Quotes of the Day.....

Jorie- "Mom, can we please just RENT a dog????"

Caleb- crying - "Mom, I bit Luke and I hurt my teeth!"

Bedside Baptist

Due to the large amounts of snow and ice surrounding our house I decided that this morning we wouldn't venture out to church but instead have our own little church at home. It turned out to be so special and so much fun.

We started out in prayer asking God to speak to us as we worshiped Him and read His Word.

Then the kids each grabbed their guitars and we sang a couple worship songs together.

Then we each opened our own Bibles to Luke chapter one.

The kids decided that they wanted to hear the Christmas story so that's what led us to the beginning of Luke. Silly me thought that's where the Christmas story began and was a little surprised when I saw that Luke actually starts with the birth story of John the Baptist. I had forgotten that but felt like we should start there anyway, thinking that we'd skim over it till we got to the second half of chapter one where we would find Jesus' birth(I wasn't too far off.)

Well, the short of the story is that we ended up only talking about first half of chapter one. Little did I know at the time that God had us right where He wanted us in His word and had much to teach us.

Here are some of the verses that we hung on and discussed this morning:

1:4 "you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught."

1:6"they were upright in the sight of God." -referring to John's parents

1:13"do not be afraid, your prayer has been heard."

1:17"he will go on before the Lord...to make ready a people prepared for the Lord"-referring to John

1:25"the Lord has done this for me"-John's mom giving glory to God

The two points that I emphasized to the kids and I think that God was trying to emphasize with me:
***just as John the Baptist had a role in preparing people for Jesus' first coming, so we have a role in preparing people for His second coming.

***just as John's mom gave glory to God for John's birth, so we must give glory to Him for all things!

We ended our Bible reading with prayer. Our prayer this time included only giving glory to God for the various things we could think of.

Our church service concluded with some loud singing, wild dancing, much laughter and big smiles. God had richly filled each of us with His Spirit.

Tonight as I put the kids to bed they said, "mom, can we have church again tomorrow morning?

Today.....

First, I just want to put you at ease that I am in a little better spot than I was last entry. Phew. Second, I want you to know that I have finally figured out why I blog.....because seriously, I have nothing exciting to say.....and now I finally know: simply, it is a way to avoid housework.

So, with that in mind, I thought I would write down my thoughts from today.


Today is the one year anniversary of my sweet and stubborn grandma going to see Jesus. How lucky is she! On one hand I want to mourn my loss but on another I want to celebrate for her! The kinda weird thing is that I still don't feel like she is gone. I just keep missing her and wanting to go see her.....ohhhhh, I miss her so much. One of my favorite possessions is her wedding ring that I wear most of the time. I have been staring at it all day today.

The greatest moment for me today was tonight during "Bible time". I read to the kids every night from God's word and tonight as I started to read I had the sudden urge to ....ah...ah ...how do I say this nicely.....relieve myself. Get my drift? Anyway, I was in a hurry to get the kids to bed because it was getting late so I tossed the Bible to Jorie and said "Can you read your brothers a story?" I then headed to the bathroom. To my delight I sat there and listened to Jorie read God's Word to her brothers. She reads plenty of other books but she has never done this before because I always do it. She then did like I do and asked them questions about the story. It was the coolest sweetest moment. She has just learned to read and to see her stepping into my role so smoothly in the way of teaching God's word was awesome! Oh yeah, baby! God has great plans for that girl!

Shocking, adoption was also on my mind today. We got an email from our agency saying that they need us to do a bunch more stuff before they can refer us a child. They need more pictures of our family and they need our passport pictures in .jpg format. Who the heck knows what that means???? I mean I guess I know what it means but I don't know how to do this. We heard wind of this when we got our original passport pictures taken and so we said to the lady who took our pictures, "can you please put this in .jpg format?" She looked at us like we were nuts and said she had never heard of that before so we thought we were nuts and dropped that issue and just got the good ol' fashioned nasty passport pictures taken. Sooooooooo, now we hear from our agency, "send us your .jpg pictures ASAP". Eiy eiy eiy. Marc comes home in the morning from work....I've already warned him that this is our priority...we've gotta figure this thing out.

Adoption timeline......this weekend I got to go to another adoption meeting for "waiting families". It was nice. Our agency puts these meetings on occassionally because it helps those of us who are "waiting" for our babies to feel like something is actually happening and we just may end up getting a baby one of these days. You see, for pregnant people there are many signs that you are pregnant. When adopting it is easy to have a day when you say, "is this really real or has this all been a dream?" Anyway, I have a bunch more thoughts that I gathered from that meeting but I will share those another time (when I have more housework to avoid) but my whole point of this was to share what Marc and I know at this point of a GENERAL timeline of what to expect. We submitted our big USA immigration form this week (along with 830$ mind you) and that form is expected to take our wonderful gov't 90+ days to complete and send back to us. Then we'll need another month from that point to have that form authenticated down in San Francisco and our agency to look over the whole deal and ship it to China. This puts us on April 1st at best. Once China receives our dossier then they approximate another 3 months for them to process us (the good ol' Skipper family) and send us a date to travel. That puts us to July 1st. Our date to travel will be about a month from then. That puts us traveling to China on August 1st at the earliest. (And all of this is assuming that we receive a referral of a baby sometime before July 1st which may or may not happen that quickly.) Many people have been asking me a timeline so that's why I share this. I have learned in my old age that God's timelines are often MUCH different than ours. I trust His plan and timing. We'll see................................

this is how i feel right now

my house is a mess.
my Christmas letter sucks. I have to change it.
I'm exhausted but I don't want to go to bed.
I have 3 loads of laundry to fold on my bed.
I wish my husband was home so I could smooch him.
I wish I could write on my blog like my friend Desha writes.
I love my life but I am just in a weird mood.
I'm not complaining, I'm just sayin.