Red Bird

Our time spent on "Red Bird" wasn't as great as the previous week. I was sick for 10 days with a head cold, and so that kind of made it hard to get to it every day. I didn't spend as much time on "bird" as I did "red", so I will review birds with him as the weeks go by. He can say his version of Red and a bird is "twwee tweee" (Tweet tweet). So we will work on that still too! We red "Our Nest is Best" which had birds in it, and of course, "Brown Bear Brown Bear!"

Here is our sensory bin of red objects in bird seed.

We colored with red crayons and markers. He LOVED the marker! We also practiced putting on red stickers, which he kept asking for "mo!" (More)

 He got to explore the red bin. He wasn't sure about the bird seed at first, but by the end, he thought throwing it in the air was pretty fun. Oh boy. 

 We used dot markers to color in a bird. He really liked using this too. So we colored his other bird sheet with the dot marker too.

 We practiced stringing red beads. This will be a work in progress. I plan to try this every week just to work on some motor skills.

 We played with the red bin again, except this time OUTside. :)

 Here is our "Red Bird" lunch.

 We worked on making a red bird craft. He was getting a little feisty during this craft because he wanted to play with the glue stick and not really stick things on the glue. But we finished it up quickly. :)

 We then made a red hat! 

 He kept looking in the mirror and saying "Hi Jace" and laughing. He apparently thought the red hat was pretty funny.

 We painted a "bird house" red! (Notice the red paint on his mouth… he first tried to eat it!) 

 He then wanted to paint a piece of paper.

 And that quickly turned into finger painting.

 Jace helped me put bird seed in our bird house for the non-existent birds we have in our yard, since we have no trees, no real grass, no watering system, no plants…. And then the bird house fell down by the end of the night. Haha. Fail. 

 We drank special red milk. 

These things lasted about a week and half, so this week has been very chill. We will pick it up again next week!

Habakkuk 3:17-19

Matt sent me these verses this morning. So great for my heart, as we move onto the cycle that will cause us to hit the year mark for trying to get pregnant.

"Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer's; he makes me tread on my high places."

I am really struggling to find the joy in this. But I certainly am trying to shepherd my heart in that direction.

As excited as I am about adoption (and I am REALLY excited about this journey), it doesn't take away the desire to be pregnant. Each month that we don't get pregnant is still hard. I found out today that we have been assigned to a caseworker at CFC (Christian Family Care)! YAY! ….but she is out of town for the next two weeks. I just want to jump full in to this process, and at every turn I seem to have to wait. I broke down in tears over this reality that nothing seems to be happening quickly for me. I sound so impatient, and I am! I am having to work overtime in shepherding my heart back to contentment. I'm struggling.

Anyways, just a rough day here. I want my heart to be like these verses… "rejoice(ing) in the Lord" especially when things aren't going the way I desire.

Brown Bear Brown Bear

We have officially started tot school!!! Brown Bear Brown Bear is our first unit (thank you, Kristin, for many of the ideas!). I am really aiming at just having fun with Jace and if he learns something along the way, cool! While there are many words he will repeat when I ask him to, apparently Brown and Bear aren't those words. The first day he said "bra" for brown…. cool, I'll call that a win. But then he wouldn't repeat it the rest of the week. If I ask him to say the word bear, he now makes an angry face and does a low growl. We will get there. :) By the 3rd day, however, he could point to whatever animal I asked him to point to in the book. So I know he knows more than what he is communicating! 

Here is our bin of brown items!

Jace wanted to wear the brown pipe-cleaners on his head.

We started each day by reading the book! (Which is now his new favorite book for me to read)

I found him sitting in his bin, reading the book by himself. 

We played "hide and seek" with brown bear. (Which was me trying to run ahead of Jace to put the bear somewhere… he usually just watched me put it down and then would pick it up and hand it to me!) He loved this! Oh, and yes, that is a pair of shorts on his head and one sandal. Seriously just a typical day in our house… he is such a clown. 

We then colored with brown crayons and used brown stickers!

We hung his picture on the fridge and he put magnets on!

I made a brown bear for him for lunch. 

We watched a 2.5 minute video about bears! He loves this video and watched it a few times!

