Picking Pumpkins at the Pouring Pumkin Patch (a tongue-twister!)

I decided on Saturday to not care about chores or whether the house was messy and to spend the day with Katya and Tony doing something fun. Alex was working but I had the brilliant idea that it would be fun to carve pumpkins. So I called my mom up to see if she and my nieces and nephews wanted to participate and we made plans to meet up at the pumpkin patch so that the kids could hand-pick their pumpkins! It was lightly sprinkling when we arrived at the pumpkin patch and by the time we had the kids out of the car and they had picked out their wheelbarrows to push around, it was pouring! I have actually never been to a pumpkin patch and while I would definately recommend the large selection it offers, I would not recommend you visiting one in the pouring rain with six children. Luckily my sister Cathy had come along with my mom and I and she actually got a picture of us sopping wet carting around pumpkins (I will have to get that from you later Cathy!). Tony was asleep on my shoulder but woke up, startled by all the wetness that was suddenly on his face. By the time we had picked our pumpkins, we were muddy, wet and cold and I think the guy appreciated our dedication because he gave us the pumpkins for very cheap.

We took them back to my mom's house to carve. The kids had fun getting all the "pumpkin guts" out and the carving activity entertained them for a while.

Katya carved a smiley face on one side and a heart on the other.
Savannah had ambitions to carve one of the intricate designs out the book but in the end, her dad finished the carving!

It almost too hard to tell Ethan from the jack-o-lantern!

I think Jacob carved the face all by himself - it turned out really cute!

I didn't get a very good picture of Jaden (a.k.a. Captain Underwear) carving his pumpkin - hopefully Cathy got a better one!

Even the adults joined in the fun - mostly to help with those sticky "insides" but I carved a face on my pumpkin and Cathy roasted the pumpkins seeds for us.

Tony walked around getting into trouble and being adorable!

Mean mommy

Sometimes I feel so mean. I really don't want to be the bad guy but I am tired and just don't have the patience for the "no" answer that inevitably follows any request. Why can't Katya sometimes just say "yes mom" and go to bed without a fight. Alex had a talk with her last week about how it is in her best interest to not say "no" to everything - prompted by her decision to not stop the gymnastics routine in front of the TV when asked (to which Alex responded that she is now not allowed to do any gymnastics anywhere in the house anymore). But it doesn't seemed to have helped.


I am so tired. Tired of working so much, tired of getting home at 7:30 only to fight with Katya about what is for dinner, fight about doing her homework, and then fight about going to bed. Last week Alex was on bed duty because I was to the point where I was tired of fighting over it and was resigned to just telling Katya that she had to be in her room after 9 pm and I didn't really care if she went to sleep or not as long as she didn't make noise so that I couldn't sleep and got up for school the next morning. Alex didn't like that idea and so he said that he would try getting her to bed and that worked out very well for me (I don't know how it worked out for him!). I lost my temper tonight with her, though, when I told her and Kaylie that it was time for bed and they looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language (believe me - Katya knows what the phrase bedtime in English means) and said that they had decided that they were sleeping in the family room instead of their beds. Kaylie relented after I told them sternly that they were not sleeping downstairs but it took me physically picking Katya up off the couch and nudging her in the direction of her bedroom to which she responded by storming off and crying. I think Alex is definately back on bed-duty.

Ukraine kids

It is crazy to think that it has been almost a year since we first met Katya. We went to the airport on Saturday to see the next group of kids come from the orphanage and it was surreal to watch the host families nervously waiting for their "child" and to see the mayhem that took place with getting the kids matched up with the people that will be their family for the next couple of weeks (and hopefully for forever).

I remember the airport last year - me with my pregnant belly, Alex, my parents, Alex's parents, Allie, my brother Josh, my brother Jeff and Audra and their kids - holding the signs that Allie had helped Alex and I decorate that said "Welcome Katya and Sasha" in Russian and wearing Halloween name tags with our names spelled out phonetically in Russian. We stood with our eyes peeled on the top of the escalator, anxiously waiting to catch that first glimpse of the kids. "What is taking them so long?", I remember thinking. I was sure that I would recognize them, that there would be this moment when I would look at them and they would look at me and they would be so happy to see me. But I honestly didn't recognize them. I had looked at their pictures so many times, but I wasn't sure which ones they were. I had to just stand there and wait - wait for our names to be called and escorted towards the little girl in the pink coat and short hair with the blue balloon and the little boy in the red coat with the yellow balloon. They looked different than their picture, I remember thinking. They don't seem excited, which worried me. What do I say to them? They didn't seem too impressed with our name tags and when I pointed out my name to Katya she glanced at it with a disinterested look. The kids were tired, of course, and watching the kids on Sunday as they posed for pictures that seemed like they would never end, I think back on how long our journey was from the Ukraine back home and I feel sorry that we didn't just take them home and put them to bed.

