There you have it...

So there is this tag going around Facebook where you have to write 25 random facts about yourself. I love reading these types of things about other people but never do them myself. All that changed today though and I decided I didn't want all of that "work" to be just for Facebook. So here it is, all you ever wanted to know about me and then some. I would strongly encourage everyone to do one for their own blog. It is actually quite interesting to look at yourself for a few minutes.

1) I have several OCD tendencies. Probably my biggest one is having to have everything in multiples of five (ie: the volume on the TV, the amount of time I microwave something, the total price of gas, etc.)

2) I am very passionate about correct English and grammar. I can't help but proofread everything I read and I have a hard time looking past spelling or punctuation mistakes. Seeing a misplaced apostrophe about sends me over the edge and it's getting more common! Oh I'm twitching already...

3) I am addicted to the internet, especially email and blogs.

4) I am a born planner. I especially love to plan trips or parties and prepare for every possibility. I am a very detail oriented person and sometimes don't have patience for those who aren't this way.

5) I have a very sensitive nose and can smell things from a mile away. I'm always saying, "Do you smell that?" It drives Ben crazy!

6) I love my family more than anything in the world. There's nothing I'd rather be doing in my life than a being a wife and a mom. I am very blessed.

7) I'm desperate to get my next child home and pray daily for us to find our birthmom.

8) I am very passionate about adoption and like to "educate" people whenever I can.

9) I wish I had finished school before I had a child. It will be a lot harder now but I will do it eventually.

10) I've always wanted to go to cosmetology school and do hair and nails out of my home.

11) I'm addicted to caffeine, especially Cherry Coke and Dr. Pepper.

12) I have 12, almost 13 nieces and nephews and I like to think I'm their favorite. I miss them like crazy.

13) I want to live by my family again but love the experiences I'm having living away.

14) I love going out to eat. It is my favorite way to spend money. Texas Roadhouse is my favorite.

15) I love finding a good bargain, especially on clothes. It always feels like a personal victory!

16) The older I get the more I love and respect my mom. She's a little crazy but has got the best heart around!

17) Sometimes I look at my daughter and wonder how she found me. She is so incredible, most days I don't feel worthy of her. Did I mention I love adoption?

18) I am a very unhealthy and picky eater. I am trying to get better for Kiara's sake but it's really tough! Fast food is my enemy.

19) I love to travel and explore. I'll go anywhere just to see what it's like and get a new perspective.

20) I get cabin fever very easily and need a change of scenery often.

21) I am not excited for baseball season to start again soon, taking my husband away so much. Some days I wish he didn't like his job so much. I am excited for the Red Sox season though. I love watching the games each night with Ben. Kiara loves it too so it has become our family time.

22) I have started playing the piano again recently and I love it. It relaxes me so much.

23) I love to make a big deal out of birthdays no matter how old the person is. Everyone deserves that one day a year when it's all about them.

24) I have fallen in love with New England since I met my husband and I love that his family still lives there so we have an excuse to visit 1-2 times a year. Nothing beats Christmas in New Hampshire.

25) I get to go to Disneyland with some of my family next month and I can't wait. I'm excited to see how much more Kiara can do now since the last time we went in '07.

Kiara-ism

Mom: "Kiara, what's your name?"

Kiara: "K-Mae Wonder Pets."

Happy Birthday, Laura

So apparently I'm a big fat slacker when it comes to my birthday posts. I've now missed four birthdays on my side of the family. Luckily two of those people never check this blog and another one of those people is only 2 so she doesn't know the difference. So I guess technically I only missed one...

That one however, happens to be one of my most favorite people in the entire world, my sister-in-law, Laura. She embodies all of the characteristics I want and she has had an unspeakable impact on my life since the day she entered it over a dozen years ago.

I would love to show a picture of Laura to be able to put a face with the name, and because picture-less posts bug me, but she is a master at avoiding pictures of herself (which is too bad because she's gorgeous). In fact I searched my entire photo collection as well as her entire blog and couldn't find a single picture of her alone. Even the supply of Laura in group shots is small. I finally pulled out my huge box of old, miscellaneous snapshots and I found JD & Laura's engagement picture and figured that would have to do. But then my scanner, for the first time since its birth, wouldn't work! I'm tellin' you the girl's got some sort of secret power to keep pictures of her from being displayed!

Aside from her secret power in the picture department, Laura is amazingly creative. Her house looks like a Pottery Barn or Ikea catalogue and she is well known for always finding the most unique items (ie: a hydraulic high chair, chair lifts for the kitchen chairs, etc.). She's also a very talented photographer and comes up with the coolest ways to display art. In fact she took the picture of Kiara that is the header on this blog. It's one of my favorite pics ever!

Laura is also ridiculously smart. She is the only reason I passed Algebra, coming over to our house almost every night to help me with my homework and taking the time to be patient with my ignorance. Nobody else has ever been able to make math make sense to me like she did.

Laura made a big mistake early on in her marriage to my brother, and that is telling me that I could come to her with any problem. Because I have...over and over and over again. She was my biggest confidant all through my teenage years, well into my life on my own, and now as an adult. I've called her too many times to count, crying and going on about my own trials and drama. All the while she listens to and consoles me, never mentioning her own heartache or pain, of which she's had way too much.

There have also been several days when I've been feeling alone or down when Laura has called for no apparent reason and reminded me I'm loved. She has always been that person to lift me up and pull me out of my funks and she will never know how much she means to me.

One particular time when Laura was my lifesaver was when our family was going through a rough patch. I wasn't married yet but was living on my own and was kind of floundering. There was one night early in to the journey when I was feeling very scared and vulnerable because of news that had been shared with us. My brother wouldn't let me go home to sleep alone and he and Laura insisted I stay at their house. They even made me a little bed on the floor of their room because they knew how important it was to me to be near my family and feel safe. It worked.

Almost exactly 5 years later I was in that same room with my face buried in Laura's shoulder as I sobbed uncontrollably over the loss of my little baby. They were tears my sweet sister knew all too well and the emotions I described were ones she has been forced to endure all too often. Yet she just listened and allowed me to feel what I was feeling, never once turning the situation back to herself or taking time to make it about her. She has felt this pain deeper than I ever will yet carries herself with ultimate grace and dignity. She is the definition of humble and selfless and if my life depended on it, I could not think of a single thing I dislike about her.

One of the happiest days of my life was when Laura became a mother. To watch her with Macy is a beautiful thing. She absolutely adores her daughter and finds joy in every aspect of parenting. Never has a child been wanted and longed for more than that little girl. And I think Macy was equally excited to come to her mom & dad. She knew the family that awaited her and now that she has them here she's not letting go!

Happy belated Birthday, Laur. Thank you for everything you have done for me in my life. I would be much less of a person without your influence and when I grow up I want to be just like you!

Thank you, Dr. King

As part of our Family Home Evening lesson tonight we told Kiara a little bit about Martin Luther King day. I'm ashamed to say I know little about him or his life, other than the basics. I know he was from Georgia, that he was a minister, that he won a Nobel Peace Prize and was the youngest person ever to do so, and obviously, that he gave his life for the cause of equality and fair treatment of all human beings.

I also know that although he was killed 15 years before I was even born, he had an unspeakable impact on my life. Because of his efforts and many other heroes who followed his example, Ben & I are able to raise a child of African-American heritage and do so within the bounds of the law. And generally speaking, we are free from discrimination or hatred.

This is a priceless gift and I am grateful that we have a day to honor such a courageous and inspired man. I believe he truly was a messenger of God, preaching peaceful change and advocating love and acceptance for all, regardless of their skin color. Because of Martin Luther King, Jr. I get to wake up to this face each day:

And I can proudly say that she is my daughter and I am her mother. I don't take for granted that as recently as 40 or so years ago and without the innumerable sacrifices of so many, our family wouldn't exist as it now does, or at least as peacefully as it does today.

I also think it's pretty amazing that tomorrow our nation's leader will be a man with the same ethnicity as our daughter. Although I don't agree with his politics, I appreciate the statement that having (soon-to-be) President Obama in the White House will make about equality among races and I pray he will have some of the same humility and perspective that Dr. King had during his life.

American Idol here we come!

Kiara has always loved music and dancing, and now that she can talk she loves singing. The first video is of her singing "I am a Child of God."

