminded me of Mario Kart. The video is a little hard to follow because I was trying to hold the camera and steer with the same hand. Look for the crash around the 10 second mark: