A New Adventure: An Announcement

Oh my goodness! Can I just tell you how busy we have been? It's a rhetorical question, I'm gonna tell you whether or not you give me permission. We've been super busy. I suppose I won't go into detail and list off all the things that have made us busy. Not that I'm complaining (okay maybe I am just a little bit) but I am a person who likes to take one thing at a time, get half done and move onto the next thing. Being busy is just not that conducive to me being a procrastinator and being able to read whole books in one weekend.

Remember last month when I said that I would like to lead a more simple life? Well I can tell you right now that simple life will probably never happen. I know by now that most of you think that our (my husband's and mine) big announcement is that I'm probably pregnant, well you would only be partially right. The big announcement is.....we are ADOPTING a child from South Korea! At least we hope to adopt a child from South Korea, we might get swallowed up by all the paperwork to never be heard from again.

We have started the paperwork process and hope to get that completed in the next 2 months. Then we will have a home study where we are asked all kinds of personal questions and someone comes to "inspect" our house(eeek!). After our home study we wait, and then wait a little bit more before a child is referred to us. Then we have to come up with a massive amount of money if we accept the referred child. After we accept the referred child he's ours, only we have to wait some more before we can go and bring him back to the States.

I'm referring to our child as "him" as the child referred to us will most likely be a boy around the age of 9 months when we finally arrive home with him.

There are still many unknowns for us like MONEY. We cannot afford the hefty price tag on our own. We will be applying for grants, doing some fund raisers, praying and probably a little bit of begging and pleading. But I do want all of you to know that both my husband and I feel 100% confident that this what God has in store for us. We know that He will provide the money even though we cannot seem to comprehend how.

We are already praying for our child. We do not know if he is born yet, or if he has even been conceived. We are praying for him, his birth parents and his foster parents. We are praying that he will be healthy and that his birth mom will have a good pregnancy. We are also praying that he will have loving foster parents who will be attentive and see to his needs. We are praying that we might be a testimony to his foster parents when we go to South Korea to meet our little one for the first time.

I plan on sharing more information, especially fund raising info, in near future. In the meantime we would appreciate your prayers.

Aha! Ahhh!

So here is some other exciting news! Awhile ago I was asked to film an Aha Moment for the Mutual of Omaha. I was very nervous about going in there and just being a blubbering idiot. It seemed to come out okay although I totally forgot to mention my blog address, that is how the ad agency for the campaign found me, and to mention anything about my faith in Jesus Christ. Yep, I totally blew it on that aspect. I really had good intentions and I kind of played out in my head what I would say. However, when the actually filming began my mind went blank. You can tell in the video where they had to edit out my really long pauses.

I got an e-mail form the ad agency handling the campaign letting me know I was selected for voting. Here is what the e-mail said:

"Congratulations! Your story has been selected as one of the semi-finalists. Your aha moment will appear alongside 74 others where visitors to the site will have the chance to vote for their favorites.

The first round of voting will begin on October 1st and continue through October 15th. After the first round, the top-25 vote getters will win an ipod Nano and move on to the final round of voting, which will begin on October 18th and end on October 31st. Check the website on October 18th to see which moments made the top-25. The top-10 favorite aha moments will be featured in Mutual of Omaha’s 2011 nationwide TV ads, which will begin airing early next year."

Here is the deal, I want you to vote for me. (You can do that here.*) I don't necessarily feel the need to be in the top 10 and be in the commercial because I didn't mention my blog in my video so really not going to build that much traffic to my blog, although you never know. What I really want is to be in the top 25 so that I can win an i-pod to raffle off and put the money from the raffle into our adoption fund. (Doesn't that sound like a good idea? I can't take credit for it, it was my husband's.) Please, please vote for my video. I believe you can only vote once a day, so vote today,then tomorrow and the day after that...


*Their website seems to be having some trouble, just refresh your browser and you should be able to vote.

Random Russian Remembrance: Nightmare Bathrooms

I have nightmares about bathrooms. This is probably going to sound strange to some people but when I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I literally have a nightmare about a bathroom of some sort. Last week it was about peeing in a cup at the doctor's office. In my nightmare the bathroom was open to the waiting room and it was a disgusting bathroom, meaning it wasn't clean at all. Most of my bathroom nightmares revolve around the bathroom not being clean.

I think all this has to do with the bathrooms I encountered in Russia and most notably Sevastople, Ukraine. The bathroom at the Panorama Museum of Sevastople is a little building outside the museum. At least I think that was the museum bathroom. I'm not sure because this was out of the way and a good 100 yards from the actual museum. A group of us girls had to go, me being the oldest took charge and found this building. I would like to note that I was the only one who did not speak Russian at the time. I'm not sure why a group of 13 year old Russian girls just followed me blindly to this building.

