6 hours of painting. 2 rooms done, one coat on another done. That means one more coat in that room, a closet and then our big room, then we’re done. Painting. Forever. I hate it.

I found out today that I push EXTREMELY hard when I’m rolling paint. Kind of hilarious. But now everything hurts. My teeth hurt. Almost there. Almost there.

No news on the adoption. Perhaps I should find out what the Amharic word for “No news on the adoption” is and nickname Tariku that.

I’ve been tagged by “Herdegens” (one of these days I’ll learn to make that able to just go to it). By the way, can you tell Zach left the computer at home when he had to travel for work? Yippee!!!

P.S. We won’t hear anything on the adoption today. Jan said she tried to call the peeps and wasn’t able to get ahold of anyone. Here’s to tomorrow!

HERE’S HOW YOU PLAY. ONCE YOU’VE BEEN TAGGED YOU HAVE TO WRITE A BLOG OF TEN WEIRD, RANDOM THINGS, FACTS OR HABITS ABOUT YOURSELF. AT THE END, YOU CHOOSE FIVE PEOPLE TO BE TAGGED, LISTING THEIR NAMES AND WHY YOU CHOSE THEM TO BE TAGGED. DON’T FORGET TO LEAVE THEM A COMMENT “YOU’RE IT” AND TO READ YOUR BLOG. YOU CAN’T TAG THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU. SINCE YOU CAN’T TAG THAT PERSON BACK, LET HIM OR HER KNOW WHEN YOU’VE POSTED YOUR BLOG SO HE OR SHE CAN READ YOUR ANSWERS.

1) I love sweatpants but pretend I love heels. Don’t tell my husband this. I love fashion, love high heels, love all that…on other people. I prefer sweatpants and spent most of my high school in them. But most of my closet is filled with cute clothes.

2) I am prejudice….against smokers. Today on the treadmill a smoker hopped on the one next to me. I smelled his nasty smokey breath the whole time and I could think of nothing else but leaning over and punching him in the stinky mouth (sorry smokers!)

3) I sleep with 2 stuffed animals. I always put them under my arms when I sleep on my belly. I’ve done it since my boobs started growing and they hurt (the animals made my boobs kind of come off the bed) and haven’t been able to sleep well without them since.

4) I am constantly looking at my personal training client’s food logs and telling them to make wiser choices on their snacks, etc. While I’m telling them this stuff, I’m thinking of the Snickers bar I’ll be consuming once I get home. I have absolutely horrendous eating habits.

5) Since Tarah talked about her ahem, gas problems, ahem. I thought I’d join. I actually don’t fart. I’m serious. Zach thought I was just one of “those girls” that pretended they didn’t when we first got together. After 6 years he’ll back me up on this. I don’t know why I don’t. It comes out in burp form if I have any extra gas. I think my husband makes enough for the both of us, though.

6) 5 minutes of dancing. It’s important to me. Every day, the kids and I get 5 continuous minutes of dancing. Some days I go for silly dancing, other days I whip out moves I remember from my days in dance class. It just depends on what I’m feeling. Today is definitely going to be a “Pop the collar” kind of day, I think. By the way, I’ve often thought I should post a small part of our 5 minutes on my blog. I’m sure it would be entertaining and it might even get us on Ellen!

7) I have a mole by my mouth, Cindy Crawford style. Unfortunately it’s REALLY light and you can’t really see it most of the time. When I was younger I used to put brown eye pencil on it to make it look more like a birth mark. Gross.

8) I once won a competition for who could postpone shaving their legs the longest. In high school I went most of the basketball season without shaving (and yes, I played basketball; and yes, I wore shorts; and yes, I had a boyfriend who loved me despite it. :)) That’s 3 months, folks.

9) I get REALLY bad motion sickness. When I was younger I used to get strep throat every time we would travel. If you ask my parents, I screamed any time we were in the car (I think they MUST be exaggerating!) Imagine my nerves about traveling 20+ hours and bringing home a 3-year-old!

10) I am flippin obsessed with blogs. Blogging, reading blogs, subscribing to blogs, tattooing blogs (not yet) whatever it is. Love blogging!

I tag: Cassie..because she needs to blog, Julie and Tony…because I’m interested, Jody III…because she has too much time on her hands…teehee, Baby Blaker…because I want to learn more about my hopeful travel mate, Sweet Peas..cuz she’s so interesting!

