New Pictures

A friend of ours is a budding photographer and she took our kids to a nearby park to take some pictures. These are just a few of them. I posted all of them to my facebook page. If you are on facebook but aren't my friend, send me a friend request and I will accept and you can check them all out!!

Lanesville All-Stars took it on the chin this week at the tournament in South Central. They won the first game but then lost the next three. Two of those losses were to the Graceland Baptist All-Stars. Their team had 5 or so boys that Caleb is friends with so they were hard losses for him. Truth be told, Lanesville is a small league and they just don't have the talent pool to pick from that most of those other teams do. Most of the kids play really hard and give it their all, which is the most you can ask for at age 8.

This weekend is shaping up to be a wild one. Caleb has another baseball tournament and Katie has a soccer tournament. Plus, they are both scheduled to participate in a triathelon next weekend too. We will see how it goes.

We went to the Great Wolf Lodge last week. It was a lot of fun. We were going to stay and go to the Air Force Museum in Dayton and then to Kings Island but Caleb's baseball tournament got in the way so we came home early. We are still hoping to go to an amusement park sometime in the near future.

Diving In and KAZ

The kids are taking swimming lessons at the local middle school again this year. This is the fourth year in a row that our oldest two have taken them. This is Coy's first year. Funny how kids grow up. Last year, we were begging Caleb to jump off the diving board. This year, he has been doing front flips off of the diving board (more like back splatters but every once in a while he gets all the way around). Well, Coy is really progressing in his swimming and today he got to jump off of the diving board into 12 feet of water. That is not the amazing thing though. The amazing thing is that Stacey can sit by and watch these kids do these things. Caleb and Katie swim up and down the pool like little fish too.

A good friend of mine that lives in central Kentucky got news today that their adoption dossier has been submitted to the Kaz consulate in Washington DC. They have been waiting to get past this hurdle for quite a while and now they have. What this means is that they will likely get to travel to Kaz for an adoption within 11 months, but hopefully sooner. The process in country seems to be a little different than Ukraine but the result will ultimately be the same. A child that does not have a home today will ultimately get a forever family. Way to go Kara and Michael. Stay with it....

Caleb was the third grade camper of the week at his basketball camp. Not sure out of how many but it didn't matter to him. His reward was what looked like an old Floyd Central HS jersey that won't fit him for 5 years or so. We were all pretty excited about it though. Katie is excelling at her drama camp this week. All except for the getting up and getting ready to go part. She thought that she was going to be doing one of those big productions like "Sound of Music" or something. I don't think she needs any practice at drama but perhaps this will give her an outlet for her drama other than here at home with us.

We are really enjoying the pool too. At least when it is not raining we are.

Don't Eat the Ice Cream

When you come to our house and we offer you ice cream, you might want to double check and make sure that it is a brand new package and not one that we have already opened as evidenced by the video. Katie and Coy love ice cream. Caleb can take it or leave it. We were playing a version of baseball in the pool tonight and Katie and I lost and Stacey and Caleb won and Coy was just kinda in the pool. When we lost, Katie storms off mad and Stacey yells "Losers get ice cream." Coy, who was not even paying attention, yelled "Mom, I'm a loser!". Nobody got ice cream tonight.

Coy had his well child check up the other day. Unfortunately, I was out of town so I did not get to go but I will report what Stacey reported back to me. He is in the 75th percentile in height and 60th in weight. No real other concerns. According to Stacey, our regular pediatrician was acting very sleepy so he wasn't his usual happy self so she didn't get a lot out of him. Oh well, Coy seems to be very healthy anyway. He did get three shots and blood drawn.

Katie appears to be healing very well. She was able to do the monkey bars over the weekend just 4 weeks after breaking her collarbone. She goes back to the no good Orthopedist in a couple of weeks but we are pretty much letting her do most things already. This is Katie at her soccer team awards dinner. She is going to practice with her travel team in the fall but play games at Graceland.

Caleb made the all-star team of the Lanesville baseball league. There are just three teams and the coach picked at least 5 kids off of Caleb's team but he was excited just the same.

The kids have a pretty jam packed first few weeks of summer. Basketball camp, swimming, drama camp, and probably some soccer camps and probably a soccer tournament.

This is vintage Coy happy face.

Maybe.......

Katie has the most to share this past week but I have to start out with a story about Coy. Coy likes to eat, there is no secret about that although I will say that his volume has slowed down from the early years. He is still a good eater. He likes to take his time when he eats (he is easily distracted and looks around a lot while eating). That is a good thing, we could learn from him, but we usually end up waiting on him to finish. On Friday night, we went to Cici's and ate pizza. Everyone was finished and Coy was still munching away. I asked him by saying "Coy, do you want us to leave you here while you finish and then come back and get you in a little while??" and his response to me was a sheepish grin, a thoughtful pause and then......."maybe." We all shared a big laugh with that one.

Katie broke her collarbone on Saturday night. We had some friends over and she was out in the yard running in flip-flops and down she went. Softball season is now over and soccer season is more than likely over. The worst part was that we had planned for her to get baptized on Sunday. Even though she was in some pain, she decided that she wanted to go through with it so she got baptized, broken collarbone and all. Caleb and Katie also got the "opportunity" to get slimmed last weekend too. They each only missed one question and so they were only slimmed once.

