Thanksgiving Stress and Untangling Bad Habits

Old pic

We had a wacky and rough Thanksgiving.  Sigh.  Sometimes it's great having family and friends and sometimes it's.... hard.  I'll point out the blessings though.  :)  My mom helped me great in the kitchen and really took a load off my shoulders while cooking.  I had a friend coming over who had to work late so I waited to make a meal till evening time.  I was a bit tired but it was still awesome.  

It's been a bit of a transition for me into the fostering world.  Sometimes it's hard to retrain kids that aren't used to things being done the way we do.  The little girl we have absolutely flipped out when I asked her to help clean up with the girls.  I went to her brother and asked if she ever had to help.  He said no and that they had to do everything for her.  Luckily, she's young and there is plenty of time to fix that.  It'd be harder to retrain a kid with good habits in their teens.  Luckily, our teen foster son has really good work ethics.  He had to shoulder a big load before but we don't do that.  Here we have balance and everyone has to contribute down to 3 years old.  That way we don't have someone or just older kids bearing most the load.  Also, another thing we're adjusting is teaching her to get things for herself rather than relying on big brother to always rescue her to get menial stuff.  These are not big, big issues and little ones are easy to refocus in a different direction. 

I have so many things coming up like house inspection on December 9th.  Eek!  Also, we're right in the middle of foster care classes and although it's a lot of paperwork to study and fill out, we're one of the lucky few who can do it right from our home rather than be gone for hours every Saturday.  Yay!

Halloween 2015/ Foster Care Update

It's been amazing having 9 kids here ever since we got Michael.  It's definitely been an adjustment since I have a 6 month old and they both came in our lives almost around the same time.  So instead of adjusting for one kid, I'm adjusting for two kids.  So guess what??  I fought to get his baby sister Grace so now we'll soon be adjusting for 3! We will have 10 kids!  Wow!!!  Pray for Grace as DCS will be bringing it to court to get her in my custody. It takes a couple of weeks.  She's already in a foster home somewhere with people she doesn't know.  In my care she'll have her big brother.  So this is huge!  Michael has been in tears at times worrying about his little sister.  I can imagine how hard that would be on him.  He's always had a bond with her.  He has no idea as we are going to surprise him when she gets here.  I don't want to say she's coming and then it not work out in court. 



Ryan was a blind referee

Soooo, as much as I hate blurring Michael's face out of our family photo, it legally has to be done so I don't get in trouble.  It makes me sad because I don't like to leave kids out.  I explained to him it's for his safety and just the rules but we love him very much.  I'm just gonna make a personal album for us at home where his face can be shown.  :)

My sweet kids and little nephew Prestyn.  He's such a cutie and very smart for his age.  Anyway, we had fun for Halloween.  This was the first year we bought used costumes as we decided it was ridiculous to go and buy new costumes for only one day of the year.  If I had a couple of kids it'd be fine but for nine kids, it'd be a ton of money.  We had fun storming the used costume stores!  Haha.