So my sister, yes the one that writes “Farm Raised” blog, was in the Chicago Tribune yesterday! SOO exciting but not at all surprising. Read her fantastic piece here,
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-organic_food_thinkmar09,0,2889815.story

Another great read about Ethiopian adoptions. It talks about the great work our agency is doing and mentions Tariku (well, a different Tariku, but a Tariku nonetheless!:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/us/04adopt.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The carpet layers are coming Thursday. This means just a few more days of sleeping in about 300 sq. ft! Yippee do da!

Another Monday, another 6 days of waiting to hear anything. 5 of those days will be intense as those are our last 5 days for a potential 20th travel. When talking to people at church yesterday they were baffled that I might be traveling around the world, to pick up our *almost* 3-year-old in 1 1/2 weeks and we don’t know for sure yet. I laughed because this is our adoption. I warned everyone it would be a bumpy ride and that it definitely is.

Right now I’m somewhat calm. Perhaps this is what they refer to as the “calm before the storm”. Because when I really think about it, this is how my mind works.

Today I need to call the carpenters and beg them to carpet the three rooms we have painted right now so that we can move into them as soon as they’re done. This way, we can move our BR/BA upstairs and move Dailah back in her room. We can set up our closet to re-set up the kids’ closet so it is their own for the first time since we moved here.

After the painters get done trimming out and painting the doors in the other 5 rooms, I will start painting immediately on those. They say they will be done by perhaps Wednesday but definitely by this Friday (Friday appears to be a significant day). So that would leave me this weekend to paint the 5 rooms. I would then beg the carpenters to come carpet next Monday. That would leave me Monday night/Tuesday to move in the rest of our stuff. Perhaps clean a little, etc.

And then of course, potentially next Wednesday be leaving for Ethiopia.

And did I mention packing bags, collecting donations and eating somewhere in there?

Trysten just said, “Mom you are the best cooker I’ve ever seen.” (ahhhh)

Too bad I thought he said I was the best HOOKER he’d ever seen.

I really need to get my hearing checked.

We have three rooms down and they look amazing! 4 more to go. It’s going to suck.

One thing I learned today. My family is the best family in the world ( I already knew that but it was reiterated). I’m not kidding. They came at 8 am (a 2 hr drive) and just left. They were even at my house painting by themselves for a couple hours while I worked and Zach took the kids to an exhibity thing. AMAZING that’s what they are. Blessed, that’s what I am.

Gotta go, my bones hurt.

By the way, word is if we hear by this Friday that our stuff is ready in ET we can still go on the 20th. So now you have a new deadline with the whole Big Man Upstairs. Please let us get through everything before Friday!

So today my good friend, Cassie, emailed me and told me I’ve slacked off in blogging. It had been a few hours, after all, and we have a commonality in our despise of anyone who calls themselves a blogger and doesn’t update regularly. Anywho, I was busy. I was busy trying to stay busy so I could try to not notice that my phone wasn’t ringing. I was busy.

One of the things I did was go to Wal Mart. I mean, really. Love the low prices, hate the crazy antics. I can’t go there once without a parent abusing their child or demeaning their child. And see, they’re in a bad place because I’m at a point now where I might just offer to take that child off their hands if they don’t want to parent them anymore. So I need to stop going to Wal Mart. The first time I went tonight (yes, I went twice) my kids decided to be holy terrors so I had to cut lose with only 1/4 of what I wanted. I’m serious, I think Dailah is like some sort of personality chameleon. If we’re around any kids who feel like screaming and carrying on, she thinks it looks like fun and goes for it. So that’s just what she did today. So I was outtie in a matter of minutes after we got our paint.

The second time I went alone. Zach was with the kids and I was able to get some quality time with the quality folks at Wal Mart. But I got to find some of those hidden ingredients Paula Dean puts in her recipes that I usually can’t get with the kids with me (except Pimento beans, has anyone heard of these and if so where in the world would I find such a thing?) I picked a line with a lot of people in it and got caught up on my People magazine (did you know Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child fame got fake boobs?) and National Enquirer (Baby Shiloh isn’t Brad’s, it’s her brothers!) Good stuff.

So that’s what I was doing today. It certainly wasn’t, in case you didn’t catch this, hearing that we will travel for sure on the 20th. It wasn’t that. But there you have it, I was busy trying to stay busy. Are you happy now, Cassie?

Stay tuned for my ‘morrow where it will be 12+ hours of PAINTING!!!!! Thanks mom, dad, and brother bear for helping!

Got up this morning after waking up in the middle of the night for some reason. I had this weird feeling like we would hear something about Tariku. Lately when I wake up in the middle of the night (which is not normal by any means but more frequent the closer we bring him home) I think of him and pray for him and for us and for me that we see each other as soon as He knows we’re ready. I also pray for my sanity, but that’s besides the point. Anyway, I woke up this morning to find an update in my email that was sent right about the time I woke up (2am our time). Fascinating stuff. It basically says he’s been the same in all categories since coming into the care center except he seems to have learned more Amharic as they are able to identify that he can point to all his body parts. But the kicker of the whole thing is his picture. He really is a Klipsch child, as he gets cuter every time I see him.

There are no words for how happy this made me. No words. Isn’t he the cutest little booger you’ve seen? By the way, the kids have been waking up at the butt crack of dawn because they were just not meant to share rooms together. Anyway, when I opened up my email this morning Trysten was right next to me. I saw it said, “Tariku A update” and yelled, “Trysten we got an update!” He said, “We get to go get Tariku!” And before I could tell him not yet, he went to get his guitar and sang a song about it. Seriously, that kid is too much.

I remember my mom saying this a lot when I was younger. I can’t quite remember if she meant that in my life or in hers, teehee.

Anyway, it’s so weird lately. I go from high to low, to just in between. I email my coordinator and am fine, I email her 5 minutes later and am not so fine. This, my friends, is adoption. This, my friends, is motherhood.

I got on the forum tonight after PUMP and Mrs. Baker had written a thread asking the forum to start a dance for us that we get THE call tomorrow. (it’s a web-based thing, the forum does referral dances to bring on the referrals, etc). It just made me cry, it was so sweet. Sweet Peas has her blog followers praying for us too.

People are thinking about Tariku. People are praying for Tariku and that is just the biggest blessing I could ask for. My sadness, that too shall pass and what I’ll remember from this adoption is the blessings. The biggest, obviously Tariku. But the people, the support, the love, I will remember those and have a feeling my selective memory will block out this sadness.

So I did finally hear from our coordinator (only 1 maybe 2 phone calls, emails from me later). We are still waiting on that paperwork for the birth certificate. No telling how long that will take, is kind of what she said. BUT…

She did tell us they are reserving us a spot in the March 20th group and to go ahead and reserve tickets for that date. She didn’t go so far as to tell us to buy those tickets and/or that we are in fact going to travel that date regardless. You see, she always stops short of promises no matter how hard I try to back her in the corner!

So we sit…kind of in the same corner as we have been, kind of in a different corner ever so slightly closer to Tariku. I’m going to try to convince myself into believing that we’re traveling the 20th. I think all the positive thinking will have a tremendous effect. I know it will. Join me will you?

So WHEN we go the 20th, we will actually depart on the 19th. As of right now we’ll be traveling with Northwest Airlines. We would depart from Moline, IL (a 10 minute drive) at 11:00am where we fly to Minneapolis, MN, then to Amsterdam (no, I will not let Zach out to frequent the coffee shops). From the Netherlands it’s off to Sudan and finally, after 18 hours in the air we will arrive in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. On the way back we skip the Sudan issue and go straight from Addis to Amsterdam. We would arrive home at about 5:20 after our travels.

Anyway, that’s just 2 weeks away. The thought of meeting my son in 2 weeks is almost more than I can take. It’s just so sad to me because other couples get a call. They get a call that says, “Pack your bags, you’re traveling on the 20th”. And they celebrate. They open a bottle of champagne and they toast to the next two weeks. We can’t do that. We’ll be lucky if we get a call that sounds remotely like that and it totally bums me out.

I think Zach is getting scared that if we don’t travel the 20th I might actually go insane. Like, give the girl a padded room, insane. So he’s been fighting too, though his reasons for doing so might be more to save his wife from the great abyss than to see his son. (Though he’s uuber excited for that as well)

So don’t give up on us yet. We still need your help. In those 2 weeks we’ll need to pack. Paint approximately 2200 sq. ft of space and move into approximately 2200 sq. ft of space. My list continues to grow!