Named Charlotte

We have been making several trips to Charlotte, NC lately, to be explained in a minute, and the first time we were going, my 2 yr old was a bit confused:

"Mama, we goin' to sha-lots?" she asked

"No, honey, not to Charlotte's, to Charlotte, North Carolina" I responded, knowing she meant her friend Charlotte's house.

"We gonna play with sha-lot?" she again inquired

"No baby, we are going to a PLACE named Charlotte, in North Carolina, just like we live in a place called Blacksburg in Virginia." I explained

Blank toddler stare....then "we goin' to play at sha-lots?"

"No, we are going to a place NAMED Charlotte, not to play WITH Charlotte, your friend." I explained, again.

"We goin' named sha-lot?" she asked.

"Yes! you got it, we ARE going to a place named Charlotte!" I respond, and then she ran off to tell the big Things, "We goin' named sha-lot!"

...and thus she continued to call it Named Charlotte (sha-lot) all day long and still calls it that, as do the rest of us now for that strange reason that we all do when a cutie kid gives something a quirky name that just sticks (some time I will explain why my mom is called "Woofie" by all the grandkids....).

Anyhoo, on to the reason for the trip to Named Charlotte. Our little Thing 4 who just recently joined our family needs a medical treatment and the nearest place to obtain it is in Named Charlotte. You see, our beauty is a geometry lover it seems as her sweet little head is shaped just like a parallelogram. From spending a lot of time in bouncy seats and lying on her back in the transitional home before we met her, she has developed significant positional plagiocephaly, a condition in which the skull forms on a diagonal or other abnormal shape rather than the correct round shape. It is not a life threatening condition in any way, but it does cause some significant issues with facial symmetry, jaw alignment, eye alignment, and ear alignment, all of which will only grow more pronounced as she gets older. Some babies start to develop flat spots from being put to sleep on their backs or spending time in car seats and bouncy seats, but if caught early, it can sometimes be corrected by changing up positions and increasing tummy time, time in things like bumbo seats, baby wearing, exersaucers, etc-just whatever will keep pressure off the same part of the baby's soft little skull all the time. While the awesome ladies at Hannah's Hope take great care of the children, they are limited in their ability to hold all the babies all the time and so they do have to put them in different things often that so they can take care of everyone. And fortunately, due to several cases of children coming home with plagiocephaly significant enough to merit treatment, the folks at HH are changing things up a bit to include tummy time and bumbos-we saw that while we were there in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, those changes came too late for out little lady and our early efforts at repositioning her to try to re-shape things on our own were not enough, so now she will be sporting a fabulous DOC band for the next 3-4 months. This is a partial helmet that she will wear 23 hours a day (it is off for bath time and time to clean the helmet) and it will be custom formed such that the spots that are already prominent will have the plastic part covering them so they cannot push out anymore, and the areas that need to even out with the "bulging" parts will be open so as her head grows it will fill in those spaces that are uncovered with the hard helmet part. Make sense? Clear as mud? Go to the DOC band website to see one and it will make a little more sense. This was a tough thing for us as we did not feel like tackling another tough medical thing and just want to get on with being a family together without any big drama, but ultimately it is needed for our sweet girl or she could face serious issues later in life that are much more difficult to treat. So, after a lot of research, discussion and prayer, we did our digital scan for our band today-a horrible experience that will get its own post, oy-and will pick up the band in 2 weeks after they custom make it for her little noggin. After that we will need to go to Named Charlotte every other week (did i mention it i s 2.5-3+ hours away depending on traffic??? good times in the car....) to have it adjusted as she grows and hopefully will be done with the treatment sometime this fall, when she will reveal her perfectly round head :) Of course, we think her head is just perfect right now, but we do think the fact that her ears are so misaligned from the plagio that if she ever needed glasses they would have to cut one arm a LOT shorter than the other to be a pretty significant issue, so a DOC band it is. This is just the overview of the whole process and Autumn has written a pretty detailed post of the band here on her blog if you want to know more or you can go to the website for the band if you REALLY want to know more. We just wanted to include you in our family fun in Named Charlotte and let you know why our sweetie will be sporting a fab new accessory in her up and coming pics :)

ps- If you have questions about anything with this condition/treatment, ask them in the comments and I will do my best to answer them!