I am a bit envious of the excitement that the families had because it makes me remember my excitement but it also makes me realize that it doesn't last forever. This dream that we have of bringing a new child into our family isn't always a dream - reality hits and you see that these are just kids. Kids like any other kids who don't wake up every morning and thank you for giving them the opportunity to have a family. Sometimes they hurt your feelings and sometimes they make you weary - wondering if life will ever settle into normalcy where you don't have to wonder if the next minute they are going to storm off in a huff. Maybe it is just my naivity and lack of parenting experience that makes me think this isn't normal.

One of the little boys that came from Katya's orphanage is a little boy named Vlad. I realized when I saw him that he was the main reason that I wanted to come to the airport. If we had wanted to adopt another child while we were over there, he would have been it. He is such a cute boy - always has a smile - and never tires of having "thumby wars" or singing "A Sailor by the Sea, Sea, Sea". I think I had a dream about him the other night because I woke up thinking about him. I sure hope that his host family falls in love with him. People ask me all the time if I am glad that we did it. I never hestitate to say yes because I truly am glad. I can't imagine our family without Katya. When they ask if we want to do it again I definatively answer no. However, if we had an extra $30K laying around and Vlad had no place to go, I might change my answer...

I cried when I wrote this post, remembering Sasha. I feel guilty because we left him there. We were horrible at writing and I am sure that he thinks we just abandoned him. I try to make myself feel better by thinking about the Arnold's and the Keller's experience and that if they couldn't get their kids out of that orphanage that we had no hope either. But in some ways that is just a "cop out" because we didn't even try.

Tony walking

Tony just turned nine months last week - on the 13th actually. He has been "cruising" along furniture pretty much since we got back from the Ukraine and has been able to stand well on his own for a couple of months. This past week, when he stands there he had this look that says that he is really thinking about taking a step. Alex and I were playing with him and holding our hands out to him and he was more than happy to give it a try! Of course he wouldn't do it for Grandma Taylor later that day and won't do it since. Oh well! At least we have proof. This evening he was holding on to my pant legs and walking right behind me as he made his adorable giggle. It was so darn cute!
Tony is the joy in my life. I know I am biased - being his mother and all - but I think he is the cutest baby I have ever seen! He has such a happy personality and he is the one person on the house that is always willing to give me big smiles when I get home at the end of the day.

Happy Birthday to me - cake anyone?

So I turned 33 last week on October 15th. You know that you are getting old when you can't remember how old you are - yes, I did have to think..."I was born in 76 and it is now 2009, so that makes me 33?...

My birthday was on a Thursday but since we had Allie on Wednesday, Alex took the kids shopping for a present on Wednesday. I came home from work and all three girls (Allie, Katya, and Kaylie) bombarded me with hugs at the door. This is slightly unusual but not entirely rare but when they wouldn't let me go I figured that Alex had given them the assignment of stalling me. Alex apparantly needed more time to light the 33 candles on my cake, which Tony helped me blow out (Alex pointed out that Tony looks a little worried in the picture. Who wouldn't be - isn't thirty three candles a fire hazard?).

The girls picked me out a matching shirt (as my sister put it - they got a present on your birthday?) which they thought was really great.

I have definately had my cake fill, though. Not only did we have cake on Wednesday, my neighbor also brought me a small cake on Wednesday, we had cake at my work on Thursday, and my mom also made me a cake on Thursday (which I made her take home with her because there was no way I could eat anymore cake). Katya asked me if when her birthday came she could celebrate it for two days in a row :)


The cake we had at my work was an ice cream cake and actually there are still two pieces in the freezer. Yummy...maybe I haven't had my fill of ice cream cake...I will be right back...

