Ahoy Matey!

February 6th also brought about big changes for Little Buddy. Being that he is a nocturnal Chatty Charlie, (unbeknownst to him), he scored a room all to himself. What used to be Grant's pad is now his pseudo-ship for pirate play!

Gone is his twin bed with railings on the side. He's moved up to a full size bed with the ever looming capability of being fallen out of! He was pumped! One thing he was not ready to let go of was the rocking chair. I asked him if I could leave it out and his reply was, "Well, I guess you could.......but no. I'm going to go ahead and keep it. You like rocking me."
I found an old treasure map and a ship's anchor to complete his decor. I've had a pirate picture on order for the last month and it's yet to arrive. I'm praying that I'm not getting hoodooyed. 
Rhett "lubs" his new room. The changes have not interrupted anyone's sleep cycles or anything. It's brought about some confusion when getting out of the bathtub because for a couple of days everyone was running to the wrong underwear drawer. Those problems have since cleared up!
Little Buddy's bffs like their new space as well. What's a new pad if you can't share it with your friends?
Tomorrow I'll peek into the changes in Cade's old room. Yummy. Those changes are exciting!

Expectant

This post is late in coming.....but such is my life lately. I feel like I've been two steps behind in everything that I plan to do. I've sent my son to a birthday party with NO gift, forgotten to pay my mother's day out tuition (although that's no shocker being that my mind still doesn't register the due date without the handy "pay now" sign taped to the door), left wet clothes in the washing machine for days and then wondered why I had no clean underwear..... My mind. It's been on hiatus.

Anyhoo, January brought some changes here at the Morgan Casa. In the midst of a truly wonderful bible study, God sent me a strong conviction about my attitude regarding our adoption. His question to me: Why do you doubt? Why are you living with no hope? That's when I made a decision: I am going to live expectantly! I'm going to fully expect that God is going to finish out the work that He's started in this family. 

As of February 6th, expectant living looks like this:

Yeah, yeah. Not the picture you were thinking of I'm sure. That my friends is a picture of two brothers now sharing a room. I gave Cade the option of choosing: room to yourself, or share with a brother. He picked share. Then he picked Grant.
The consensus was that Little Rhetters does too much talking. It's the truth. Cade and Grant were overjoyed to move into their new quarters as bunk mates!  

After I shot down the Star Wars bedding, both settled on having a sports themed room. That worked out well being that the local Tarjay had several accessories that went well with the decor.
I must say that my request for this post was just ONE normal looking picture. Now that you've perused all of the shots taken you can see that "normal" just really isn't in this family's vocabulary. That's okay. Most of the time normal just really isn't much fun!

Stay tuned for Little Buddy's room.......and more of this story!

On A Mission

At the time of this post our mission trip begins in exactly 36 hours! Last night we had a quick little get together with some of the team to do some packing. Amanda P. was stoked about being there :)

We had tons of donations from our Sunday School class as well as my mom and dad's church. We packed 60 boys watches, a gagillion girl's hair accessories, girls and boys underwear, handmade blankets and birthcloths, and a few pairs of stray shoes in this box. 

Bobby was in charge of weighing the boxes. He and I clearly didn't agree on how items needed to be packed......I wanted to place small items together in ziploc bags. He preferred to just pile things in willy nilly with the "git er done" man attitude. Needless to say, I let him do that and then when he walked away I put things in ziplocs. Deep inside he thanked me for it later when we had to move some items around......deep, deep inside. He may or may not have referred to me as "Packing Nazi" once or twice.

Here's our box of fun: Jump ropes, playdough, craft sticks and lots of diecuts, coloring books and some things Bobby picked out- wiffle balls and bats, baseballs, and glo-sticks. Have you ever seen a sad kid with a glo-stick? Me neither.
Next our box of toiletries and randomness: bowls, neopsporin, q-tips, cups, deoderant, soap, and toothpaste (all nicely packed in ziplocs, might I add).

We racked up with some shoes. All the boys will be twinkie-dinkie-doo with their almost converse shoes on. Piled under those are tons of girls shoes. We should have enough for every child to have a pair. God will have to work out the sizes because we just bought what we could find.
I didn't take a picture of our fifth box. It's a box-o-pads. And really, who wants to come to this blog and look at a bunch of pads? Here's an interesting fact though: A packed to the hilt crate of pads weighs just a hair over 25lbs. Now if you're in some kind of random knowledge contest you'll surely win with that tid bit of information.

So, 36 more hours until plane boarding, 60ish hours until we debut at the orphanage and tackle our first major task.... the de-lousing of 100+kids. If my hair looks a muck in all my pics when I get back it's because I've greased it in tea tree oil to ward off critters. If Bobby is bald it means the tea tree oil didn't work.

