Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Cultivate a Soft Answer

I suck as a person and a mother.  So this transition as a mother is harder than I thought it was going to be.  I LOVE LOVE LOVE these kids.  They are so adorable and I often find myself telling Reeve I am going to eat his face or sneaking Millie in another toy that she does not need.  They def make my days brighter and I love all the trips to the pool, splash park, library, wal-mart, and so on.  We pray everyday to make them a member of our forever family. I am not complaining about them. It is more me as a person.

Tonight while I was at Young Women's (that is a program in our church for girls ages 12-18) we were talking about Personal Progress ( a program that the girls do to develop themselves and they have to do projects under certain values). We were discussing something that the young women can do with their mother and how it can be a really neat experience.  I was looking around at the young women with their mothers and could see the love that existed between them.

Then it made me think of my mother.   I LOVE my mother.  I don't know if love is strong enough word. She is one of my best friends. I talk to her probably a thousand times a day. Anytime she comes to visit me or I go to visit her I count down the days and I relish very day I am with her. My dream is for her to live near me. There is nothing that I can not talk to her about. She is one of my greatest blessings in life.


I want that with my daughter. I try to think what did my mother do to make me feel loved, to make me feel like I could come to her with anything. I knew growing up that I had one of the coolest mothers ever, even though we make fun of her quite a bit. I want that with Millie. I want her to think of me and have the warm feelings that I have for my mother.

However, part of me feels like maybe I am not creating an environment to cultivate that. I remember one family home evening my mother read an article that was titled "Cultivating a Soft Answer." She talked to us about that we are too loud, and yell too much, and how dramatic we are, and how we need to "cultivate a soft answer" Us being Us just laughed at her and rolled our eyes.  We still make fun of her to this day about "cultivating a soft Answer".

However now that I am mother. I am seeing that their is something to this.  I am def to quick to yell, grit my teeth, jump on my kids cases, and have found that I am strict mother.  I will see Millie yelling a Reeve and think "OMG she is imitating me. Do I really sound like that to her?" And in this case imitation is not the best form of flattery. It is def a mirror.


So why am I writing this?  Why am I boring you with these details?  I wanted to put it out there in the universe and to keep myself accountable. I wanted this post to serve as a reminder to let go and LOVE my kids instead of trying to teach all day long.  If I am trying to teach I need to remember that the great teacher of all (Jesus) did not teach in anger.



so here is to cultivating a soft answer (in my whisper voice)

Friday, June 17, 2011

Splish Splash

I obviously can not show pictures of the kids where you can see them and who they are yet but I was able to snap some pictures of them at the splash park the other day of their feet, toes, or from behind.  So I hope you enjoy the pictures. They are from when we went to a splash park and then playing doctor at home. Millie is obsessed with playing doctor and doctor shows and anyone who has anything broken.  It is also fun to see  Reeve run around and wave his hands in excitement at the splash park. Millie is too cute and she makes sure her little brother is protected but tries to run through the sprinklers at the same time. 

Both kids came to our house terrified of water and we have been working all summer on this. They are doing so much better and now it is opposite. They pretty much have no fear and I have to constantly make sure they are making safe.  It is HOTT here so we go to the splash park or pool a lot.  You know I got to work on the kids' tans.  We can not have a bunch of whities up in here. Just kidding y'all.  I lather the kids in sunscreen. I feel so privileged to be able to spend the day doing fun stuff like picnics, splash parks, pools, playgrounds, shopping, movies, science museums, shopping, ice cream, popsicles, walks, and all things summer.  It makes me happy when we are all out as a family and to see them run around happy.


 







Friday, June 10, 2011

Hello World

I feel like I apologize a lot on this blog for my lack of blogs. So once again I am sorry for the lack of blogs. I am doing the very thing that irritates me.  I blog hop at night and I get so annoyed when one of my favorite blogs have not updated for a week and here I am going on months.  I mean honestly not a lot of people read my blog but I am not doing it just for that. I am doing it as a way to journal what is going on in our family.

As many of you know, we have face a lot of heartache in our family the past couple of months with the loss of our son Smith.  I am not ready to completely discuss it on here yet or give a lot of the details of how it all ended.  It just too hard and still too fresh. I know many of you have expressed your concern to my mother that I am not the same Amanda.  I 100% agree with you. I am trying to get back to that person. I have my good days and bad days and I do try hard to be sad when I am by myself. However, sometimes I can not help it. There is the underlying sadness of missing my son. It is a weird place to be. Losing him was like a death but it was not like a death at the same time. I will never see him again but yet I know he is still alive in this world somewhere. I have no grave to go mourn to but yet I still mourn. I still count him apart of our family but yet he is apart of someone else now.  Anyways, I can save this for maybe my more personal journal or another post when I am ready to discuss it.  I still cry.  I still think of him every day.

A couple weeks after losing Smith we got a phone call from our agency asking us to take two kids into foster care that they are going to try to terminate parents rights.  At first I said I needed to talk to my husband and I would get back to them. I wanted to say no because I thought our family needed to mourn before bringing kids in our home again especially ones that we might not keep. However as I hung up the phone I just heard this voice saying say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So I just did that. I called the agency back and said yes and .....now we have two kids in our home. They are ages 4 and 17 months. The girl is 4 and the boy is 17 months.  Unfortunately while they are still classified at foster kids I am not allowed to post pictures or give their real names.  Once they are in adoption mode (meaning parents rights are terminated and we are going towards adoption I do not have as any restrictions) I can post pictures and all that jazz. We have a lot of fun together and I can not wait to show you how cute they are. Everyone tells us they look like Milton and Me.

For now we will call the girl Millie because that is what we will change her name to when we adopt her if we get to and the boy we will call Reeve. At least that is what we will call them on our blog. In real life we have to call them by their names until we get to adopt them. I know a lot of you are wondering how likely is it that we get to adopt them. The answer....I have no clue. We will not know until probably September. We are just going forward on faith of the original answer we got.