Random family updates.

The four youngest are in bed asleep and John and the three oldest are in the barn working on the benches for the table. Very soon I won't be tripping over the 10 dining room chairs that end up in all kinds of weird positions around the table. (And Ava will no longer be able to tip the chairs over just to hear the loud sound it makes, yay) I just sent hot chocolate down to the barn for the boys, with Liesel. The house is so quiet, I didn't know what to do with myself. I guess it's as good a time as any to write a quick family update.

Jude and Liesel did great on their piano and guitar recital yesterday. John got it on video, I'll try to see if I can get it off his camera and post it. They have really found their little musical niche and it's fun that they can do it together, and it doesn't require a lot of driving around and being too many places as was the case when they were in soccer. Family activities have slowed down significantly and we have spent a lot more time at HOME since Joseph and Zoya came home and I'm starting to think that maybe that is how it is supposed to be. Truth be told I am LOVING not being involved in any sports at the moment. Although I realize that Simeon needs an outlet or he tends to be moody, fidgety, and destructive. I am thinking maybe football. There is a homeschool football group here locally that I think we'll check out for next year. Unfortunately homeschoolers in our state do not have the privilege of participating in public school sports as is an option in many other states. By the way, Simeon is doing so much better academically. Amazing what a pair of reading glasses can do!

Joseph is loving school! Sometimes on weekends he carries his backpack around the house signing 'school'. We are driving down the road and he sees a school bus, he goes nuts. His teacher says he is doing great, although we did get a note sent home last week that he was taking his clothes off, running around disobediently and hitting his teachers. :( I think his bad behavior was from staying up late the night before because for the most part he has gotten excellent progress reports. He insists on eating in the cafeteria, his teacher says. And when I pick him up from the bus stop he always...I mean always......tries to climb up into the bus driver's seat. It is obvious how badly he wants to drive that big bus. When I went to eat lunch with Hope the other day he waved at me from across the cafeteria, and nudged his aide and pointed to me, as if to say, "Hey, that's my mom.". Then he did his own little sign for 'hot' and gave me the thumbs up. So cute. Hope and I joined him at his table for the second half of lunch.

Zoya. Oh my dear Zoya. If anything is causing me anxiety right now it is my little Zoya. The more she gets to know us the more she refuses to eat. The one pound we all worked so hard for her to gain, she has lost again. She has produced a lot of different weights on a lot of scales, but my scale here at home says she weighs 20.5 pounds. She will be six years old in 3 weeks. When she isn't wearing clothes, she (still) looks like a walking skeleton to me. I can' t get her to eat most meals. I work and work to add calories to her food, but most of her meals just go to waste. I have discovered that she loves coffee. So I add Pediasure to it. She loves vegetables and salads, which I would love for any other kid except that she will not gain weight eating vegetables and salads. Ugh!! I have asked several doctors to consider placing a feeding tube in her. The doctors who can actually make the decision say it is not a medical necessity because she can eat. But being able to eat and actually eating are two different things. We have gone around and around from specialist to specialist trying to figure little Zoya and her problems out. We have been to 3 different oral/dental specialists trying to figure out a temporary solution for her cleft palate, until we can get her healthy enough for surgery. But nobody seems to know what to do with her. The Shriners/cleft hospital in Houston are apparently only taking babies at this time. So it looks like we will be seeking answers out of state for her. Probably back to Little Rock? Can we come see you Lorraine family??? :)

Ava is still loving The Little Lighthouse. We think she regressed a little bit, either while we were in Ukraine for so long, or since bringing two new strangers into our house. But she is starting to respond more to Joseph and to Zoya and it's fun to watch them all trying to nurture and take care of each other. I love that! Ava is picking up some habits, both good and bad, from Joseph, and vice versa. Hmmmm.

