D and E Bible Crafts and Carefree Timelessness ;-)

D is for Dove ;-)

E is for Empty Tomb 

Found some awesome geese today ;-) 

Mountainview park 

This is what the Galluccis do at the park ;-) 

Lots of family fun ;-) 

I have been thinking and pondering and praying over marriage the last two months. Joe and I have almost reached eight years as a married team. ;-) I feel that the last four years or so our marriage has strengthened and as I think about it, these are a few of the things that I have learned. 

1. Give 100% whenever you have the strength.

 “Can you meet me hallway, right on the borderline

That’s where I’m gonna wait, for you.”

Black Eyed Peas

That's what our culture tends to say. Give just enough. That's how I felt when I first got married, and our marriage suffered. "I will cook if you do the dishes." "I will go with you to your boring work party if you will go with me to mine." "If I do something for you, what will you do for me??"

This is the wrong way to look at marriage. Give 100% whenever you are able. Granted there will be times when you are sick, emotionally exhausted, stressed, and such when you cannot give your all no matter how much you want to. However, whenever you have the strength give all that you can to your husband. "What can I do for you today?" "How can I help you?" Service and love and sacrifice naturally creates an attitude and posture of service for your relationship. Asking what you can get out of the relationship on any given day is the wrong question. If you give all you can, your husband will see that, and on those few days when you cannot do your best, he will see that and be more than willing to help you in return. Just make sure to ask. Husband's, as Joe told me often our first few years, cannot read our minds. ;-) 

2. Going hand in hand with serving our spouse is knowing how to do this most effectively. I highly recommend reading the book about the five love languages. Find out what your spouse's love languages are and have a conversation with him about yours as well. Fill his love jar the way he needs it to be filled. My love languages are physical touch and quality time, and I naturally will run into Joe's arms to give him a hug whenever he is feeling a little down. However, that is not what he needs though hugs are always great ;-) . His love languages are words of encouragement and acts of service. His entire disposition lights up when I praise him. It gives him the strength to do his best. 

3. I believe that feeling happy has a lot to do with our expectations vs. our reality. I often have the least happy days on special occasions like Valentines Day or my birthday because I have high expectations for how I want the day to play out exactly. So this is my advice for those of us with young children. Try not to have unrealistic expectations of your husband. My husband wakes up early and works hard for us all day long. I try not to expect him to do anything when he gets home other than be with us and talk with us. When my heart is in the right place with this, I am so much happier. If I need an adventure or need to get things done, I try my best to do those things before he gets home so that when he does, we can focus on just being together. We are not in the same stage of life that we once were. Kids are unpredictable and extremely time consuming. I know without a doubt that my husband loves me, and that is enough.

Love you, sweetie!!

 Pajama Day!!

Max looking up at the sunset. "Mommy, that's God's coloring. Our coloring is inside but his is outside. I think his coloring is more beautiful. Don't u?" 

A, B, C Bible Crafts

So I do a preschool project with the boys every day, but I wanted to do a theme so we are doing Bible A,B,Cs. We read a story from the Bible that has to do with that letter and then the project. They are loving it so far.

A is for ANGEL 

B is for BURNING BUSH 

C is for CROSS 

Welcome to the Process ;-)

We got accepted to the China program with Holt International today! I am over the moon. We had an intense conversation with our adoption agency about our thoughts, and I needed some time to process things so I took the boys to the "forest" and we hiked around for three hours. Deep green is always my favorite therapy. I logged into the parent handbook today. For twelve months, I have been staring at the button longing to push it and now I can. ;-)

Here's to the adventure! 

Some pics of our adventure today. ;-)

May I have the strength to say, it is well with my soul.

I believe that happiness does not come from anything that we do or have it comes from spending ourselves for others, trying our best, laying down ourselves and knowing that at the end of the day you've given it your all. 

So we finally applied to adopt our little girl from China this weekend! We finally made it. 17 years after God placed the idea in my heart, I made my first real step forward. I was expecting to be more elated than I am. As I tried to explain to Joe, and he made fun of me since he actually has run a marathon, applying to adopt feels like the first step of a 26 mile race. I am nervous about the next 12-24 months of the process, hoping that there are no snags and knowing at the end of the day there are no guarantees. We were signing the agreement yesterday, and it spelled out one of my biggest fears, which is there is a good chance that the special needs of our little girl will be bigger and more complicated than the reports state. My stomach flips; my heart panics. Can I handle this journey? Can I make it? It's a long, winding, lonely road. I pray that I have the strength to say, my life is yours, Lord.