Our 4th

Almost all smiles, but one little lady a little more interested in eating the flag than waving it. We'll let it slide, she's new here :) Mommy and the oldest Thing were in the parade this year representing the summer musical we are in (yes, it is true, we are in the community theater production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, my favorite musical in the entire world, feel free to snicker at that thought if you know me, but I love it enough to endure the mockery) so Daddy had the other 3 ladies ready to catch as much candy as possible. We were blessed with a beautiful day with a nice breeze which was GREAT when the parade had us literally running for parts of it to keep up!! We followed the parade with a cook-out at my sister's house where with her family (6 kids), our family (4 kids) and some friends (3 kids) we had a nice baby parking lot:

And we finished off the night with fireworks, which mezmerized our little lady--so much so they almost put her right to sleep:

All in all , a great day and we are once again proud and blessed to be Americans!!

Here's One More

I will not keep parading all my little crafties for y'all every day, but this one was fun and I am planning on doing several more, some for my kiddos and some for gifts. When we were on vacation, we were in this cutie pants (and pricey pants) store called "Island Girl" which has lots of cute whimsical girls things . We saw these cute bath towels with letters stitched on and they were really cute and the girls loved them as did I, but I did NOT love the FORTY SIX dollar price. It is a towel for crying out loud!! I looked at it and thought "I can make that!" So, we made one for one of Thing 1's friends for her birthday and here it is!

(ok, silly Blogger keeps posting this sideways for some weird reason-I will try to fix it tomorrow)

Easy, fun, inexpensive and cute!! The best combo of all!

(Hmmmm, at $46 a pop, I wonder how many times we could adopt? do I smell an business?? haha!)

Martha Stewart Meets McGuyver

I haven't posted in a week because I didn't feel like it. Yup, I said it. I have just been having a week where nothing seemed to want to come out of my hands to the keyboard and I didn't have the oomph to try to make a post happen despite that so, I just didn't. No biggie! We shall just pick up like nothing ever happened! Lots went on around the house last week so I will just cruise through it to catch y'all up, 'k? (I KNOW you have been on the edge of your seat waiting to see what went on during my life.....) I got lot of little projects done and it felt good to be creative again. I love to create and make stuff-this blog first began as a knitting blog, btw-and a lot of that has taken a back seat for several months because life just got in the way of being able to create much other than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich-and apparently my ability to write normal length sentences also has been arrested. Anyhoo, I spent several days in a creative whirlwind and I need to note, my first priority in being creative is doing it frugally. I prefer to spend as little as possible in my projects and using stuff I have to make something new so what follows is a heap of cheap fun stuff :). First, I made a skirt out of a bed sheet a la this tutorial. It was a fun easy little project that made me feel like I made something real. Here is a picture of me wearing it (and looking dorky in mid conversation since my hubs took the picture of me w/o my knowledge) a few hours after it's completion:
Next, we had a need for a lamp in our family room but it had to fit on top of a piece of furniture we had that only had a limited amount of surface depth. I saw a lamp at my friend's house that was like a flatish rectangular shape and thought it would be perfect, but I couldn't find one anywhere and as she is a friend, stealing hers would be wrong--well, it would be wrong even if she weren't a friend I suppose....... So, we took and old sheep planter we had and broke a hold thru the bottom, used a cheapy Ikea lamp base to thread up through the hole and made our own lamp! Here it is in all its sheepy glory before we found a lampshade that would work:

(Incidentally, I have since found one exactly like I wanted, but since we made our own, I chose to ignore it and pretend like it wasn't even there) Also in the lamp department (my stars, this blog post is RIVETING, isn't it??) is my exciting discovery that is probably only a discovery to me, but it is my blog so I can act like I am smart on it and you are free to roll your eyes at my true simpleness if you'd like. So, I often see great lamps at TJ Maxx in the clearance section that have the finial-the little screw on top knobby thing that holds on the lampshade-broken off and it always seems like a waste because the lamp is in such great shape otherwise. So, I found this great lamp in such condition, and we actually needed another lamp in another room-little to no overhead lighting in our home so we need a lot of lamps around here-so I snatched up my $15 lamp with glee. I thought I could super glue it and I did and I was all proud of myself and put it all back together-and then it fell back apart. Hmmmm...I was determined not to lose because hello?! I got it on major sale and I needed to be able to say "check out my lamp that was on sale but I totally fixed with my brilliant McGuyveresque skillz" (yeah the "z" gives it that hip edge, dawg). After a few minutes (read:hours of frustration and cursing the inventors of the chintzy super glue that would in no way hold a constrution guy to a steel beam), I think about if I can take apart our old lamp in some way to use the parts. Well, voila--this part that was broken just pops right out and I swapped it with the one from the old lamp and put it on the new cheap lamp and I totally fixed it with my brilliant McGuyveresque skillz:
Ok, no more lamp stories, sadly enough. But, look, a CURTAIN story y'all! I had some white sheers I had hung up in front of our Sliding Glass Door of Light That Bleaches All Things. I also had a nice white rod that wasn't long enough. I had a rod extender, but it was brass and the curtains were sheer. I also happened to literally be in the midst of tossing out this prop from one of my girlies' dance recitals:
It is a star mounted on a piece of black PVC pipe-wait, was it black? Oh no, it was just covered with black electrical tape, which means it is WHITE PVC pipe, white like my curtain rod and wouldn't that just make a terrific rod extender?? Yup, it fit just right so, victory!

