New Talent

Moses figured this out all on his own, and he was pretty proud of himself. Who knew a pencil has so many uses?

Well, hello everyone! The Limmer family really didn't fall off the face of the earth, I just tend to do things in spurts.:) A lot has happened since I last updated this blog!
Christmas was a fabulous time at our house. We had lots of snow and had the pleasure of getting snowed in at Justin's parents house with some wonderful family members. It made the holiday lovely and relaxing. Moses got his promised drumset, as you can see, and is a very cool drummer. We also got a picture of him with Great Grandma Limmer, who is 93 years old. I am so grateful for her legacy. She still lives on her own, gets down on her knees to scrub her floor and I have to fight her to wash the dishes at family meals. Her years and years of faithful service to Jesus have given our family such an amazing platform, and I know her prayers have impacted our lives tremendously. Because of the snow, we waited until New Year's to celebrate with my family, but it actually made it really nice to spread out the festivities a little. It also happened to be my 30th birthday (gulp!) and I enjoyed spending it with the people who made my birth possible in the first place!

January led us to Nebraska for a conference, which meant we got to stay with the Higgins family! They were in Africa with us picking up their boys Etienne and Ezekiel, and it was so good to be with them again. Aaahh...the refreshment of friends. 7 kids, 4 adults, 1 dog and tons of playing and talking to be had by all.

I started back to college classes a couple of days after we got home. I went back to school when I had Asia, and have been steadily plugging away at my elementary education degree ever since. I sat out this past fall semester, but if I stay on course, I'll graduate in May 2011. It's good to be making progress on that goal again.

We have been bugging Moses' doctor for awhile about the lab results testing him for parasites. Moses had gone through 2 treatments on Flagyl, but I kept saying to the doctor that something still didn't seem right. They finally realized they had misread the lab results and there were 3 more parasites that the Flagyl alone would not treat. So, he's just now finishing a 20-day course of meds that will hopefully be the last. I'd also read some recommendations to do a lactose-free diet after chronic giardia. After looking at our options, I decided to put him on goat's milk, and we saw almost immediate improvement in his stools. He's not 100% yet, but I feel like we're definitely getting there. He also had more bloodwork done at the beginning of the month to retest his lead levels. He originally had a level of 15 (doctor wanted to see it below 10), but this time around it was a 5! He has to have one more test below 10 for the doctor to be satisfied. Moses is also picking up tons of new words and growing like a weed. He says "Hold you" and "up please" when he wants picked up. He used to call both the girls "Asia" but now he calls Trina "eena". He's outgrown all the 18 month clothes we had and his first pair of shoes. He officially wears a bigger size shoe than his big sister. Wow!

I'll work on shortening the time between my blogging spurts, at least by posting pictures. :)

Cluttered Christmas

I really like Christmas.

I am not one to decorate our house from ceiling to floor, inside and out. Heck, I haven't even made one Christmas cookie this year, but I still really like Christmas. The story of God becoming man, choosing and determining to wrap Himself in infant fraility thrills me to my core. Having a nativity set for Christmas seems so important to me. I want to look at it and remember what happened that day, and the implications it has for me in my everyday and ordinary life.

So, every year at Christmas time, I clean everything off of our entertainment center and put up our nativity. We don't have a mantle to display it on, and coffee tables are out of the question for the obvious reason that there are 3 children ages 5 and under living here. I love unwrapping every wiseman, shepherd, camel, and donkey and placing it carefully in position, and it only seems fitting that the simplicity of the nativity shouldn't have to compete with anything else. It should be the focal point, the attention-getter.

But, you know, the top of the entertainment center is such a convenient place to put things. It's close to the front door and high enough that the kids can't reach anything on it. Before you know it, life is crowding out my simple, beautiful nativity scene. This month's water bill, car keys, a movie we rented, a manual for Asia's new birthday bike, and on occasion, Trina's socks encroach on the sacred space meant only for Baby Jesus. In a matter of days, my Christmas scene becomes very...cluttered.

So many things are vying for our attention during the holidays. So many everyday life responsibilities threaten to make us forget the importance of our Emmanuel reaching through time to be with us. We have trouble keeping things in their proper place. The insignificant and temporal often overshadow the eternal and lasting.

