Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Guess who might be getting another exchange student!?

I just got a call from the exchange program we hosted Melissa through and they have more kids coming at the end of May.

As much as we loved having Melissa here, when she left it was kind of nice to have our house back and we said that we were done having houseguests for a while. So now I'm laughing at myself that I'm seriously considering the idea of doing it again so soon!

We haven't decided if we're going to do it. We actually have some out of town plans in June and I don't know if taking someone else with us is going to be too much. I'm not sure if having someone in our house for a month again so soon is going to be too much.

Am I crazy??

Probably!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Six months!!

As of today, Clarissa has officially been home for six months! I really can't believe that six months have passed already. The six months BEFORE she came home dragged on forever, but the six months after have flown right by.

The six month mark is an important milestone because it's the amount of time that must pass before she can be legally adopted. So now we can get the legal process finished up and finally, after three looong years, we can say goodbye to adoption paperwork. YAY!

We met with our lawyer today and signed the papers that needed to be signed to get our court date and hopefully the court is assigning us a date this afternoon. She said that she's going to push for the week of May 10th, and that sounds great to me! I should hopefully know the date in the next couple of days.

Our lawyer is super nice and she totally looks like Camryn Manheim, lol. (Doesn't Camryn Manheim play a lawyer on some show?) I had to laugh as we were leaving her office today. She's really friendly and we sat and chatted for a few minutes after we signed the papers. I forget that we're paying her a fortune by the hour, but Shawn did NOT forget and was silently adding up how much our conversation about Clarissa's cute shoes and whether or not I'd ever seen a glow in the dark pacifier was costing us, lol. Whatever, it's adult conversation in my day. Charge me for it, it's still totally worth it. :)

So that's the latest adoption news. May is going to be an exciting month around here!

Monday, April 12, 2010

The parable of the floorboards

In our religion we have something called Family Home Evening. It's one night a week (traditionally Monday) where we gather as a family at home and have kind of a little family meeting. We sometimes do things like play a game, have a religious discussion with the kids, talk about family business and just spend some quality family time together. It's nothing fancy, it's just fun and informal and a chance to regroup as a family and teach our children.

We get busy and we're not always great about doing it, but I'm trying to do better. Tonight for Family Home Evening we had Korean food (our favorite!!) and I gave the kids a little lesson (OK, I gave one of those "mom" speeches, lol) about not sweating the small things.

And because I have nothing else to blog about today, here's what we discussed. It was brought on by something I've been thinking about today.

This morning I was cleaning the kitchen and I was walking through the kitchen looking at the floor and I noticed the one floorboard in our kitchen that is skinnier than the others. It brought back a memory and gave me something to think about all day.

Three or four years ago we remodeled our kitchen. Half of our kitchen had carpet on the floor and the other half of it was vinyl. I wasn't a fan of either so we pulled it all out and had hardwood floors installed and did some other changes in our kitchen. The wood floor project was supposed to be simple and it ended up being a ginormous headache that went on for a month. After they tore the old floor out they realized that they had brought the wrong kind of wood and then had some problems getting the right kind (it had to match wood that was already in our entryway), so our kitchen ended up being torn up for several weeks.

When it was finally finished we were really happy and enjoyed our floor for a few months...and then our dishwasher broke and the water damage ruined the new hardwood in part of the kitchen. We had to pull up the cabinets and about an 8-10 foot section of wood between the wall cabinets and the island had to be pulled out and replaced.

After already having gone through a disaster with that floor a few months before I was NOT happy. We had to tear the kitchen up again, we actually had to live in a hotel for a week while they had huge loud fans drying out the subflooring and then they had to replace the wood and restain it.

When they went to replace the wood there was some sort of an issue about matching up the boards for some reason. Honestly, I can't remember what the problem was anymore exactly, but because they were only replacing one section they were having a hard time getting it to match back up with the exsisting flooring where it lined up with the end of the cabinets. I forget now what the problem was, but it was a big problem. They kept getting more and more flooring guys to come out and look at the floor while they tried to figure out how to fix it and in the meantime we were still living in a hotel.

