A little recap...

I know.  It's just shameful.  I had such great intentions of staying on top of our life (our adoption doings, in particular) as we wait for YunLi, but life just happened and here we are.  Please accept my humble apology, and delight your eyes with the Cliff's Notes version (text and photo) of our summer here.

• School got out.  We did stuff.  Weekly activities at the library, art classes, piano, gymnastics, early Saturday morning family/friend soccer games, hikes at Makoshika, day trips to Billings, a rained-out trip to the Medora musical (musical-less, thanks to the deluge), reading, snow cone snacks, baking...  This was probably the most scheduled summer we've had in years.  And I liked it.  I think I can count on two hands the number of times the B-word was uttered by a child.  (No, not that B-word, "bored.")
• I dislocated my shoulder at the end of July while playing soccer with a bunch of little kids.  I'm not proud.  I'm also not healed.  I start PT this week and may have surgery on the horizon.  Pray that I won't have to go there.  
• We came up with a name for YunLi:  Zinnia Joyce YunLi.  Joyce was my great-aunt's name, and Zinnia is a name we both love.
• Our dossier was logged in in China on August 19th, and our agency is giving us a loose prediction of December or January travel.
• Joshua was just transferred back to one of his old areas and gets to spend the last 5 weeks of his mission NOT being an assistant.  He's very excited about that.  WE are very excited that we get to pick him up a few days early and our entire family will get to go to General Conference together.  Super awesome!  
• We went to the county fair just before school started and Maizie and Sofie became zipper initiates.  There's no way I would have gone on the zipper at their age.  I scream like a baby (and might even utter a few choice words in my terror) even now.
• We're homeschooling Maizie and Sofie and the rest of the kids are in public school.  The first week is done, and things went great, but this is the week that all the after-school activities start up.  Ugh.  
• Our sweet Poppy (our corgi) passed away unexpectedly from a suspected brain tumor.  We miss her terribly, but we have a new little "Augi" (corgi/mini Aussie mix) named Rocket who is lots of fun.  We also have a yet-to-be name sheltie puppy coming in early October.  
• I got a job.  It's not much of a job, but I'll be spending this school year supervising the two new school district speech pathologists.  It's a whopping 2.5 hours per week, but it will help with our adoption expenses.
• I've been busy applying to college for Joshua.  He's already been accepted to BYU-Idaho, but he's holding out for BYU-Provo.  We're all crossing our fingers.  

Those are the major points, except for lots more cruddy things that happened, that I'd rather not revisit.  ;)

Ready for the dance recital

Cool photo that Joshua and the other assistant took in Milwaukee

Running through the sprinklers

Sofie's 11th birthday

At Elitch Gardens in Denver

Weird Uncle Jay...

With the fam for my niece's baptism

4th of July parade - gymnastics kids (Thalia's in the blue leo)

More parade pics  (Cora and Jack)

And still more parade pics (Maizie and Sofie)

Jonah subbed as a drummer for the Catholic school marching band.  Doesn't he look thrilled to be wearing that hat?

Dancing at the 4th of July concert

Zoe, in a rare face-showing shot.  Isn't she lovely?

Jonah drumming in his uncle's band

At the library after an activity.  Sitting on Rodys and thinking of Grandma Thorley.  ;)

A birthday surprise for me!

Jonah, master piggy-back giver

Hiking at Makoshika

Hanging out with two of my sisters (I'm on the right)

spousie-selfie

Makoshika again

Saying goodbye to our beloved Poppy - truly the best dog who ever was.  <3

And saying hello to our little Rocket (right)

Beck's 8th birthday

Beck and Jack at their British soccer camp

Ethan and Jonah's 16th birthday

Joshua (blue guy in the middle) and the other mini-golf crazed elders

Our authenticated dossier!

Celebrating Joshua's 21st birthday without him ;)

Our little sheltie puppy.  She is as of yet nameless and will be joining us in early October.

At the fair - our last hurrah of summer

All but the two on either end are ours.  ;)

Torturing new missionaries

Thalia getting her baptism lessons

First day of school for Maizie and Sofie

New picture of YunLi/Zinnia!