The next video is "Families Can Be Together Forever." Both songs are sung quite often in our church and they're what we sing each week in our Family Home Evening. When Ben was 10 his little brother passed away. Since then, some of the original lyrics to this song have bothered his mom and so she came up with an alternate phrase. I always liked them better but especially since our miscarriage, they take on new meaning. The official version is, "I have a family here on earth, they are so good to me." Our family's version is, "I have a family of great worth, they are so good to me." That is what she's singing at the beginning of the video.

There is a French hymn that Ben likes me to play on the piano but since I don't speak French and the tune always gets stuck in my head, I always "sing" "do, do, do." Kiara has caught on and "sings" it that way too, and that is what she's doing at the end of the video.

Kiara-isms

#1- "Mom, baby Noah gurped!" (Also referred to as "burped.")

#2-Kiara pulled her little Ikea chair over to the microwave so she could stand on it and watch her food cook. I told her not to stand on it or it would break. This is what I heard next:

"Oh, I can't stand on the chair, it'll break. I'm too big. Let's go to Target and get a stool. I'll get a pink one. K, let's go."

#3-Kiara loves to say prayers by herself now. Here is a recent one:

"Bless Mommy, Daddy, K-Mae, Gina, Sister Rooker, Kalli, Hanna, Thomas, Stocky, K-Mae."

Going back to work

...If you can call playing with this little guy work!

This week I started babysitting my neighbor's 4-month old son, Noah. He is a little doll and Kiara & I love having a baby around.


Only problem is, come 5:30 he has to go home. Now it's Saturday and we don't get to see him at all until Monday. I think I should talk to his mom about renegotiating our arrangement so he's here all the time!

Taming the beast

This post is dedicated to all of those people who ask me how long Kiara's hair is when it's down and what it looks like. Here is your answer:

Keep in mind that this is just the top layer. There are mounds and mounds of curls you can't see.

Playing catch up

We are still trying to recuperate from our fun Christmas trip to Utah (although you wouldn't know we were there on Christmas because I have no pictures to prove it. That's 2 years in a row where I get so caught up in Kiara and her taking it all in that I totally space taking pictures. We do have video though for archival purposes). We were lucky enough to go for 2 weeks since this is Ben's "slow" season at work and his office was shut down most of the time we were gone.

I won't bore anyone with a day by day travelogue of everything we did, especially since there was too much going on to even remember. We did manage to sneak in a few naps

though since every night we stayed up way too late playing games.

(BTW, Kiara is totally faking in this picture. She likes to play "the sleeping game" a lot, she even throws in some fake snoring for effect.)

A few other highlights include:

• Bowling. We got a ramp for the 3 youngest kids and let them have a turn pushing the ball together. They thought it was the greatest idea anyone had ever come up with and got so excited whenever we told them it was their turn. Thomas and Kiara would start clapping as soon as they let the ball go, long before it ever knocked down any pins. The 3 of them even got a strike!
  
  
• Seeing my best friends. I love watching Kiara play with Allison's kids, Jonah & Caitlyn. They get along great...
  
  ...and I even got the perfect picture of Jonah giving Kiara "the eye." It will be perfect to display at their wedding! They are so cute together.
  
  
• Lots and lots of cousin time. I think there was only one day the whole trip where we didn't see at least one cousin. It was great and Kiara was in heaven!
  
• Playing in the snow. For the most part I see snow as a nuisance & I really don't miss it but winter, and more specifically Christmas vacation, is not complete without a little sledding. This was Kiara's first year and we didn't know how she'd like it, especially since she hated her snowsuit and refused to keep gloves on but once again she amazed us. She is our little daredevil and loved every minute of it. We wouldn't even get to the bottom of the hill before she'd start begging to go again.
  
  (I know you can't really tell who anyone is in the second picture but I think the mountains look beautiful.)

Overall our trip was the perfect mix of relaxation and fun but we are kind of glad to be home and back in our normal routine. You can only sit around eating junk and letting your mom (or mother-in-law) wait on you for so long before you start to feel lazy and need to be productive again. We do appreciate my parents so much though and are so grateful to them for always opening their home to us and spoiling us more than we deserve.

Except this little girl, she deserves all the spoiling anyone can throw at her!