Upon entering the building it was clear that there was no electricity. There were also no windows. It was also apparent by the smell that it was indeed a bathroom. There were at least 4 open rooms, one straight ahead with another behind it. The room straight ahead had benches and looked kind of like a locker room, at least that is all we could tell from the dim light from the open door. Off to the right was the toilets, well, the holes in the ground where you do your business, not actually toilets. Each hole was separated by a wall, there were no doors. Not that it mattered it was really too dark to see anything.

There was trash everywhere. We were stepping carefully hoping not to trample on anything that moved. Beyond the toilet room there was another room. But it was too dark to tell where that led or what was in it. There was also some movement going on in that room. I would like for you to take this moment and imagine five 13 year old girls and their leader (me) trying to go to the bathroom very quickly before anything came out of that back room to attack us. There was a lot of 13 year girl screams, then a little nervous laughter, then more screams. And to top it all off, we couldn't actually see the holes in the ground where were supposed to go.

I had my camera with me and wanted to use the flash so that I could at least see where were going and to get a picture of the nightmare bathroom. The girls begged me not to, which I'm sure was wise. They did not want to see what was beyond the toilet room. As I type this my heart rate is going up and I am imagining the fear I felt, which was probably greater than the girls since I lead them into this mess and I was farthest away from the outside door. I had actually positioned myself this way just in case something did come out of that other room and I had to be the one to stop it and the girls could get away. Yes, this bathroom was that scary, think horror movie scary.

I was the last one to go, I made sure the girls were done before I went, and before I knew it they had all left me in there ALONE! They all just ran out of there before I could finish, five 13 year old girls running, screaming as they went out of the most terrible bathroom known to man. And they just left me there ALONE! It took me about 10 seconds to run out behind them. I know that I had stepped in, ummm....something really gross. After making it out the front door I took off my shoes and just rubbed them all over the grass trying to get off whatever it was that I stepped in. Then I used an entire bottle of hand sanitizer all over my feet and my hands.

Now you know why I have nightmares about bathrooms.

Overcoming Rejection

I once heard that man's greatest fear is rejection. I don't know if this is true or not, but what I do know is that it is one of my greatest fears. I struggle with this fear everyday. I seriously just want everyone to like me and like everything that I say or do. I know it's kind of ridiculous and unrealistic. Sometimes I will not take a risk becuase the fear of rejection pops up.

Whenever I feel this way the Lord brings Isaiah 41:9,10 to my mind.

You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth,
And called from its remotest parts
And said to you, 'You are My servant,
I have chosen you and not rejected you.
Do not fear, for I am with you;
Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God
I will strengthen you, surely I will help you,
Surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.'

Whatever the situation or circumstance I know that my Father will never reject me!

I want a Scooby Doo Band-Aid!

Maybe you've noticed that there hasn't been any posts in the two and half weeks, or maybe you haven't. I wish I could say that I have a good reason, but most of it is just plain old ordinary laziness and procrastination. The other part is I've been a bit under the weather and have been on some pretty powerful drugs. I'm better now, by the way.

Last Saturday evening my husband and I decided that he should probably take me to the emergency room. (I'm not going to tell you why, so don't ask. Let's just say that you don't need to know everything about me and I really don't need/want to tell everyone everything about my life, and I'm sure you would prefer that anyway.) I was in some serious pain and the doctor said I could have some pain medication via the IV port they nurse miraculously got in my arm; I have deep veins that like to hide from nurses with needles. The doctor assured me that it would ease the pain in a matter of minutes. An hour later I was still in pain. I also had significantly less blood as well since the nurse took about 12 vials of blood.

The doctor came in to give me my lab results an hour and a half after the first course of pain meds. He asked me if I was still in pain. YES! After an exam and some signing of paperwork the doctor said I could have two shots of pain meds, but they would take an hour to work, but they're more powerful than the one given by IV and they would last about 12 hours. Umm, yes please.

After another 30 minutes the nurse came in and told us we could go home after she gave me my shots of pain meds. I started to roll up the sleeves on my hospital gown and she looked at me and smiled. She told me to stand up and turn around, these shots go in your bum. What?! Really? Tetanus and hepatitis, and even flu shots go in the arm. Maybe she thought I didn't have enough muscle on my arms to handle such shots, I assured I did. She was not having it.

I got up and asked her if I could at least have a Scooby Doo band-aid like they gave us as kids when we had to get shots in the butt. She thought I was joking, I was serious. I would've settled for Sponge Bob. She wasn't the most gentle and now I have a couple of bruises and I didn't get a cute band-aid :( On the bright side one of the shots was morphine and 20 minutes later I was blissfully unaware of my surroundings.