Finally, for now-I know you can only take so much--AND I don't yet have a picture of my favorite DIY project we did last week, we will see how cheapo, er, creative, I really am. In our powder room, we have had the same little silly take-up-space-but-don't-use fancy towels on the extra towel bar for the last 6 years and I was sick of looking at them. I knew I wanted something with red on it and set out to just buy some nice ones at TJ Maxx, when I got my cheapy lamp, of course. But not a red towel to be seen to I headed to another mecca of cheapyness-Big Lots. I found just what I wanted-in a large bath towel. So, I decided I could make it into what I wanted AND only spend $6 total. I cut it up the center and folded both sides in and stitched them down so it cannot be unfolded. I also stitched the raw edged end with a zigzag stitch so it would not continue to unravel. Finally, I cut off the opposite end which had a nice coordinating decorative border and made a tiny towel out of it in the same manner. I figured these towels would never be used, just merely need to look pretty so if you come to my house, do not take them off the bar and look at their silly back side where you see weird sewn down edges and such, just look and see this:

And, the true cheapness revealed: on the way out of Big Lots, I saw the same towels in hand towel size, but to buy them I would have to spend $12 rather than $6 so yes, I cut it all up and Frankensteined it to save $6. 600 pennies saved is 600 pennies earned, right???

Ok, thanks for putting up with my fascinating review of my home improvement projects of the week. DO you like to do home improvement stuff? WHat are your favorite projects? How do you save money?

It's Good To Be The King

An afternoon well spent and well deserved.....

Happy Daddy's Day, baby! We LOVE you!!!

Love,

your harem

What A Difference A Family Makes!

The day we met Zoe the first time

...just 6 short weeks later!!

We're Baaa-ack

*SIGH* We are back from vacation they just don't let you stay forever and not pay for the condo, weird. It was a great time of just chillin' and getting to know our new family dynamics a little bit better. I am not going to sugarcoat things-we had a pretty tough time returning home with our little lady and we were pretty miserable for a few weeks. So, while a lot of our trip was just same stuff/different place in the form of 8 million daily diapers, crying, bickering among sisters, crying and complaining that their mean parents are so unreasonable, and also crying, it was just great to get away from things at home and have fun and finally feel like we connected as a family of 6 with no distractions of school/work/housework. (I will write another post about our some of our struggles upon coming home because I feel like all sides of adoption need to be known so that others in the same boat do not feel isolated or defeated and know that it can still turn out ok.)

Anyway, today I especially wanted to share that we returned to a week of medical follow up appointments and Zoe has officially been cleared of TB and has been taken off the horrendous meds that caused all manner of unpleasant side effects and we are thrilled that we can put that chapter of our life with her to rest and MOVE ON!!! We knew it was the case but had to jump through the proper medical hoops to "leave no stone unturned" and so now things can feel a lot more normal. Little Miss is happy as a clam to be done with those meds and is loving life with a house FULL of sisters that think she is the bomb! (do the kids still say that these days?? I AM pretty sure I heard DJ Jazzy Jeff say that on my mix tape in my Walkman so I am totally down with the youth of today...gnarly) Anyway, God has filled our hearts to overflowing and has taken a couple of scuffed up earthen vessels and filled them to the brim with His treasures through the task of parenting our little girls. Almighty God, you never cease to amaze me with what You make possible in our lives!!

And of course, I will leave you with a few pictures of our vacation because that is what you REALLY want to see, right??The Things

I'm Drivin' In My Car

A little friend who lived right behind our condo

We take pics at this tree every year-we started with only 2 tiny toddlers, now we're running out of branches, haha!