They finally decided that one floorboard was going to have to be skinnier than the others in order to make it fit. The kind of had to put in half a floorboard to fill the gap correctly. I kind of lost it at that point. I was tired of the floors being torn up, the stress of living in a hotel while they figured out the problem was getting to me and I wasn't happy that our expensive new floor was going to have a flaw in it. I lost sleep and shed tears over that stupid skinny floorboard.

They eventually put the floor back together, we moved back into our house and life continued.

Fast foward three or four years to today and as I was cleaning the kitchen I saw the skinny floorboard. I walk over that floor a million times a day, I mop it, I sweep it, and honestly I had totally forgotten about the skinny floorboard until today. It's not noticable unless you point it out and I just never think about it anymore.

So that got me thinking about life and the stupid things we stress over. I'm actually embarrassed to admit that my biggest problem in life at that time was a skinny floorboard and that I actually thought it was a problem! Of all the stupid things in life to have a fit over, that's probably the stupidest. There are a lot of people in the world who would be thrilled to live in ANY house and I was unhappy that my floorboards didn't match. Someone should have slapped me upside the head and given me a reality check.

In our lives there are so many things that we think are huge problems that in the grand scheme of things really aren't. Those problems will now be referred to in our family as skinny floorboard problems.

We had a good discussion with the kids tonight about not letting little problems seem like big problems. The vast majority of things in our lives that we think are huge problems end up being completely forgotten after a while. Time passes, problems work themselves out and later you look back and laugh at the silly thing you stressed out about.

So from now on, when we find ourselves all worked up about something we're going to ask ourselves if it's a REAL problem or just a skinny floorboard problem. Is it something that is really going to impact our lives or is it something petty that is going to blow over and be forgotten? If it's petty, let it go. Skinny floorboard problems aren't worth the stress. Sometimes you just have to accept that life isn't always going to be perfect and move on.

So there you go, the parable of the floorboards. Life is too short to worry about skinny floorboards.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

I'm still alive!

When it comes to my blog, I'm trying really hard to follow the saying "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all". That explains my absence for the past week!

It's been kind of a crappy week where I haven't done much of anything except lay around and be sick. I've seriously never been sick this long in my whole life. I've had a bad cold all month that kept coming and going. I've had a sore throat and a cough for weeks.

Shawn had planned to take a few days off work because we were planning on going out of town for my birthday, but when I was still sick we decided not to go out of town and he took the time off anyway so we had a low key long weekend at home and he helped out with the kids so I could rest.

Finally by Tuesday I was feeling much better and was so happy to finally be over the sickness. Then Wednesday morning I woke up at about 5am with a stomach ache and within an hour I was throwing up and extremely sick.

The boys got up to get ready for school and Matthew said that his stomach hurt, but after he ate something he said he felt fine, so I sent him to school. In the meantime Shawn called work to say that he was taking another day off because there was just no way that I could take care of Clarissa while I was spending the day in the bathroom.

At about 10am we got a call from the kids school letting us know that Matthew was in the nurses office because he had just thrown up. By the time Shawn got over there to pick Matthew up, Josh was in the nurses office throwing up too.

I don't know if we got food poisoning or the stomach flu or what, but it was horrible! Shawn and Clarissa never got it, but the boys and I pretty much spent the day in the bathroom. I'm so grateful to have such a great husband who played nurse all day long.

Today we're all feeling much better than yesterday, but I kept the boys home from school again so we can all take one more day to recover.

After all of this I hope that we've reached the end of the sickness in our family because I seriously can't take it anymore. It's been crazy around here!

Oh! One fun thing did happen this weekend! Shawn bought me an iPad for my birthday!! I've wanted one really bad so I was super excited! It has been keeping me entertained while I've been sick.

So there is the update from our house. Let's hope that my next post is about something fun and not another recap of another week of sickness!!

Friday, April 2, 2010

Boys Over Flowers

Hi, welcome to my new obsession-the Korean drama Boys Over Flowers!

I love Korean dramas. Seriously LOVE them. When we were in Korea we bought some of our favorites on DVD and I love to watch them over and over.

For those of you who weren't here for my previous posts about Korean dramas, they're kind of a cross between a soap opera (only not trashy and cheesy like American soap operas) and a mini series. They have hour long episodes that all revolve around one plot and once they resolve the story, it's over. They're kind of like American TV dramas but they only go for one season.

Koreans know how to tell a story and keep you on the edge of your seat until it's over! American movie and TV writers need to go to Korea and spend some time learning from the masters.

I have been hearing about Boys Over Flowers for a while, but had never gotten around to watching it until this week. It was a gigantic hit in Korea last year. It has 25 hour long episodes and I've pretty much spent the past several days trying to cram episodes in wherever I can. Shawn and I have been staying up super late every night watching as much as we can until our eyes won't stay open anymore! Last night we finally watched the finale and it was really good.

Pretty much every Korean drama I've seen has the same basic plot line-Cinderella story with a love triangle. The sweet girl from the wrong side of the tracks meets a rich, handsome guy and complications ensue. You'd think that the same story would get old after a while, but somehow they manage to retell it a hundred different ways and it never gets old.

Boys Over Flowers follows that same story line. A girl from a poor family gets a scholarship to the most prestigious, fancy high school in the city and meets four very rich and powerful boys who pretty much run the school. At first they hate her and then they love her, and well...it just gets complicated after that.

It's sweet and sad and funny and completely addictive. I'm tempted to start over and watch it again!

Anyway, today I was looking on Youtube for videos related to the show and I realized something. When we were in Korea we took the train to the city Clarissa was born in and the day we were there it happened to be the day they were having an international film festival in that city, which I gather is sort of like Sundance or something. All the big movie stars in Korea were there.

We were only there for the afternoon and evening before we had to go back to Seoul, but while we were at the beach we watched them set up big movie screens and there were lots of people and photographers. We didn't really know what we were looking at and of course everything was in Korean, so it was interesting to watch, but we didn't really know what was going on.

Today I did a search on Youtube and came across a video of the main male star of Boys Over Flowers (who has officially replaced Jim Halpert as my new TV boyfriend by the way, lol) and he was there walking the red carpet that night! He was literally across the street from us! It would have been really fun to watch all the excitement that night if we had known who we were looking at.

So anyway, watch Boys Over Flowers. I love Korean culture.

In other news, we were supposed to go out of town to my moms house this weekend for Easter and my birthday, but I'm sick so I don't think we're going. In an effort to stop complaining so much on my blog I've tried not to whine about the fact that I've been sick all month, but I've been sick all month. Our whole family has been sick all month. We just keep passing it around and when someone gets over it someone else gets it and we start all over again. I was feeling OK for a while while everyone else was sick, but now they're all better and I feel crappy again. I can't stop coughing. It seems like everyone I know around here has had the same sickness all month.

So we may just be staying home and taking it easy this weekend, which is kind of OK with me. I enjoy going to my moms house, but right now a quiet weekend at home is sounding kind of nice to me. We can find something fun to do at home.

I'm oddly not all that excited about my birthday this year. Normally I get excited about my birthday, but for some reason this year I'm mopey about it. I'm turning 35. I don't feel 35. Wasn't I just 17 yesterday?? I thought you weren't supposed to start getting mopey about your birthday until you turned 40. I've been having a bout of nostalgia this week. Maybe it didn't help that I've been watching a show about high school all week, lol.

So that's the update from our house. Aside from the annoying cough I have and the even more annoying bout of grumpiness about my birthday, life is going fine around here. Oh, and I'm still on Duck Watch 2010, but nothing yet. I'll keep you posted!