It is very likely, if I can pull it off, that my crate will look like this on the way home:

If there is a hand visible it means that the medication wore off before we made it all the way home. Also, the visible hand will also likely mean that you can catch my picture on America's Most Wanted or CNN News "American Missionary Kidnaps Child"......wait. Didn't we finally just quit hearing that one?? In any case, I'll try to keep things legal. Thanks in advance for your prayers for our team!!

Drivin'

Grant's favorite birthday present has been tearing up the streets......well, the streets of his mind. He's already been talking about how he could take his car to the pool and only, IF ONLY, it would be frozen over, he could drive it right across the water.

He picked out one of his most loved sleeping partners, so loving and thoughtfully named, Black Bear, to be the sole driver of his prized wheels. I can't decide if Black Bear's facial expression shows happiness or frustration. 
I find it quite ironic that this is his most prized pastime these days being that I personally bought him two remote control race cars for Christmas that never made it out of the package and were returned to the store without a second thought as to where they might be. As of today, I've used a total of 12 batteries not counting the one's that were in it when he got it. This might be a good time to remember to use my Duracell coupons. 

We All Survived!

Grant was up at 5:45 this morning because the thoughts of his spend-the-night- birthday party were inhibiting his sleep. His teacher informed me that he was high on excitement the entire day. I only had to hear "are my friends coming yet??" approximately 80 times between the hours of 3 and 5pm.

Lucky for me, 5pm finally rolled around and after a few rings of the doorbell all the party players were present and the fun began! First stop: pizza eating and an impromptu spelling contest. After a brief conversation lull, one bud piped up with "Does everybody know that I can spell railroad?"  That just gave me a giggle....

This is how crazy a 6 year old slumber party can look:
I wrangled the boys for a moment of present opening but couldn't contain them long enough to sing Happy Birthday or even eat cake for that matter. It was fine with me being that they were all ready dosed up on sugar from their Valentine parties at school.
They did settle for a little bit of popcorn and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. After that the real fun began!
How about a little wrestle-mania!! It was at this point in the party that I could really figure out whose idea it was to have 4 boys spend the night- Bobby or Grant? It cracked me up when the boys came upstairs and asked Mr. Bobby to play with them. Can you even see Mr. Bobby in this pic??

This picture makes me smile every time because Grant is totally laughing his head off.

Wrestle Mania will always be one of the boys' favorite memories I'm sure. This buddy's mom said that's all he talked about when he got home and she had no idea what it was!
Here is the last group shot of the night. I wish I would have had a camera to snap a picture of the faces of my three night owls when I entered the room at 1215am with my serious face on and separated the chatty charlies. It would have been priceless memorabilia! 
I know this slumber party created a lot of whiny boys on Saturday but it was good for a thousand laughs and smiles on Friday night! Happy, happy birthday, Grant!!

Six Looks Like This

Grant woke up this morning with one more completed year underneath his belt. I finally wised up and crafted the infamous birthday crown the night before so I wouldn't have to roll out of the bed at first dawn to try to be creative. From this waking moment on, Grant was no longer "Grant" but "Birthday Boy". He tried to get me to start calling him that on Wednesday night but I didn't cave. 

Here is what six looks like right now in the Morgan casa:

Cade broke out of the room with him at 6:30 on the dot. Little Buddy? Nowhere to be found. He slept until 8 which is completely unheard of in these parts.
Birthday dinner was Grant's choice and I had to pull my mom card when he said he wanted to go to Snappy Tomato. Please, no. Much to my happiness he pulled out a second answer and we headed to Logan's. He stuffed his face full of buttery rolls and gave his dad some knucks for having such a great birthday. I was lucky to have my handy, dandy pocket camera to capture the face stuffing.
It was his first time to be on the receiving end of the Logan's Birthday YeeHaww and he loved all 10 seconds of it!
His bros were pumped about his birthday as well.....because generally birthdays mean new toys and new toys are fun for everyone!
We headed back to the house and shared some birthday cupcakes with the grandparents. In keeping with another unintended birthday tradition, I forgot to get real birthday candles and instead had to improvise with a tea light left over from Halloween.  You'd think after, say, the 4th or 5th time that happened I would remember to get some candles. Not so much.
It was a great day for celebrating 6 years with one of my most favorite boys! If I survive my next post will be pics from his second annual spend the night birthday party! Yikes!!

It Fits Just Right!

Well, I finally found something to put in that crazy little cutout that our architect designed in our basement wall. It's taken me over 3 years and nothing seemed just right until now:

You just really never know where you might find this child. And by the way, he's a stuffed "Rhettaboo"...... very similar to the more popularly known "caribou". His own words. Really. You just never know.