First day of school for Lily, Cora, Thalia, Jackson and Beck

First day of school for the rest of the teens (Lily - right - started the day before)

Bountiful Baskets haul, with a photo bomber

Rocket's getting bigger!

Joshua (2nd from right) before leaving for his last area

Another new picture of sweet Zinnia.  Isn't she so cute?!

Mother's Day 2014

Mother's Day is always more like "Mother's Weekend" at our house for a couple of reasons.  One, I guess I'll confess that I like to milk it for all it's worth, and two, since we don't go out and do social things on Sundays, the fun stuff needs to happen on Saturday.

Teffy ended up coming home with a friend on Friday night, which was a nice surprise, and Curtis and I were able to go out on our regular date.  We'd made a plan to spend Saturday going to Jackson and Beck's last two soccer games and then to the nursery to pick out plants for our flower beds (that Curtis would plant later that day as his gift to me), but it was freezing cold and raining, so things changed a bit.  One of the two games was cancelled, and it was too cold to risk putting the plants in the ground, so they're in the garage until Tuesday.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a good thing that I had some extra time because I realized I'd made a big goof!

I was put in charge of gifts for the 18+-year-old women at our church for Mother's Day, and in addition to ordering cute little notepad sets for each of them, I planned to make giant blondies for them.  I made a few pans each day during the week, cut them, wrapped them, and put them in the freezer, and by Thursday I was done.  I was pretty proud of myself!  But Saturday afternoon I decided to double-check my count, and I discovered I was short by 14!  I ended up having to make two more pans of blondies, and I was so grateful that I hadn't realized my blunder as we were packaging everything up on Sunday morning.  That would have been awful.

I'm the music leader in our children's program, and in our main worship service, I had the kids sing a super cool song to their mothers, after a short reading by one of the older girls in our group.  She read a scriptural account from Alma 56 in the Book of Mormon about young men who were able to go to battle in defense of their countrymen and families as their parents had sworn an oath never to take up arms again.  These young men were not afraid because of the lessons their mothers had taught them, and because of their mothers' great faith.  In the end, none of these young men was killed in the battle.  So cool!  Anyway, the song the kids sang referenced this story, and they sang it with such gusto that there was hardly a dry eye in the chapel.  I was quite pleased because I had told the kids their goal was to make their moms cry happy tears.  They succeeded in making quite a few dads cry, too.  ;)

After this, the fathers of the missionaries who are serving from our congregation were called up to read letters that the missionaries had written to their moms.  I knew this was coming because I had helped to plan the program, but hearing my son's sweet words to me was the most amazing thing.  The other moms were completely surprised and in tears as their tearful husbands choked out their sons' words.  We then had two speakers who did a really nice job talking about mothers of all sorts.  It was truly one of the best Mother's Day programs I've ever seen.  I loved it.

After church, we had a nice lunch (oh, and I forgot to mention that Zoe had arrived that morning.  She invited her boyfriend and he came, too).  Teffy gave me some beautiful flowers and some candy and some of the kids gave me sweet things they'd made at school.  My teens have promised to write me letters, which I will nag them about until they do it.  ;)  Curtis made me breakfast (not in bed, since that doesn't work when you have to get up when I do on Sunday mornings!) and plans to get the plants in on Tuesday.  But the highlight of my Mother's Day was being able to Skype with my sweet missionary son for an hour.  He looked and sounded WONDERFUL and is obviously so happy.  He's doing just great, and it's crazy to think that the next time we talk (in 4 months and 25 days - ha!) it will be in person.  I'm so proud of him.

Mother's Day has become a bittersweet holiday for me, but I feel that my mom is aware of the goings-on in our lives, and I know she loves me.  I love my sweet family and feel so blessed to have all of them in my life.

Here are some screenshots from our Skype session with Joshua.

And this is Beck's short play from the collection of first grade Mother's Day plays at his school.  :)

Joshua's email - week 81

I don't usually post Joshua's full emails anymore, but it's been a while and today for some reason, I felt like I should.  We got to Skype with him yesterday for Mother's Day, which was SO awesome, and it was clear to me that he is doing amazingly well.  He is happy, confident, and totally on fire for what he is doing.  I am so very proud of him.  :)

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Week 81

This week was sweet!  We were really busy this week with some realllllyyyy long meetings haha, so there's not a lot to share, but I'll tell you about a few of the highlights!