Earlier in the day on Saturday (last Saturday) we went to Jeffersontown to visit Gayla, who was one of the ladies that helped us while we were in Ukraine. She is a sweet lady and her voice took me back to that apartment and those days that we spent with her. We didn't get to spend a lot of time with her but we did get to show her our other two children and let her see Coy for a bit. Seeing her also reminds me of the other children that are still over there, waiting for parents, or anyone for that matter, to love them.

Meet The Robinsons......Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHAkYrNpqIo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPxyokPPztg
OK.....here are the you tube videos. The top one is Katie at soccer in the church league. The bottom one is Caleb at football. I will post one of Coy at his soccer games soon now that I have done it. It takes a while.
Stacey is out of town tonight. She is going to run in the Indy Mini-Marathon tomorrow. We stayed here so that she could "rest-up". To help pass the time, we stopped and bought the movie "Meet the Robinsons". The other kids did not remember that movie but I remembered it very well. We watched it the weekend before we left for Ukraine. Without going into the details....again (you need to watch it if you have not already), Coy watched the whole movie and when it was over, he said that he was the little yellow hair boy. That gave me an opportunity to tell him again that he was adopted by his mom and me and how we are glad that he is in our family. We sometimes talk about "that lady" in Ukraine because Coy was in her belly but that is as far as it has gotten for now. We don't want to hide anything from him but we try to be sensitive to what he can understand. I think the movie moved Katie that most though. She was able to piece some of it together and associate the little boys in the movie with Coy and his situation. It was very touching to see her make that connection.

2 Years in the US with US

OK, so the last post was not exactly 2 years HOME per se but it was 2 years since he became a member of our family and that, to me, is home. It is not the wood and brick that where we lay our heads. We came back to the US two years ago on Derby Day and we haven't looked back since.

The next time that I post to this blog I hope to have a link to some videos of ours on YouTube as well as some pictures that we took of our recent visit with Gayla. Gayla was the lady that met us at the airport in Kyiv and she helped us through our appointment as well as getting our visas to go home. We stayed at her apartment while we were in Kyiv. We didn't get to visit long because there were a number of folks that wanted to see her but listening to her voice brought back so many memories for me. We also got to see the other couple that was in Ukraine the same time we were. They now have adopted 3 children from Ukraine and went back to get another girl but unfortunately if fell through. There were numerous kids from Ukraine there. Some you could pick out. Others were more difficult to tell. I think Coy looks great and is very smart and we are lucky to have him. He is a bundle of joy (mostly) and has been a very welcomed and wonderful addition to our family.

Anyone that reads this blog, please be in prayer for friends of mine/ours that are in the waiting process for adoptions. I know it can be painfully slow sometimes and that these folks need to be encouraged from time to time that God's timing is perfect. That is one of the main statements that I remember from the ladies that helped us in the US. I guess that they had been through the waiting so many times that they had seen first hand over and over how God had worked everything out perfectly. And He will again. In His timing.

2 Years Home

We celebrated Coy's adoption day today. It was two years ago today that we stood up in an Ukranian Court of Law and gave our reasons for wanting to adopt Coy. There were so many then. There are so many more now. We didn't really do a lot. We went to Bass Pro Shop so that he could look at the fish in the aquarium. He likes that. We then went to The Fun House for supper. It is a Chuck E. Cheese knock off. We had gone to CEC a couple of weeks ago to celebrate Coy keeping his diaper dry at night for five nights in a row. We haven't had five nights in a row since but I digress. He is making progress. Anyway, back to Coy's Adoption Day. One of the best things we did today was to go back and watch the video tapes from our time in Ukraine and the few weeks right after we got home. All of our children have grown so much but it really helped me to appreciate how much Coy has grown. It is still the same boy but oh how he has grown. There were sections on the video tape that I had forgotten that we had taped. There was some good footage of him just walking around the orphanage, both inside and out. We will convert it to DVD and I will see if I can post it here somehow. But some of those images took me straight back there. In some ways, it seems like yesterday and in other ways, it is like it never happened. The footage from the orphanage made quite an impact on me. I can't remember if I had even watched it before or not. I probably had but I don't remember watching it. I filmed Coy playing outside with some of the other children in the orphanage and it broke my heart to watch it today. There was a little blind boy, probably about 4 years old or so and he was just standing in the yard, which was bare as it could be and he was talking or singing or something but he was just standing there, entertaining himself, unaware of everything around him. How sad. Our lesson in Sunday School today was on whether or not God causes disasters or tragedy to happen. And whether he does or not, we can certainly say that, at a minimum, he allows it to happen. And lots of people question God as to why He might let a 9/11 happen or a World War to occur but I question why He lets innocent children be born in to this world all alone. That is a tragedy that happens everyday. The best answer that I have is that He knows so much more about the big picture than I do that I can only trust Him. He has it all under control. I don't understand it and I probably won't until I can get to heaven to ask Him myself. But it does make me wonder. And I think this is where I should come in. Do I let the knowledge of that tragedy move me to do something about it somehow or do I just sit here and wonder?? It doesn't help my guilty conscience that I am sitting here in my essential palatial mansion comparatively speaking with all of the excesses that they will never enjoy. It also doesn't help that I look around and struggle with envy with all of those that have even more than I do. We had fun with Coy's Adoption Day, but for me, I want it to be more than about fun. I want it to be about something bigger than that. Something much bigger.