Responsibilties

We had to have a meeting over the weekend with Allie & Katya about household responsibilities. Alex was at work on Saturday and so I was the chore nazi, except that my phone died on me and I lost all my contact info so I was really not in the mood to follow the girls around and keep reminding them that they needed to get their chores done. So, I let Katya continue to pout (it usually takes at least 30 minutes for her to get over pouting after she gets her list of chores but sometimes she can go for a long time) for several hours without bugging her. I'm not sure what Allie was doing, except that she wasn't watching TV, playing the computer, or video games because she hadn't done her chores either.

The girls have started wearing makeup which is OK as long as when we tell them that they have too much on they go and wash it off. Well, Katya put on a ton of blue eye shadow and I really didn't care until she decided that she was going to go outside - at which point I told her that she needed to wash some of the makeup off. She replied "no" and I told her that if she didn't go and wash off some of the makeup I was going to throw it away to which she replied "it isn't mine". I find this story comical now because I think it really shows how much English Katya understands - enough to sass me back with a very good reply because the makeup really isn't her's (it's Allie's!) - but at the time I was steaming mad and told her very firmly (and angrily) that she had better get in the house and wash the makeup off! To her credit, she did go into the house (loudly stomping - of course) and she did wash the makeup off and then stayed in her room and pouted for the rest of the afternoon while I tried desperately to restore my contact stuff on my phone (to no avail). Meanwhile, Allie decided to do her chores only because I wouldn't let her go to her friend's house until she was done. By the time Alex got home, I was pretty mad at both girls!
So we had a family meeting on Sunday morning. I read in a book that if you made a list of the things that needed to be done in the household and then let the kids pick some of their chores, that gives them a little sense of control. So I made a list of chores, including chores that Alex and I had to pick from (that we don't really want to do either!), and it was going OK until Katya picked "mowing the lawn" and got mad when we told her that Alex had to help her (as if we would let an eleven year-old girl, who doesn't even know what a lawn mower is, operate it on her own!). In the end, we assigned her most of her chores. Oh well! I told the girls that the chores were completely their choice but that the choice to not do them would come with consequences, including not getting paid, not getting to watch TV, etc. and that when they come and ask us to do something we would probably not be too motivated to say yes. I also told them that I really didn't care how the chores got done (i.e. if they wanted to pay the other person to do them or con one of their friends into doing them) except that if I did them that they would have to pay me. We'll see how it goes. Katya pouted about them for a little but did do most of them, including cleaning out the guinea pig's cage. I had warned her that if she wanted to keep Shadow as a pet that she had better clean out his cage by the end of the day or I would assume that she no longer wanted a pet guinea pig and find him a new home :)

Sometimes parenting can be so exhausting! I was talking to one of my co-workers the other day and we were discussing how much easier it is for you to just do the stupid chores yourself, which is probably why a lot of parents give up. However, how will your kids ever learn responsibility? -sigh

Lunch with the ladies

I had lunch today with some other moms that have adopted children from the Ukraine. It is so comforting to hear that they are going through similar troubles. I think we all have our days when we would really rather not have our beloved children around...

I try so hard to have patience. But when you have a daughter and niece who both need to practice their multiplication tables why in the world would you not want to have them practice them with each other instead of spending fifteen minutes separately with each! Or if she needs to read for twenty minutes a night and her other homework requires her to read a page on the solar sound, why would you not want to combine the two together? Katya can be so difficult and sometimes she just really pushes my buttons! If she only knew how much energy and headache we could save if she would just cooperate. It seems that we spend half of our lives watching her pout and stomp around the house. Usually it is slightly amusing and doesn't bother me. Somedays, though, it just makes me want to close my eyes and pretend that I am back in my pre-mother days :)

The top of my "urk" list is the whole eating thing. I do the thirty-meals-in-a-day thing, where I spend one day a month cooking meals and freeze them so that we actually have food to eat. Last month, Katya helped me cook and I thought if she saw that individually she likes all the ingredients going into the food that she would be more likely to eat. NOT! Even though Alex and I have made the policy that if you don't like what we are eating for dinner you can skip it and wait until breakfast, it still infuriates me that she will take one look at something (doesn't even take a bite of it!) and proclaim that "me no like". I'm sorry but we are not having ketchup (with a side of mashed potatoes), spaghetti, pizza, or McDonalds every night.

The next thing on my "urk" list is bedtime. Bedtime usually starts out with a struggle and ends with a snotty little girl stomping off. I realize that we can't make her fall asleep and that she thinks it isn't fair that she has to go to bed and we don't but we are the parents and between the hours of 9 and 10 we deserve to not have children around (isn't that a god-given right?).