Will you excuse me? I think I have some cleaning to do...

Moses the Marine

Last week, some wonderful friends from our church, David and Kisha, heard me mention that I needed to get Moses' hair cut again and kindly offered to do it for me. This is the end result, and I love it! Even though he'd already gotten one haircut, he still had several thin patches on the back of his head from laying down so much in his crib, and the hair on the top of his head was so thick I couldn't get it combed out. David took it down enough so that it will all grow back even. He looks like he just went to boot camp (I thought the camo shirt was a nice touch)! The first day or so, he kept rubbing the back of his head. So different! We also have to really make sure he wears his hat outside. Brrrr!

In other Moses news, he is picking up new words every day and he's starting singing songs. Today when we were in the Dollar Store, he was singing at the top of his lungs, "Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, bye bye!" One of his other favorites is "Today is the Day" by Lincoln Brewster. He is getting a mini-drum set for Christmas (shh, don't tell!) and I can't wait to see what he does with it.

To My Asia Renee...

Dear Asia,
It's hard to believe that you came into our lives 5 years ago yesterday. You were so tiny at 6 lbs. 2 oz., but you were such a fighter! While you were being born, you were having some trouble and the doctor was concerned that you might not be feeling very good when you were born. She told me that I might not get to hold you for awhile because they would need to help you breath, but you screamed so loudly that the doctor laughed and said, "There's nothing wrong with her!" You're still not afraid of making your opinions heard!

You cried when the nurses were cleaning and measuring you, so Daddy went over to the table to see if he could help. As soon as you heard his voice, you stopped crying. When he could pick you up, you reached for his face and felt his beard, like you were saying, "So this is who's been talking to me these past nine months!"

What a wonderful, amazing day December 7, 2004 was! You have changed my life forever, Asia Renee. I am so thankful that God has let me be your Mommy.

Have I told you all the things I love about you?
I love ...
- Your curiousity and sharp mind. I'm pretty sure you can learn anything!

- The way you say words like, hostibal (hospital), bisgetti (spaghetti), chapskips (chapstick), efelant (elephant), renember (remember), and batatoes (potatoes). The other day at dinner we were having something with potatoes in it, and your little sister Trina said, "I don't like tomatoes!" and you said, "Not tomatoes, BAtatoes!" So funny!

- Your love for your sister and brother. You are such a good helper! What I am I going to do when you go to kindergarten next year?

- Your laugh! It is so infectious! Nobody can stay serious when you are laughing!

- Your sense of fashion. I love the outfits that you come up with! Grandma Dixie would say that you come by it naturally, and would point out all the pictures of Mommy wearing skirts and moon boots. In my opinion, the Limmer girls are stylish people.

- Your heart of worship. Don't ever stop making up songs to Jesus. He loves it and so do I.

Daddy and I love you so much, and I know that this year is going to bring so many good things to your life. Happy Birthday, Love!

Readoption

One thing that was kind of foggy to me when we entered this adventure of international adoption was the readoption process. I knew that we needed to readopt Moses in the U.S. once we came home, but I didn't know what the steps were to do that, especially in the state of Wyoming (it's specific from state to state). Some friends of ours in Indiana who adopted two girls from Rwanda were able to do the paperwork themselves, so I was hopeful that we could do something similar. I made a few phone calls to our county government, and after being transferred from office to office, I was told, "Just call an adoption attorney." We called the state government offices, told the same thing. Then we called the Department of Family Services, thinking that they deal with adoption all the time, and they had told us the same thing. We got the hint and called an adoption attorney!

We brought Moses home on an IR-4 visa. This means that we were not present in Rwanda for the court hearing where we were made his permanent guardians, thus necessitating our need for readoption. All his Rwandan documents, including his passport, are all in his Rwandan name. Here in Wyoming, we have to wait for 6 months (since the time we gained custody of him) and go to a court hearing where he is officially adopted as a Limmer. One funny thing the attorney told me is that in Wyoming, it is required to publish a legal notice to the birth parents in the paper (the Casper paper, no less) since we don't have any document where they officially relinquished custody of him. That sounds logical, right? Some very, very pale friends of ours threatened to respond to the ad. Ha ha! I threatened her with her life if she did!

