Tender mercies

One major blessing that we've received as we've prepared for our yard sale and eBay sales is SCHOOL CLOTHES.  As I sorted through bin after bin after bin of outgrown clothing, I found that we had plenty to sell to bring in more funds for our adoption, but also enough to provide complete school wardrobes for six kids, right down to coats.  All they still need is shoes.  We have special savings accounts for things like school clothes, christmas, vacation, etc. (a la Dave Ramsey), and because we aren't having to use so much of the clothing fund for clothes, we can use that money toward the adoption.  I knew that we had a lot of clothes, and we go through them all every October and allocate them to the right people, but holy cow - we somehow ended up with a TON!  And another bonus is that I have a lot of stuff that will work for Thalia when she gets here.  Our teenagers buy a lot of their own clothes, so that will help cut down on our costs, too.  What a blessing!

Big boo-boos for my baby boy Bekele

This was not Beck's weekend.  Things started to go sour when our awesome neighbor, Jacob, came by to pick Beck up for a "man date."  The two of them went to get ice cream, and on the way home, Beck face-planted and gouged his eyebrow.

Then, the next morning, he, Sofie and Jackson were putting bikes and toys into the shed in the backyard and Beck was stung twice by a wasp.  Poor guy.  I'm bracing for the third bad thing...

Weekly menu

Here's a list of our Bountiful Baskets from this week:

Conventional:
red potatoes
red bell peppers
baby carrots
romaine lettuce
english cucumbers
grape tomatoes
peaches
plums
red grapes
blueberries

Organic:
broccoli
beets
radicchio
eggplant
green bell pepper
tomatoes
red grapes
cantaloupe
blueberries
pluots (giant ones!)
peaches

On top of that, our garden is starting to produce prolific quantities of cucumbers, and we have bell peppers and zucchini coming.  I also made the mistake of buying some blueberries yesterday (which is like washing your car to make it rain), and we ended up with 8 additional pints!  I also bought strawberries and bananas (good call), some sugar snap peas for lunches, and some mushrooms.  I had some cucumbers, green beans, summer squash, peaches, plums and nectarines left from last week, so we're trying to gobble a lot of them up today and tomorrow.  I roasted up a big pan of summer squash and zucchini that we'll eat for lunch today.  


Here's my menu for the coming week, or at least part of it!  We're taking a quick trip down to Denver because Lily has to have her cochlear implant processors mapped, and we'll be seeing my sister's family while we're there.  I'm not sure what we'll be eating those days, but we're packing our coolers with a couple of days's worth of food to help keep our costs down.  

Monday dinner:  Roasted green beans and radicchio with garlic

New pictures and info!

I got a few teaser pictures with a promise of more to come.  Thalia looks so beautiful and happy!  And as great as the pictures are, the information is even more priceless because it helps us better understand her abilities and personality.  We can't get her home soon enough!

Here is what one of the women who met Thalia had to say about her:


I can't say with absolute certainty that I heard her speak but that could be because we were strangers and in an overwhelming environment. I speak a little Chinese so to get her smiling and comfortable I would take a picture of her, show her, and ask "who's that?" in Chinese. Then she'd get this precious little smile on her face and point to her chest. After the first few times, she got really happy and silly and was very animated for the camera. I think she may have said something while pointing to my sunglasses. I took them off my head and held them out to her and she very distinctly nodded and smiled. Like I said though, I can't be sure if what I heard was a word or more along the lines of baby babble. She was a very effective gestural communicator though and really shone once she was further away from a big group. 


I remember my sister M's adoption profile describe her as a very quiet introvert. But after maybe a day of being outside the hectic orphanage setting, she transformed into this wild, cackling, chatty girl. Song Guo reminded me of her in that sense. She was incredibly charming and animated- overall, I thought, a very bright, happy little girl.


As for her size, my mom and I were shocked to find out she was 7. She is tiny! My guess would have been 4 or 5. But my mom says she came across as being "sturdy" as all the Bao An girls appeared to be. You can see in the group picture where she stands with everyone else. 


Here are the pictures!  I will add the others as soon as we get them.

Surviving the yard sale and a weekly menu teaser

Over the past week, we've been getting ready for today's yard sale, and I swear I'm about worn out!  Most of what we planned to sell was kids' clothing, but a lot of it was stuff that I knew I'd get better money for on eBay.  That meant I had to go through every single bin of clothing we had (maybe 30 of them?) and separate out the stuff that I could sell here.  I did MASSIVE amounts of laundry to get everything ready, and it didn't help that we managed to pick one of the hottest weeks of the summer to do this.  Last night we finally got to bed at 1:00 am, but we had to get up at 5:00 to get everything ready for the sale.  Four hours of sleep wasn't much to go on with all we had to do, and what energy we did have was sucked away by the hot, humid weather.  Ugh.

Anyway...

Our sale ran from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, and in that time we made about $1560.  I was thrilled!  All the big items sold right away, we got quite a few giveaway entries, and in the end we only had 4 bags of clothes left to take to St. Vincents.  Not too bad!  Several of our friends and my mom also made treats for us to sell, so those helped bring in a lot of money too.

I have my work cut out for me with getting the rest of the clothes sold on eBay.  I think it will probably take me about 2 weeks to get it all done, but I'm going to try to do just a bin per day so I don't get overwhelmed.  The bonus in all of this is that going through all the stored clothing at once allowed us to do quite a bit of school clothes "shopping."  Lily, Maizie, Sofie, Cora and Jackson need absolutely nothing else for school except some shoes.  And Beck has quite a few new things.  Pretty exciting!

The great thing about this whole yard sale experience has been how well my whole family has chipped in and helped.  We took the kids out for an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant as a reward for their hard work, and we had a lot of fun.  After dinner, we came home and collected the four bags of clothes, returned the borrowed tables to their rightful owners, and cleaned up the living room and hallway.  Only the dining room is still filled with stuff, and I can stand that a little longer.  It was a very productive day!

As for Bountiful Baskets and my menu, I haven't had any time to do any planning, but here's a list of what we got.  I'll post my menu as soon as I'm able.  :o)

green grapes

plums

raspberries 

nectarines

cantaloupe 

strawberries

Mt. Ranier cherries (15 lb case)

broccoli

radicchio

cilantro

corn

yellow squash

heirloom tomatoes

bagged carrots and funky carrots (I don't know what they're called, but they're purple and white and yellow)

collard greens

English cucumbers

cucumbers

spinach

butter lettuce

green beans

leaf lettuce

And here's what we have left from last week, or that I purchased:

mushrooms

plums

butternut squash

potatoes

bananas

garden cucumbers

Thalia, the sack of potatoes

Last night I had a dream about Thalia.  It wasn't one of those really weird dreams that only makes sense  while you're asleep, and then you wake up and go, "What the crap?" (like the one that I had about Maizie, in which she was delivered to me by mail, in a blue and white striped shoebox, and I was shocked to discover that she had a human head but doll's body).   It was a dream that felt totally normal and like an extension of my regular life, and it's left me missing her all day.

We were in some sort of hotel or something, and she was sitting down in a chair and I was squatting down in front of her.  I was testing her to see how much English she knew, and I was surprised that not only did she understand what I was saying, but that she could speak to me a little bit too.  Then she put her hands on my cheeks and looked right into my eyes, and we gave each other a huge hug.  She was sweet and giggly and snuggly.  After that, even though she's 7 (and about the size of a 5-year-old), I hiked her up on my hip and lugged her around like a toddler.  She was very heavy, and because of her low tone, she wasn't doing much to help hold on.  It was like lugging around a sack of potatoes.  Later, I was giving her a bath, and she fell over, beneath the water level.  I reached in to grab her, but found that I had to use all my strength to get her upright again.  She didn't use any of her own muscles to help with the effort.  After the bath, the memory of my dream is vague, but I remember just being with her and being so happy.  I was so disappointed when I woke up, and I kept trying to get back to sleep and pick up where I left off.  No such luck.

I think my brain was plugging in experiences I've had with the kids I've worked with who have Down syndrome.  Having low muscle tone is pretty much a given.  But the personality she seemed to have seemed so right.  I felt like I really knew her and she was just so mine.  

I miss her and I haven't even met her yet.

More pictures to come!

Last night I got this email from a woman who just got back from China:

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Hello,

We just got home from China and are a bit jet lagged so have not gotten to photos yet, but we took many of your adorable daughter! Just wanted you to know how cute her little personality is, what a doll! My daughter and I fell in love with her! Pictures soon after some much needed sleep! Just wanted you to know mission accomplished!

M
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Even this little bit of info gave me such a boost. I can't wait to see the pictures!