One day I need to make a list of all the things that I love about Katya so that when she makes me so mad I can read it.

Pictures

We went to take pictures on Sunday. One of Katya's friends commented one day that there were no pictures on our "picture" wall of Katya and since then we have made it our goal to change that. We also haven't had any pictures of Tony taken for a while and since we didn't have the $400 that we usually spend at Fotogenix in our budget, we decided to just go to Kiddie Kandids.

We should have prepped Katya days beforehand that she was going to have her picture taken because when we told her that morning what we were doing that day she wasn't happy (did I learn nothing from the whole Hannah Montana concert thing?). It was like pulling teeth to get her to get dressed, she wouldn't put her picture shoes on (so we had to just bring them with us), she turned her nose up at the two shirts we bought at Old Navy and was really just being a pill (I could thing of some not-so-nice ways of putting it!). It took a guilt trip at the photo studio to finally get her to cooperate. I told her that she was having her picture taken whether she smiled or not and that if daddy and I had to look at a grumpy picture on the wall every day it would make us very sad. Mental note to self: the guilt trip worked :)

The pictures actually turned out not too bad, although Tony wouldn't give us one of the really big smiles that he usually doles out. Oh well!

NOTE: We didn't take any pictures of Allie - not because we love her any less but because we have a "gazillion" pictures of her already and because Kiddie Kandids limits the number of poses you can have in a sitting (one of the reasons we stopped going there years ago).

Miley Cyrus

Katya is a huge Hannah Montana fan. She has the songs on the ipod memorized according to their number in the playlist and anytime we are in the car, her request is to listen to Hannah Montana. She (along with all of us - because we have heard each song a million times!) has almost all of the songs memorized. So, we decided to splurge for nosebleed section tickets to Hannah Montana tickets (we were the second to last row from the very top!). We took Allie to Hannah Montana two years ago and since it was on a Tuesday and we didn't have Allie anyway, Katya and I had a "GNO" (Girls Night Out).

The first problem was that I waited until the morning of the concert to tell Katya that we were going. This was actually planned so that Katya couldn't brag to Allie about it and make Allie feel bad. However, after telling Katya that we were going to a concert (and explaining that a concert was where you went and listened to someone sing - to which a disgusted nose wrinkle reply was made) and that Hannah Montana was going to be that person singing, I didn't get quite the reaction I expected. Katya wasn't excited and didn't want to go. It took her the whole morning ride over to my mom's to change her mind - after she had asked if Hannah Montana would be singing more than one song.

Since Katya wasn't excited about it, I called my sister Cathy to see if she wanted to go and put makeup on Katya - thinking that may cause a little bit more hype. Katya thinks my sister Cathy is the greatest thing since ketchup because she has a dog and she has a lot of makeup :) Katya looked very cute with her hair and makeup all done. Cathy had even put press on nails on her (Katya loves press on nails, even though the record time that they have lasted her is about two hours!).

While walking to the concert, Katya told me that she was scared. I then realized why she didn't want to go - she doesn't know anything about concerts and I think perhaps she thought that maybe she was going to meet Miley Cyrus or have to go up on stage and sing with her. I laughed and told Katya that there was nothing to be scared about - that concerts were fun especially with screaming girls.

Apparently, Miley Cyrus was sick. So after enduring a horrible first act, we had to sit through an hour and a half of "concert" where it seemed Miley was off the stage more than on it. We watched one number with just the stage dancers, a clip from her upcoming movie, a half a song where they tried to pass off her backup singer as her (to which Katya leaned over and proclaimed - "That's not Hannah Montana"). I thought that perhaps she would sing at least a couple of Hannah songs, but only sang Miley Cyrus songs and unfortunately Katya doesn't know Miley songs very well. Needless to say, mid "concert" I was really regretting having Katya miss her last softball game and the choice to not sign Katya up for the community ed. art class. Katya kept leaning over every couple of minutes and asking, "All done?" and when I replied, "Not yet" she would slink down in her chair, put her chin on her elbow, and huff. When it was finally "all done", we high-tailed it out of there (not even waiting to see if there was going to be an encore) and listened to Hannah Montana music all the way home.

Alex asked her if she had fun. She said yes. If only...I am sure that she will go to funner concerts in the future.