So now we have to wait until March for our court hearing, then we can obtain a Wyoming birth certificate and apply for U.S. citizenship. After that, we'll get his U.S. passport and everything should be squared away. It'll be nice to have almost all of the paperwork done!

November Ramblings

Here are some pictures of the Limmers from Halloween and the last few weeks. We did finally see some lovely fall weather and the kids had a blast jumping in leaves. Halloween brought the collection of massive loads of candy and a fun party at the church. Two of our friends came as hippies, and Moses stole his fro wig. Hilarious! We were also invited to speak at my mom's church on Orphan Sunday about adoption. Justin preached a message called "Room for the Lonely" (you can hear it on our church website, www.wyrchurch.com. He preached it here in Casper the week before so it got uploaded to our website). Moses was the charming celebrity, as always and won everyone's hearts.

I have been duly reprimanded by my mother for not posting anything whatsoever in the month of November on my blog. I must admit that the entire world of blogging still seems strange to me, mostly because it's hard to imagine anybody being all that interested in my life. And then there's the dilema of what to say; should I write about all the funny things that happen with my three kids or stick strictly to adoption stuff since the majority of my "followers" are fellow adoptive families (although I don't know about all you "blog lurkers" who are sitting off in the shadows of the internet)? What I have noticed about blogging is that there is a certain sense of surrealness to it. People can present life in whatever way they want and no one would know any better. For all you know, I have an absolutely idyllic life, complete with "happily ever after" endings every day. 'Tis not always so. Even with adoption, I often get the feeling that others look at us and expect everything to have magically fallen into place now that we have Mr. Moses here with us. What they don't see is disaster moments when Moses throws up at dinner (a fairly regular occurence. He has the fastest gag reflex in the West!), Trina throws a huge wad of toilet paper in a full bathtub and effectively plugs the drain, Asia has a bloody nose, and Moses pees on the floor, all in the span of 1/2 an hour (yes, that really was our night on Monday. Oh, I forgot the part about the blow-out diaper. That was in there too. I'm not sure I've ever seen so many bodily fluids in such a short span of time). Life is not always a fairytale. My son bites people, my daughter screams and throws fits when I tell her she can't have candy for the fifteenth time today, and I sometimes get frustrated and want to turn in my resignation and sign myself up for mommy rehab. So much for blogs being idealistic and one-sided! :) Now you know all my secrets!

The other side to all of this is that I have a really swell husband (who knows all my quirks and loves me in spite, and maybe even because of them) and three terrific, heart-stoppingly beautiful children that I would not trade the world for. How can you compare any trauma of parenthood to those moments when my 17 month old son, who I have only known for two months, grabs my face and kisses me over and over? Or when my 2 year tells me every time I give her any kind of meal, "Thank you for this dinner, Mom" without ever being prompted? Or when my almost 5 year old tells me that she "loves me in the whole wide world?" I am overwhelmed with emotion even as I write this. I am such a lucky gal! Who'd a thunk I'd ever be so privileged?

The other day we were driving in our van, listening to the radio and the Newsboys song "Wherever we go, that's where the party's at" came on. Keep in mind that the Newsboys are from Australia. From the back seat, I hear Asia say, "Why are they singing about a potty, Mom? That's gross!" and she proceeded to laugh hysterically and say "Gross!" every time they sang the chorus. What a treasure! Yesterday, Trina wanted to go outside after lunch but couldn't find her sock. She discards them in very random places throughout the house, and I thought I'd try the Love and Logic approach. I said, "Trina, you need to find your sock to go outside, or if you don't want to find it, you can just go take a nap." She half-heartedly looked for it for a few minutes and then looked at me in all seriousness and said, "Swiper took my sock, Mom. He's playing with it at Dora's house." Since the offensive Swiper would not return her sock, Miss Trina took a nap (Asia later found it stuffed between the couch cushions. Big sister to the rescue!). What a nut! Moses is not to be outdone by his sisters. He is rapidly learning the art of comic relief. He recently figured out how to blow "raspberries" and will rush to do so on anyone who is laying down and will hold still long enough for him to get his lips on their tummy. So funny!

Thanks for listening to my ramblings and sharing all my "treasures" with me. I plan to write my next post on readoption, so all you adoption people stay tuned. Best wishes from this slightly off-kilter home to yours!