We tried matching heads and tails, and then a cartoon bear to a real life bear. He wanted nothing to do with this. Hopefully he will come around in time.

We tried sorting gummy bears. But this was his first reaction to seeing the gummy bears.

So we moved on to plastic counting bears. He didn't want to sort anything. So he just played with the bears in the egg carton. 

We colored a brown bear. As you can see, the coloring didn't last long. Just a few scribbles of brown. :) 

We also painted with brown paint and made a Bear face!

Daddy read Brown Bear Brown Bear to Jace.

And this is Jace pointing to the brown bear!

It was a really fun week! I am excited to review brown and bears with him throughout the upcoming weeks to see if he will start saying those words. It's such a quick overview during the week, that I hope the repetition during the upcoming weeks will solidify it more. I don't push it much. When he looses interest, we are done. So these activities don't last long at all. But we have fun during those few minutes. :) 

And so it begins...

Well, today it begins! We have filled out our application for adoption and are sending it in to Christian Family Care! After some mediocre results with some fertility testing, we are so ready to pursue adoption! I am very thankful that God has really softened my heart (as well as Matt's) to the point where we are STOKED to pursue this journey. "Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established," Proverbs 16:3. We are excited to see how God will work in this process. I will post updates as they come, but I expect the timeframe from beginning to end to take a while. :)

July!

Well, looks like it's time to catch up for July! ;)

Well, I found out that I am getting a niece!!! I am so excited. Little Dakota Madeline is already so loved! <3 

This was the first year that we participated in Chik-Fi-le's free food day! :) It was actually a lot of fun, and you can't beat free food. :) Here are a few pictures! Isn't my Jace cow so cute??? 

Matt's birthday fell on a Monday this year, and so he took the day off. With not many things planned this year, he has quite a few days-off to take before he looses them in October. So taking off his birthday was a no-brainer! We spent the day together, which was so nice. Barb watched Jace at her house during his nap and we picked him up around 5 and met most of the family at Joe's BBQ for dinner. Jace did so well, which was awesome. We don't venture out to eat much with him, so it's nice to see him doing well when we do go out to eat. Abbi works at Joe's BBQ now as a busser, and so we got to see her in action! Jace loves Abbi so much!

We also had our very first family movie night with Jace! It was so much fun. He LOVED the popcorn! We watched The Lego Movie (which seriously, is sooo funny. Matt was cracking up so much! We both want to get the DVD one day. I definitely recommend it!). Jace made it through about 45 minutes before it was bed time, but he did well. I think he liked climbing on the pillows and sitting on the couch in the dark. :)

Oh, and there's nothing like finding Jace sitting on top of the kitchen table… I tell you what, I have my hands full with how curious this kid is. Love him to pieces. 

I love me some cuddles!

I will end this post with a statement I read in Jerry Bridge's book, "Trusting God" that I've been thinking a lot about the last couple days. "I once attended a seminar on the subject of Christians and stress. One of the speaker's main points was that, if we want to live less stressful lives, we must learn to live with a single agenda: God's agenda. He pointed out that we tend to live under two agendas; ours and God's, and that the tension between them sets up stress." I stopped to think about that and found it so true in my life. I am trying to live under two agendas! My agenda included having kids between 18 months and 2 years apart… The fact that my agenda didn't happen makes me stressed! I am trying to not be the planner I like to be, and to remember that God's plan for me is already figured out. When things don't happen according to plan, that's my plan failing, not God's plan for me. In fact, all is going perfectly to his plan for me! Anyways, it gave me a new perspective on what I allow to stress me out--it is often because my agenda isn't lining up with God's agenda. I just need to put my agenda away! :) 

Okay, and one more from the same book (Man, Jerry Bridges just has a way of wording things that just stops me in my tracks and I'm like, WOW! So good.) "God never pursues His glory at the expense of the good of His people, nor does He ever seek our good at the expense of His glory. He has designed His eternal purpose so that His glory and our good are inextricably bound together. What comfort and encouragement this should be to us. If we are going to learn to trust God in adversity, we must believe that just as certainly as God will allow nothing to subvert His glory, so He will allow nothing to spoil the good He is working out in us and for us."

"But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world." 1 Timothy 6:6-7