Monday:
The weather finally started getting nice! Woohoo! I love it!  Even though short sleeved white button up shirts make you look like a dorky 20 year old boy scout*, they're really nice to have when it gets hot! haha

Tuesday-Wednesday:
I went on exchanges with Elder J again, (he's the one who came out with me).  He's so sick! I LOVE that kid!  He's way humble and he's just fun to talk to, so we had a lot of fun working together and talking throughout the day.  We gave a lesson at a member's house (for dinner) about the Atonement and then talked about family history and they LOVED IT.  They loved it so much that they told our mission president about it hahaha. Woohoo!

We talked to a bunch of kids on campus at UWM.  There was this one kid named T that we were talking to for like 15 minutes.  He was SWEET!  We were teaching him the Restoration, and RIGHT when I got to the story of Joseph Smith's First Vision and he was feeling the Spirit HARDCORE, the bus he was waiting for pulled up and started driving away!!! So he ran in front of the bus to stop it, then hopped on and we never got a chance to give him a Book of Mormon, a card or ANYTHING!!! Dang it!!!!!!! It was pretty funny actually how it all worked out, but it was really frustrating!

Thursday-Friday:
I went on exchanges with Elder G.  He's SICK!!! We ate at the family's house that we ate at last time.  The mom's name is A.  She's Filipino and AWESOME.  She made us some really good curry.  The next day, we went and contacted some people and tracted and street contacted between visits.  The first door we knocked, a young Hmong guy let us in.  He was with his two kids and he was just about to go to work.  We taught him about family history and the importance of keeping records and then taught about the Book of Mormon.  He seemed to really like it, so we set up an appointment with him for this week!  Hopefully the elders can start teaching the whole family! :)

As we were street contacting, we were just BOLD.  It was sweet.  We talked to lots of people and a few of them were really interesting....... but it was definitely fun hahaha.  One of the people we visited is a Jehovah's witness convert.  She told us about her story a little bit and then she asked about the Book of Mormon.  She accepted a copy to read, but it didn't really go anywhere outside of just giving her a copy.  So that was really funny because like 30 minutes later, we were driving to go visit someone else, and I saw this young hispanic kid walking down the street in a black suit with a black button up shirt and a black vest.  I jokingly said to Elder G, "it's another Jehovah's Witness!" and then we drove away and turned to go visit the person.  We got out of the car and noticed a little stand with a box with a door on the top.  It was a free library box.  You can put a book in it and take one out.  It's pretty cool.  They have them all over Milwaukee.  So we decided to put a couple copies of the Book of Mormon in it.  We both wrote our testimonies in them and put them there.  As we were standing there, the kid in the black suit was walking by!  He walked straight past us and he was like 20 feet away when I yelled, "Hey! what are you dressed up for?!"  He turned with a big smile and said, "I'm a Jehovah's Witness!"  So I was right!  His name was L and he's 18 years old.  He was so cool!  We talked to him for like 20 minutes just about proselyting and what the people are like that he talks to.  He was way chill.  We had a really good discussion.  I always hate those situations because you don't want to come off as the prideful jerk who only cares about converting people.  But we ended up transitioning into teaching the Restoration in a way that didn't sound cocky, prideful, or arrogant, so that was sweet! :p He was genuinely interested in what we teach, so he asked what our message was.  It was a pretty cool experience I guess haha.  He was seriously a way cool kid, so it was fun talking to him.

Saturday:
I was on exchanges with Elder S.  He's LEGIT!  Seriously one of the funniest kids I know! I love that kid!  We visited a ton of people in this little town called ***, Wisconsin.  We had some good experiences there.  Probably the coolest thing that happened was a member referred us to her friend who has like 6 adopted children from Ethiopia, so I was able to go talk to her friend about her adopted children and we taught her about the Book of Mormon and she accepted one to read for herself!  That was pretty much the highlight of the day.

Anyway, it's been a really good week. It was sweet getting to skype home for the last time!  It feels weird that it was the last time! Ahhhhh!

Anyway I hope everyone has a wonderful week!  Love you all!

Elder Josh Whicker

*Obligatory dorky 20-year-old boy scout photo ;)