Non-update update and keeping humble

What is the non-update update? Nothing has moved in our journey to LB since November.  We haven't even received confirmation yet that China has received our paperwork and has logged us in.  We assume, but it sure would be nice to get a definite yes.  We know God has a plan in this, so we remain impatiently patient.

I forgot to mention last month that James and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary on Dec. 9.  For years James couldn't remember if our anniversary was the 9th or the 7th (Pearl Harbor Day).  He says that both dates are known for a Japanese invasion of some sort. 

The kids cleverly helped us celebrate our anniversary by building congratulatory Lego structures.





Their teacher asks you to ignore spelling errors



The twins get credit for helping by not helping.





Speaking of the twins (as I so often do), they wanted to relive some of the "good ole days" by getting into the kind of trouble that has become rare around here:

Those are sunflower seeds. The kids had scraped them off a big sunflower.  They were in a container that had no lid.  That there is an invitation for trouble.


When I asked the twins what happened, Micah blurted out, "It's not Micah's fault! Kara did it!"  To which Kara retorted, "Uh uh, Micah do it!"  Hmmm, fruit from the forbidden tree anyone?



The twins proudly showing that they can get their own cereal.  To their credit, they did not make a mess.



Have you ever heard the expression, "Hanging off the rafters?"  Well this is Micah hanging off the gutter.  James had lifted him up to see something, Micah grabbed on to the gutter and refused to let go.  We think we have a future rock climber here as he hung there for quite a while before we got a chair for James to stand on and get him down.

 Micah likes girls.  We are glad of that, but he is an incurable flirt. He also lets us know when there is a girl that has caught his eye.  His current crush is on a girl that appears on the kids' Latin DVD.  Micah asks often if we can watch Latin.  When we do, it certainly holds his attention.  We think Kara is watching just to see what the big deal is all about.

I was having a conversation with my friend Pam about an article we had read.  The article warned parents not to take too much pride in their kids' accomplishments.  I can see that as a possible pitfall for Pam (not that it is, she is a very humble person).  After all, she has four grown children, each very accomplished in his or her own right.  Her kids are musicians, athletes, preachers.  Me? I have three kids accomplished in their own way and...a pair of streakers.

Kara decided to show her wares one day at church.  Yep, there I was standing in the narthex chatting with someone after church, when I saw Kara come around the corner sans anything from the waist down.  Moving faster than the speed of light (or wishing I could), I scooped her up to take her to the bathroom.  On the way there, I found her underwear and pants.  She had had an accident and dropped her drawers outside the secretary's office. I guess she figured since "Aunt Carol" does everything around the church, she might as well do laundry too.

Micah must really be a night owl, because he sure seems to love "the moon."  One day my friend Jesi came to me and said, "Uh, Micah just mooned me.  He took his pants down, diaper down, and smiled like it was funny."  Now where would he get that idea?

On New Year's Day our family went to my mom and dad's house to eat some traditional Japanese food.  As I, my parents, my sister, brother-in-law, and my sister's friend sat at the table engaged in conversation, Micah entered the room, dropped his drawers and bent over.  As the room erupted in raucous laughter, I hastily escorted him out of the room to "talk" about this unacceptable behavior.  When I told him that what he had done was inappropriate, he responded, "But the girls laughed!"

Micah and Kara are both interested in certain body parts.  Kara went through a phase in which she would ask women (pointing to their chests) "What's that?" I told her that she was not to touch ladies there to which she will now ask, "You la-ley? You have la-ley? No touch la-leys?"  Micah is interested in "belly bellies."  He informed me that, "You don't put up your shirt and show your belly belly.  It's immodest.  (smiling) I like belly bellies."

We often have mysteries around here.  Some are not solved, such as, "How in the world did playdough get into my rice cooker?"  Others are solved via self-incriminating evidence.  In viewing pictures on my camera, I noticed that I had a series of pictures like these:

 After a while I found more pictures like the one above, just random shots of things.  We knew one of the twins had to be behind this, but had no evidence until we saw this picture:

Those legs could only belong to one chunky monkey...

Yes, the twins can be crazy as usual,



but we also get moments like these:

Oh yeah, back to body parts and the like, here's a closing quote from Micah:

"I burped in my pants.  Ew, that's gross.  But I liked it."







Freebie pics and something strange is going on...

Yes, yes, I know.  Miracles of miracles, two posts within the month.  And it's such a calm uneventful month.
After such a long absence of pictures, I felt compelled to add some more...

Here are some that were Christmas card contenders:

 The WTs did not mind that the leaves were wet and the air was cold.  I don't think their internal thermometers work that well at that age... It's cute photo, but somewhat incomplete.

 Here is the Froisland pinwheel shot.  We couldn't get the WTs to look straight up.  That blue thing in the picture is Gabriel's "scarf."  Now I purposely put the word scarf in quotations as the thing is really a piece of fleece that used to have some sort of shape to it.  Now it's used as a jumprope, whip, etc.  Linus has a blanket, Gabriel has his "scarf" (see, I did it again).  Sometimes the "scarf'" goes missing courtesy of one of his siblings.  I don't miss it and only feign attempts at helping him find it again.  Bad mommy, bad bad mommy.

 Should we get Micah some wine to go with that cheese????

I actually like this one, but there was too much street in the background.  Picky, picky, picky.

One of many cool aspects of homeschooling is that when the kids visit their dad at work, we get to call it a "field trip." 

 Her dad has a helmet just like this one...

More cheese!

Okay, so something strange is going on at my house.  We actually were able to take down the gate that blocks the stairs (we had a small ceremony for it).  Here is a picture of a construction worker helping to dismantle it.

Another bizarre situation we had was a huge cereal spill...that was not caused by the WTs! In fact, Mom knocked it over and the WTs rushed over to the scene.  I was about to head them off (I had visions of toddler toes squishing the cereal gleefully) when the strangest thing happened.  They started picking up the cereal and putting it back in the container (oh stop, the 10 second rule applied, besides it's the thought that counts, not the hair and dust that went with the cereal). 
The WTs are also engaging in this activity I think people call "sharing."  It's where one WT has a coveted item that the other has and actually gives it over.  It's pretty mindblowing stuff.

 So I don't know what's going on around here.  Maybe there's going to be an earthquake (they say animals act funny, maybe toddlers do too).  Or maybe aliens abducted the WTs.  Yep, that's it.  And this is what they left behind:

'nuff said.  Case closed.

Vacation photos at last!!!

 See, I told you that I would come through with our vacation pics.  I'm just glad I got them in this year!  Of course I have way more pictures than you have patience, and way more pictures than I have patience waiting for them to load onto the site.  I carefully selected and here's what I got:

Let me start by commending the wonderful TSA people at the unnamed airport from which we flew.  Since we were not getting fed on the plane (though Southwest serves some decent snacks), we each had our own lunch bags.  I froze yogurt for each one of us and included mandarins and applesauce (all in sealed individual serving size tubs).  Depending on which agent you got going through security, you either lost all three containers, kept all three containers, or kept a combination of them.   Thankfully I had packed other food so we did not completely waste away in our six hour flight (though there are parts of me I would like to "waist" away, har har).

 You'll note that James is sitting with Micah who slept almost the entire way there.  I had the job of entertaining my busy bee, Kara, who decided to finally fall asleep ten minutes before we landed.  I told James, "We're switching twins on the way home."

We landed in Tennessee which was really hot.  I mean really really really I can't believe how hot it is hot.  When we "deplaned" Gabriel asked, "Why is it so hot?" I (being very westcoast snob centric) said, "Because we're not in California anymore."  Some lady (very southeast centric) overheard and retorted, "You're in God's country now!" I resisted a response.

Our first stop was to visit a family we had met in China.  They were there to adopt their daughter, Hopey. We met in the playroom of the hotel in Guangzhou and hit it off instantly.  Kittye and Mike are adoption pros (though they would not want me to say that as they are very humble, which makes you admire them all the more).  They currently have nine kids at home (two are out of the house, one is in heaven): two biological, five from Liberia, and two from China.  They were so kind (and kind of crazy) to allow us to descend on their home.

Thankfully they have a pool, because well, did I tell you that it was hot there? I do have to be fair and say that it was unusually hot.  The Kelley's friends and family we met apologized to us for the weather.

This is Will who has the best smile ever.

 Here the WTs are playing with Isaac and John Michael (who I tried to smuggle out to take home with me...after all, they have so many kids, couldn't they spare one?) in a rice box.  Amazingly enough, it looked pretty much like this when they were done playing.  John Michael asked the best question I've heard in a long time.  He said, "Mrs. Froisland, why do you only have five kids?" I told him we were working on growing our family.  Besides, once upon a time his parents only had five kids.  There was also a time they had no kids.  To which John Michael looked very seriously at me, shook his head and said, "Nooooo."  I guess when you are the second youngest of the clan it's hard to imagine a world without kids.

 You'd think with 14 kids in the house, it'd be mass chaos.  Well, it was controlled chaos.  The Kelley's household is a well-oiled machine which made it extremely easy for us to step in and integrate.  The kids had a blast together, so we hardly saw them.  Emily (all the way to the right) had written a play that we saw our first night there.  She put together another production for us in which our kids were more than happy to participate.

 This is Hopey.  Yes, she really is this cute in real life.

Mike gave a memorable quote when, in talking about our Suburban, he said, "Well someday we'll downsize to a Suburban."  We had an amazing time with the Kelley's.  We begged them to visit us in California.  Yes, housing would be interesting, but we can pitch tents in the backyard.  Mike assured us that if they came to visit, he'd give us at least 24 hours notice.

 Our main reason for going east was for the Korver family reunion which occurs every three years.  I think there were about 100 or so present.  I love these reunions.  There are no feuds between family members, no weird Uncle Bernie who embarrasses everyone by scratching his belly in public, no black sheep, just loving families who are accepting and welcoming and wonderful and fun!

The reunion was at a very nice camp in North Carolina.  Again, I rarely saw my kids as they scattered here and there to play with "first cousins once removed."

This is Gabriel (nicknamed "Bob") with cousin Bob.  Bob gave Gabriel the "Bob" shirt at the last reunion.  We promised to take a picture of the two of them every reunion with Gabriel wearing that shirt.

Okay, no weird Uncle Bernie, but a crazy Cousin Kathy.  If you have a birthday near a reunion, watch out! You'll get a song written about you and sung to you very loudly (truth be told, it is super fun to be the "target").

 Is this a force to be reckoned with or what?

As you'll see, Kara made her way around...

 Before leaving North Carolina, we squeezed in a short visit with Jeremy, Julie (who has since had another
 baby girl) and Eden.  We've known Jeremy for a long time as he grew up in our church.  I once had a banana eating contest with him in Mexico.  He won, though shoving a whole banana in your mouth is not really fair.

 From North Carolina, we drove to Kentucky (or "Tentucky" as Micah called it).  Let me stop the narrative briefly here to comment on something.  Out of California, we are a conspicuous family.  I've never really thought that since there are many families that look like ours at home.  Not so back there.  We ate at an IHOP one day and I took Kara to the bathroom while James and the other kids got seated.  When Kara and I rejoined our family the server was at the table.  She looked at me and said, "So will this all be on one check?"  James and I looked at each other speechless.  Huh? I stammered out, "Uh, yes it will."  James quipped, "He'll (pointing to Micah) be paying."  Our guess is that she might have thought we were two separate families???

Another time we were at the petting area in the Creation Museum (another stop for us).  I again took Kara to the bathroom (bad time to pottytrain) and when I came and stood next to James, a lady laughed and said, "Now it all makes sense!"  I just kind of smiled at her and she said, "I thought how nice it was for your husband to adopt all your children (she was referring to our four biological children), but now it makes sense!"

As I said, we stopped in to the Creation Museum.  Being big fans of Answers in Genesis, we were eager to see the museum dedicated to defending creationism.  It's a very impressive place.  One big highlight for us was seeing Buddy Davis.  He is a dinosaur sculpter, writer, and singer-songwriter.  Our kids have grown up listening to his music, and Micah and Kara are now his biggest fans in our household.  While we were at the museum, I spotted him while we were eating our lunch.  Not wanting to start a riot, I whispered, "There's Buddy Davis!"  I couldn't believe people were not swarming around him.  I wondered if he was an actor portraying Buddy Davis.  Being the embarrassing mom, I made the kids go over and take a picture with him.  I was trying not to be too giddy.  I don't know if I succeeded.

 We got a lot of comments on our trip about the WTs.  Sometimes we were nice and told people that they weren't really twins, and explained that one was adopted (people then asked which one was adopted).  Other times we felt like being mean and just commented that they were not twins, but were nine months apart.  We let people go away shaking their heads at that.

After our trip to the Creation Museum, we drove to Indiana to visit another family we met in China.  In fact, we spent most of our time in China with the Faulkners (and another great family) as our kids came from the same orphanage.  They were not strangers to adoption as they had previously adopted another son from Korea.  Joe and Beth were accompanied by two of their girls (they have six kids total), Jennifer and Sarah, in China, so we got to know them as well.  We had enjoyed this family so much in China, we could not wait to meet up with them.  Plus, we were eager to hear Micah speak English as he was only speaking Chinese when we last saw him.  We were also looking forward to them seeing Kara with hair!

This is their Micah.  He wanted to make sure we didn't mix him up with our Micah, so he told me to call our Micah, "Micah, Micah."  This guy is absolutely thriving.  He's being homeschooled, so Mom is obviously doing a great job!

Here is Wesley who likes Legos as much as my kids.  He and Gabriel also did a lot of Bionicle talking.  This picture was taken at a fountain near (on?) the Purdue campus.  The kids had a blast getting blasted by the water. 

Sarah really bonded with Kara in China, so it was fun to see them back together.  I told her I would love for her to babysit, but the plane fare back and forth might be a little much for a night out.

This is Jennifer who is perhaps one of the gentlest people you've ever met.  She and Sarah are both great with kids. 

We had a super time with the Faulkners.  They were wonderfully hospitable and we had great food and great conversation.  They don't have little ones in their home, but they were extremely accomodating with the WTs.  They were always assuring me the WTs were no bother.  The visit with them was a great way to end our trip, though we were sorry to have to say goodbye.

We left really early in the morning to drive to the airport.  The kids fell asleep in the car except for Kara.  Out of the blue she started singing.  It was a song that had a definite beginning, middle and end, but not one that we recognized.  In fact, we didn't recognize any words at all.  We became convinced that she was singing a Chinese song that was stored way back in her memory.  When we first got her she didn't speak (even in Chinese), but once she did sing a little bit of a song.  I asked her to sing her "special song" again, and she did.  Of course if I ask her to sing her special song now, it comes out as "Deep and Wide" or "Jesus Loves Me" or a combination of the two.

Once we got to the airport, we had a slight issue going through security.  The Kelleys had given us two shakers of this really yummy seasoning to take home with us.  One of the shakers had already been opened, but the other was still sealed.  James forgot that he put the shakers in his backpack, which was his carryon.  Apparently, an opened container of a powdered substance is not a good thing to try to take on the plane.  Here's where I give a shout out to the TSA guy at the airport in Indiana.  He took the opened shaker and was apologetic about having to test it! We completely understood why it was needed, but he was easygoing, professional, and he explained the whole process to us.  When it was confirmed that we were really only sneaking on cajun seasoning and not bomb making substances, we were on our way.  And yes, I sat next to Micah on the way home. 

I have to comment that we met some really nice people on our trip.  When we came into Kentucky we could not find our hotel and got lost in a residential area.  James asked for directions from a man in a truck who was on the side of the road.  He offered to drive us by there even though we were quite far away.  He said he was kind of heading in that direction.  We followed him for a good ways, he slowed down in front of our hotel, then went on his way without us being able to say thanks.

When we arrived back home, James went to get our car which was parked in another location away from the airport.  That left me with the five kids and all our luggage.  After waiting for a while, I decided to move us outside which had to be done in stages.  A woman stopped me and asked if I needed any help getting to my car.  I thanked her and said that we were waiting for our ride (which ended up taking a looooooong time to come, which is a looooong story).

Before I sign off, a quick update on child #6.  We have new video and pictures of him.  He is ridiculously adorable and needs to be home!!! If you're praying types, please pray for quick movement of paperwork.  Merry Christmas to you all and I leave you with one more picture of the WTs enjoying the after effects of rain.

Micah decorates his room, All the world's a stage for Kara, Fire at the Froisland's

Yeah, yeah, pictures...now we have a new computer, but I haven't figured out how to download pictures.  I'm not even making promises anymore.  You'll just be pleasantly surprised when they surface.

Before we had kids, we would hear parents tell stories and we'd say to ourselves, "Our kids would NEVER do that!"  Since we've had kids, we never say that anymore.  Okay, let's change that to: since we've had WTs, we never say that anymore.

Micah apparently has decided he wants to get into interior design.  He decided to decorate his room one day during naptime.  It was quiet in his room, so of course, the silly silly people that we are, we thought he was actually napping.  That fantasy of ours ended when Daniel came downstairs and said, "Micah's door is open and it really stinks in his room!"  James and I (yes, James was actually home for this one) rolled our eyes and figured we needed to change his diaper.  No state of alarm until James overheard Charis comment to Daniel, "Oh, so that's why it smelled.  Yeah, I saw brown stuff all over Micah's hands."  With that, James bolted upstairs.

Let me interrupt the narrative here to say that James and I had been occupied because we were expecting company in an hour.  I was working on dinner, and he was tidying up some paperwork.  So if you didn't catch this earlier, this was an hour before our guests were due.