Hope has asked me to come help out in her kindergarten classroom. Zoya starts school at the beginning of the year (probably). I'm going to ask the school counselor if my big kids and I can volunteer once a week or so, tutoring or cafeteria duty, or something. Wouldn't that be fun? I did read to the kindergarten class one day a couple of weeks ago and always have fun hanging out with the kids at lunch time.

And John. How many times in a day do I think to myself how lucky I am. Who else would have traveled across the world and taken that risk with me, the risk of 'ruining our family' bringing all these little special little kids into our family. I am so glad he said yes. Yes we are busy. Oh so busy! Some days we hardly have a chance to say a word to each other all day, but somehow we make up for it here and there and after the kids are in bed. (And we still hold hands in church and in the front seat of our 12 passenger van with all the various sounds and activities going on behind us!) I feel so lucky, and I wouldn't trade places with any other woman in the world.

Antonio

Our family is sponsoring Reece's Rainbow's "Antonio" for the Angel Tree this Christmas. Who are you sponsoring???

Fun times at the Urban household

On Thanksgiving night, while we were out of town, we got a text from our babysitter/dogsitter saying that our dogs had disappeared from the yard. For several nights we worried and wondered where they might be. How sad we were to come home to an empty house with no wagging tails or wet noses to greet us. We put ads on Craigslist and called the local shelter. The dogs were not found for several days.

But I am happy to report it was a Homeward Bound ending, and both dogs are now safely home, thanks to a nice lady who found them wandering at a local business and took them home. She kept them all through the holidays and then called the vet's number on the rabies tag, which is how we finally located them. Needless to say we are so thankful for a happy ending.

We have an interesting dilemma----Nelly has gone into heat (which apparently triggered the sudden exploring) while Luke is a 'teenage' puppy with raging hormones. Fun times at the Urban house. Would you like to be a fly on our wall watching me and 7 kids trying to keep the dogs apart and the neighbor male dogs away. Interesting indeed.

Meanwhile I finally got around to scheduling them both for spaying/neuturing.

What do they call a cross between a Chesapeake Bay Retriever and a Labradoodle? John says a 'Chesa-doodle'.

More photos

If you're ever in Sacramento, The California State Railroad Museum is a must-see! We thoroughly enjoyed it!

Strolling through Old Sacramento with the grandparents was memorable. It was a beautiful day.

Opa treated us all to Old Fashioned Taffy.

Liesel got special permission to spend the night with her great-grandma in the retirement center and ate breakfast with her the next morning. I have fond memories of spending the night with Grandma when I was about her age, so I was ecstatic that she would have at least one opportunity to do this. I called a couple of times the next day to check on her and she said she was looking at pictures with Great Grandma and would I please stop calling and interrupting her. Apparently they had fun together!

Zoya was absolutely mesmerized with Great Grandma's wrinkles.

I have always loved the view from my Uncle and Aunt's front yard. Can you see the vineyard across the street and the mountains in the distance? I spent a year with them while I was in High School so it almost felt like going back 'home' in a way.

We spent the day at their mountain cabin playing in the snow and then warming up by the fire afterward. How fun!!

Uncle Steve took John and the kids to pick the biggest and sweetest granny smith apples EVER. We brought home a bunch and have been enjoying cinnamon apples, apple crisp, and have plans to make apple salad. YUM.

Uncle Steve teaches mechanics and woodworking to High School students. Thank goodness he has developed a lot of patience. He even let Joseph help.

Jude and Zoya enjoyed the backyard tire swing together....

Grandma and the girls baked homemade rolls for Thanksgiving dinner. Even Grandma was cracking herself up as she couldn't remember whether she had added the salt, sugar, etc. She IS ninety-two after all! (Or is she 93, I can't remember?) We were all relieved when the rolls turned out not only edible but delicious!

After a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner Uncle Steve slipped out and soon after we received a surprise visit from SANTA CLAUS!

I absolutely loved how tenderly Santa interacted with Uncle Steve's grandaughter Jillian. How sweet.

