A Quick Catch Up

Sorry for the blogging lapse the past few weeks, life has just been  so consuming that even though I have TONS that I could be writing about, I just can't seem to find the time.  The kids are all still doing awesome.  The transitioning and adjusting is going great.  I have volumes I could write about it all, but for now I will just do a quick catch up. 

We started to work on the flooring in our house and it has completely thrown me off.  Messiness stresses me out(although you would never know it to look at my house!).  I knew that changing the flooring ourselves was going to be a messyish(that's a word, right?) project, but we needed new flooring. Bad!  We don't have a garage and our driveway is gravel, so that means all kinds of dirt, mud, and chicken poop has been tracked in to my house daily for the past 4.5 years.  As much as we have tried to train Luke and Ray to wipe their feet and check their shoes before coming inside, they still forget at times.  Heck, I even forget sometimes. Needless to say, we needed some cleaner floors, and with 6 kids, carpet was not going to be one of our options.  So we decided on laminate and got the supplies.  That was two weeks ago, and so far we only have the living room done , but I am completely in love with it.  No more stressing about dirt getting tracked in on the floor.  It's just glorious.  We have run in to some issues with the sub-flooring though, so that is why we are stalled right now.  So now I have about a million boxes of laminate and tools stacked up in the living room. I spent about a week feeling grouchy and overwhelmed and I just couldn't pin point why.  The kids were still doing exceptional and there were no other major life issues that had arisen, yet I was still constantly overwhelmed, which always leads to me being very grouchy, short tempered, and over all just irrational(sounds like a fun person to live with, eh?).  I also realized that our little home improvement project had the misfourtune of coinciding with "Aunt Flo's" monthly visit.  Before her regularly scheduled monthly visits, Aunt Flo tends to make me irritable and tired(which makes me irritable also).  Sheesh!

Once I realized what an un-fun person I was to be around, I decided I was going to be different.  I made the choice to not let me surrounds determine my attitude.  I also made the choice to take charge of my surrounding, instead of letting it control me.  I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, so if I know that I can't do something the way that I want it done, or if I don't have the time to do it absolutely perfectly, then I just forget it all together.  For example, the inside of my fridge has been in desperate need of a good cleaning.  Several juice spills and other miscellaneous drips and spills have left the inside sticky and nasty.  It has been driving me nuts for weeks, but I just haven't had the time to take EVERYTHING out and clean it.  So a few days ago I made the choice to not let it get to me anymore.  I had the time to give one shelf and one drawer a good cleaning, so I did that.  And then I made the decision that I wasn't going to let the other shelves and drawers that were still dirty bother me.  I would get to them when I could get to them, but until then I would have to be satisfied with what I could do.  It's a choice for me.  Letting go of things that bother me just doesn't come naturally to me.  But I can honestly say that I feel so much better now.  And as it turns out, choosing to not allow myself to be stressed has made me infinitely more productive.  I've been chipping away at projects and messes here and there and have see improvments.  Whereas, my normal self doesn't take on a project unless I can see it through to completion.  That is how I get a mountain high stack of papers that need to be filed, instead of just filing a few here and there, I usually wait until I have the time to sort through them all and file everything.  Then the stack grows and grows to the point that no normal person would have time to file them all in one sitting.  I am realizing that I am my own worst enemy.  But now that I know who the enemy is, I can beat her.  I can get inside her head and mess with her game plan. *wink*

Now it is time for me to go.  I need to clean another shelf or two in the fridge or fold a load of laundry before the kids wake up from their naps.  I won't leave you without an quick up date on the kids.
Alik:  He's learning english like crazy.  He is seriously the most helpful child I have ever known.  He amazes me more every single day with his capacity to learn.

Danil:  We moved him to a pack-n-play to see if being in a confined space helps his sleeping issues.  While it has solved the issue of me worrying about him during the night, there are some other issues that have arisen because of it.  More details on that later, but I will say that the overall sucess of the pack-n-play has led us to decided to put him in a crib.
Several of you have commented on likely his spikey hair.  I like and too and Danil LOVES it.  Everytime he sees me coming towards him with the hairspray he gets a huge grin on his face.  He smiles the whole time I am fixing his hair and then giggles when I am done.  He knows he is handsome.

Josslyn:  I swear I gave birth to that girl.  She has the temperment to be a biological child of mine through and through.  She is a delightful mess.  She is  so many things that I didn't see in her the first few weeks at the orphanage.  She is a jokester, and a clown, and  drama queen.  She likes to sing and dance and have every single one of her 9,000,000 boo boos kissed.  She demands attention, positive or negative.

Ok, now I really need to go before nap time has completely come to a close without me accomplishing anything at all.  Well, besides blogging.