I was hoping that Charis was exaggerating when she spoke of the brown stuff being "all over his hands" until I heard James exclaim, "Oh my goodness!" I tried to pretend I didn't hear that, but very soon after that I was summoned upstairs.  When I got to Micah's room, I thought it looked like a crime scene.  I actually considered calling one of those companies that clean up after crime scenes.  And a crime had been committed alright, a crime against Micah's parents' humanity (and senses of smell) since they had to do the cleaning up.

From what we could gather from the copious amount of evidence left behind, Micah decided to free himself from the constraints of his diaper and from what it contained.  Then he choose to express himself by taking his "paint" and using his room and all it contained as his canvas.  I'll stop there with the details since this is a family blog and anything more would not be for the faint of heart.  Suffice it to say, it took an hour to clean up, our guests were on time, but dinner was late.  Not that we really had an appetite anymore anyway.

I think I've mentioned before that Kara has a thing for shoes.  Well that "thing" has expanded into clothes in general.  I think she believes the world's a stage and she is on it.  Or she thinks that she is the host of an awards show and needs to undergo numerous "costume" changes over the course of a day (or an hour).  Anybody's clothes are fair game, which amounts to some rather humorous results.  When laundry is out and waiting to be folded (just about every day, several times a day), it's like a shopping spree for Kara.  I think my favorite look was when she was fully clothed, but had several pairs of other people's underwear over her outfit.  I'm sure we'll see that on all the runways in Paris come the spring.  FYI, we don't let her go out in public like that.  We already have mountains of blackmail material on the WTs.  We are all looking forward to using said material.  Like, say...on their wedding days???

This next story I can only remotely blame on a twin, but mostly it's on me.  Actually I've been blaming flies (my new analogy for sin) because no one likes them anyway.  As I was getting lunch ready the other day, the WTs were in the backyard playing.  Every few minutes it seemed, one of them had to come inside for one reason or another.  Of course opening the door is way easier than closing the door (apparently), and so the door was constantly being left open.  Flies took that as a personal invitation to invade my house, which they did most readily.

When feeding the kids, I set up their plates assembly line style and then put them on the table.  With the flies swarming about, I couldn't leave the plates on the table unattended.  Since I was right at the stove, heating something up, I placed the plates around the stove, inadvertently obscuring my view of the stove knobs.  Wanting to turn the heat up on my soup, I peeked between the plates and saw the word "left" and assumed it was for the burner I was using.  People, sometimes it's a really bad idea to assume.

I kept smelling something odd as I put the finishing touches on the plates.  I figured something spilled on the heat element in the toaster oven and that's why it smelled.  About the time I checked my soup and noticed it wasn't bubbling like it ought to have been, a flame shot up behind my pan.  Instantly I realized I had turned the wrong burner to "high."  With one hand I turned off the burner, with the other hand I started beating down the flame with a towel.  As soon as I had it out, it flared up again.  I realized that what was burning was a melted Tupperware (it HAD to be expensive Tupperware, not the use and toss Ziploc lids, which I never toss and so they are multiplying like rabbits in my cabinet) lid which was on a metal burner cover, which was on another metal burner cover (metal is a great conductor of heat if you didn't know).  I whirled around to find the tongs I had seen the WTs playing with and of course in that instant, even with the heat turned off, the flame shot up again.  Once I got the tongs I removed the flaming burning cover, put out the flame, and then removed the other burner cover.  I at least thought to scrape some of the melted rubber off the cover before it cooled.  I failed to turn the cover over and see the mound of melted plastic that very quickly solidified onto my nice expensive cobalt blue burner cover.  And wouldn't you know, NO ONE was around to watch my heroic handling of this disaster.  I am usually tripping over people getting in my way while I prepare meals.  Not this time.  Talk about anti-climactic.  Anyway, I still blame it all on the flies.

How are flies like sin? They are really easy to let in, really hard to get out, and they cause consequences far beyond what you would expect.  And they're really yucky.

By the way Nov. 6 is Orphan Sunday.  For more info you can go to www.orphansunday.org or one of my favorite organization's sites www.showhope.org   Remember that there are millions of orphans out there, but it only takes one person to make a change in the life of an orphan.  Here are two good videos, both using the same song, but worth watching.  I just dare you to not shed tears when watching the second one. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAEkZFll-xU&noredirect=1

This one has clips of real "gotcha" moments, when families are united with their children.  We are eagerly eagerly awaiting our second gotcha moment!

Go to this site and click on "When Love takes you in"
http://www.showhope.org/Resources/VideoLibrary/tabid/122/modId/540/LCPage/2/eType/ALL/LCTag/ALL/Default.aspx