The Grand Canyon!!! Don't worry, we only stayed long enough to snap a few photos. And if a monkey harness/backpack ever came in handy, it would be on a little boy with Down Syndrome at the Grand Canyon!

"Aunt" Sharon is my mom's best friend and roommate from college (and a faithful reader and commenter on this blog---Hi Aunt Sharon!!) They lost touch eventually, and through the wonders of the internet have reconnected in recent years.  It has been so fun to watch them become best friends all over again. The girls were so excited to get to spend the night with her the first night we arrived in Sacramento. They had fun playing with her cat, Sugar.

We got all the kids out of the van and bundled up, then walked a few blocks on a muddy sidewalk (Notice Ava took a spill-check out the pants), and took this photo of the kids, only to realize we were at the wrong museum. Ooops! Oh well it was still a fun memory made, and a photo worth posting, I think.

Pictures from our trip

Since we switched all our photos to Picasa I have  no idea how to upload more than 5 pictures per post. So bear with me as I make multiple posts about our trip to California and back.

Gee, I don't know why we got so many stares as we boarded the plane to Sacramento. I wish I could have video taped all the people who counted the children one by one as we walked by!

I am not lying when I tell you the kids were all great travelers! Ava held her daddy's hand almost the whole way, and kept looking behind her seat at me and giving me a thumbs up (a gesture she has learned from Joseph). Joseph sat in the aisle seat and groped people as they walked by. John kept reminding him that he was a passenger, not a TSA agent in training. :)

Zoya has the world's smallest bladder. I lost count of how many trips we had to make to the bathroom!

Hope is our little social butterfly. She saved a seat for her new friend that we met just before boarding. It sure is nice to get to sit by nice kid-tolerant people on long flights with children. As you can see, Hope and Sarah are now BFF.

New Header and Thanksgiving fun

A big thank you to Nikki who designed a new blog header for me!  How nice!! I had been debating whether to change it but I don't know how to do all that fancy photoshop stuff. Thanks Nikki for helping me out. Please check it out!

We are alive and well. Had a great Thanksgiving week with the whole family. Here are a few of the things that we did:

-Flew to Sacramento, CA (Yes, the WHOLE family) where we met my parents (AKA Opa and Oma) and spent the evening and night with our dear family friend, "Aunt Sharon"
-Visited the CA State Railroad Museum and strolled.......with 7 children and two grandparents...... through Old Sacramento, enjoying peanut butter taffee and early Christmas decor....a FUN experience
-Experienced the famous In-N-Out Burger...YUM.....wish they had 'em in Oklahoma
-Drove with my parents to Reedley, CA where we spent a few days in my aunt and uncle's guest house and enjoyed my aunt's and mom's wonderful Thanksgiving cooking and chased kids around
-Spent some quality time with one of the best Grandmas I know
-Picked some of the best granny smith apples I've ever had in my life
-Listened to my kids perform and my dad preach at my grandma's Sunday night church service at her retirement center
-Spent a day at my uncle's mountain cabin where the kids rode snowmobiles and had snowball fights
-Watched my boys learn to work with wood and metal, thanks to my Uncle Steve. We brought home a homemade knife, a handcarved "Jude", and a set of farm benches for my long dining room table (YAY).
-Received a surprise visit from Santa Claus (AKA Uncle Steve)
-Said a tearful goodbye to my 92 year old Grandma....Man I wish she was closer!
-Three-day road trip from Fresno to Tulsa, via 15 passenger van with Opa and Oma
-Took 7 kids to the Grand Canyon (Can we say STRESSFUL)
-Visited Grandma Urban in New Mexico, plus John's brother and family
-Arrived home late last night with a million and one things to get done today.....


Thanks to Opa and Oma for a super fun trip! Thanks for putting up with all the noise and bickering in the backseat, not to mention 101 potty stops for Zoya, whose bladder must surely be no bigger than a walnut!

Pictures coming soon.......