Please hold me through this journey. Please help me to be brave. I struggle so much with fear. That and being too hard on myself are probably my two biggest weaknesses. There are so many things out there to fear, especially once you become a mom. I want to be fearless. I want to walk forward in the knowledge that God is big enough to handle all my concerns and is in control. Please help me to be the person that you want me to be. Please help this adoption journey continue to refine my character because I want to be more like you. 

Hello 2015

Jan 1, 2015

I remember sitting with Joe sometime during January 2014 and strategizing and saying, “This is going to be a really hard year for me because I already am so ready to start the adoption process, and I have to wait another whole year.” We made it through, with flying colors might I add. It was a beautiful year, filled with freedom, adventure, preschool, Disneyland, Legoland, curiosity, patience, and stillness. My three boys have kept my hands busy, but there has not been a day that has gone by that I haven’t thought of Bella, prayed for her, longed to know where she is, wondered if she is alright, pondered who her birth mother is, questioned what age she is. It is amazing how much time I have spent thinking about her and praying for her.

Being a stay at home mom has been a refining fire for my type-A, task oriented, straight-A student heart. It has stilled me and changed me more than anything else in my 29 ½ years of life. I have learned, finally, to be ok with stillness, to be ok with doing nothing with my boys, to be able to quiet the ever present voices whispering at me to keep striving, to keep pressing forward, to do more, to BE more. I have become in the last 4 ½ years so much better at accepting myself, and that trying my best whether or not anyone else notices is enough.

I have learned to empty myself of expectations. I still walk forward into every day with a to-do list: laundry, preschool, park playdate, Target…. But I have become so much better at being okay, for the most part, of surrendering my day. Of laying down what I want my day to look like, on an hourly basis because that is usually how often I need to do it, and allow myself to be flexible to what may happen, which has made me such a happier person. If naps don’t happen, if the boys refuse to do what I had planned, if I drive down to Legoland and they won’t go on a single ride, it’s ok.

Every day is a struggle to be patient, but I have grown so much. No matter how many times the boys yell at me, cry, whine, yell at each other, ask for insanely crazy things, I have learned to take a deep breath, smile, and answer calmly. I have learned to not let their emotions affect my internal world. I have become so much more emotionally stable through the boys. They have trained me to be able to hold a screaming child and comfort him and remain internally still and peaceful.

The hardest thing for me is parenting with an audience. I am fine with calmly disciplining, teaching, talking with an emotional and unreasonable child, but when I have to do it while friends or family are watching, for some reason, it is a 1000 times harder. Doing what I believe to be the right thing is one thing, but doing it while imagining if someone else thinks it’s the right thing makes it so much harder for me.

I need my friends. I need to talk with them and share with them and struggle through this parenting mystery with them, but I struggle with them seeing my children’s weaknesses and my own. Being a parent is so hard because day in a day out you try your best to pour good principles and right and wrong into your children, but at the end of the day, you never know what they will do. You can’t control the words that pop from their mouths or the way they shove a kid that grabs their toy. You can respond after the fact and try your best to handle each situation with grace, but it is hard not to see your children as a reflection on you on a daily basis, as little Hayleys, in that people look at you like you are doing a bad job if your kiddos throw a tantrum.

The good news about this is that it has made me very nonjudgmental of other parents. I put myself in their shoes, and even the parents that are yelling at their kids with angry faces, I understand. I understand the emotional breaking point you can get to after watching your kids for ten hours without two minutes to think in quiet, and I just smile and hope that their day gets better.

So we begin the year of paperwork. A year I have prayed for and sought and thought about for so long. And now that it’s here I am nervous: nervous of roadblocks, of rejection, of hang ups. I have had so much energy and passion and desire to be my best as a stay at home mom for so long that I am afraid I will wake up somewhere along the way in the next 12-18 months, which is how long the adoption journey will take and realize I am tired and am not sure I can handle another one, and then it will be too late. And I know that I will need every ounce of love, and strength, and passion I can muster once she is here. I feel so ready for her to come right now. So ready to jump into the challenges and long nights and hard won joys that will come but so afraid that once we jump on that plane, I will not have the strength that I have now. I pray for patience in the sitting and the waiting and the being. Because God’s timing is perfect, and he knows which little girl a world away is for us. I have read so many comments from so many families waiting on specific paperwork at different times and how many exact days they have been waiting because they have been counting, and I am worried about being too obsessed with the waiting and forget to live.

I want to release my fear. The fear of which special need we will be tackling and the fear of my energizer bunnies accepting and loving their new sister who is going to come at them not with blinking newborn eyes but with grabbing toddler hands, the fear of the difficult transition for our baby girl who has so much ahead of her the next two years.

2015 is going to a big year. A year of changes. A year of kindergarten and of schedules. A year of notarized paperwork and holding our breath. And I pray for the strength and the patience and the energy to be the best version of myself day by day by day. 

Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll