Fall/Christmas

Wow, it's been a while since I have updated our blog!! So, what have we been up to? Oh, just about EVERYTHING!! Fall-Christmas is my favorite time of year, and I get so excited about all of the fun activities, food, and crafts that come along with this time of year. The girls, Ryan, and I have been staying super busy and having a blast!

Our biggest event over these last few weeks, was packing up and heading to North Carolina for Thanksgiving. Ryan's sister Katie and her family live out there as well as several of Alona's dear friends from Ukraine. We wanted Alona to be reunited with these sweet friends, and thought Thanksgiving would be the perfect time to go! What is typically a 13 hour road trip (not factoring in stops) ended up being a 17 hour road trip (not including stops) for our crew!! Our little ones were huge troopers and did an AMAZING job on the LOOONG drive. We planned in advance, and packed a busy bag for each of them to keep them occupied, along with lots of snacks, and a whole  bag of dum dums to resort to when all other things failed:)

One of the many things in the girls busy bags...pom poms and containers to sort them!

 Road trippin!!

 The girls were slightly excited about getting to stay in a hotel:)

 Precious cargo

Snow through the NC mountains!

We had such a wonderful time being with our friends and family in NC, and it was totally worth the long drive. Getting to witness Alona's sweet reunions with her friends was priceless. When you think about all of these sweet kids, and where they came from, and where they are now...it is truly remarkable. Who would have thought that they would see each other again...much less with new families and in the US!! Truly, miraculous.

Alona and her BFF Liza 

Alona with her dear friends (siblings!) Vitalik and Lera

Cousins!! (We brought the girls, the Williams have the boys:))

Back at home, we have been busy, busy with all the holiday parties and school activities for my Kindergartener and Preschooler. Alona has stayed busy going to the dentist:) Last week-end, we headed to Branson, MO for a week-end getaway. We stayed in a cozy 2 bedroom cabin and treated the girls to a ride on the Polar Express. We got our girls, Alona included, matching Christmas pjs this year, as we do every year. As I was getting the little ones ready in their jammies for the Polar Express, Alona excitedly asked me if she was to put on her Christmas PJ's. I just loved seeing how excited she was about it! All of our girls loved the Polar Express, and Alona said that her favorite part of the trip was seeing Santa:) It has been so neat seeing her reactions to all of our holiday events and traditions. To think that just this time last year, we had no clue that we had another daughter in this world, and that Alona thought she would never have a family, just makes me wanna cry like a baby!! How awesome our God is, that He had such an incredible plan for our family that we could never, ever have imagined. 

Avalea's preschool Thaksgiving Feast

Alona filling and Operation Christmas Child box for an orphan....so sweet!!

Round 2 of getting cavities filled

Aislynn was Pocahontas for Book Character Day at school...and won 3rd place overall in K for her costume!

My Little Pilgrims

Getting ready to see the off Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast!

Avalea with her gingerbread house

The big girls with their dough art creations

Sledding on a very icy week-end!

Pajama Day in prek!

Arabella in her Christmas gear

My little Adalaise posing in her Christmas attire as well:)

Welcome basket at our Branson cabin

Lots of snow in Branson!

Lincoln Logs!!

Farrell girls ready for the Polar Express

Our family all ready for the train ride:)

Santa!!

Candy cane treats for Avalea's prek Christmas party

Avalea's class!

Girls working hard on painting our wrapping paper

Aislynn wearing her Grinch dress at school

Pretty wrapped presents with the girls handiwork:)

Aislynn's class party!!

Sweet keepsakes from Aislynn and Avalea

PJ day in K!

My 3 princesses....life's a ball in the Farrell House!!

One other new and exciting that we are about to embark on, is Alona starting school! We feel incredibly blessed that we are going to be able to ease her into full time school, by starting her out taking 2 classes this coming semester. She is going to audit and ESL and an art/computer class starting in January to hopefully prepare her for full time school starting this fall. We feel that she will benefit greatly from being around kids her own age and that she will flourish in this small school setting. To be honest with you, I am totally not a teacher!! It has been a huge struggle to find the balance of home schooling Alona with giving my 4 little ones the time and energy they need through out the day. We will still home school Alona this coming semester as she audits her 2 classes, but look forward to her being in school next fall. She is nervous about starting school, and understandably so. But she is also excited. We cannot wait to see how she grows through this process. 

As we gear up for Christmas next week, we want to wish each and everyone of you a very Merry Christmas! 

Avalea (4)

Arabella (3)

Aislynn (5)

Adalaise ( 18 months)

Alona (16)

Me and Ryan (the old folks;))

Sweet sisters

Psalm 136:4," Give thanks to him who alone does mighty miracles. His faithful love endures forever."

Recent Happenings

Before Alona came home I thought that it would be no problem to keep up with the blog... oh, how wrong I was! Finding an hour or so (yes, it takes me that long!) to type out a post is proving quite difficult! It seems I can only manage to do so every few weeks. 

As you can imagine, we have had a lot of going on. On the home school front, Ryan and finally decided on a math curriculum for Alona. We are using Math U See and decided to start with their Gamma level which focuses on multiplication. Alona was missing the core facts of multiplication and did not have her facts memorized at all, so we felt it very important for her to learn these basics so that she would have a good foundation to build upon. 

After 2 very frustrating weeks with simple spelling tests, we decided to order a curriculum for that as well. We chose to go with All About Spelling, and are starting with Level 1. I am hoping that we will be able to progress through the levels quickly. 

After Thanksgiving break, we will be starting the English curriculum of First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise. I think it will be great for Alona to, again, learn the basics of our language. She is continuing to do the home school curriculum of Rosetta Stone as well, and has been doing great. The hardest part there at the moment, is possessives. Alona is still being tutored once a week in reading comprehension and is attending her ESL classes once a week. 

We are still trying to ingrain the importance of homework and self study time. This has been an ongoing struggle over the last few weeks, but we are definitely making progress, and for that, I am SO thankful!!

Now that we have the boring home school stuff out of the way... we have been doing tons of fun stuff as well! We had our first family of 7 photo shoot a couple of weeks ago, and I cannot wait to see all of the pictures! For the first time EVER all of my little ones actually cooperated!! We were done in 45 minutes...that is seriously a record. Two sneak peeks that I ADORE are:

Are my babies not adorable?!?

My Sweet, Sweet Family

We also celebrated Arabella's 3rd birthday (which is tomorrow!) with a Ballerina Birthday Party. So much fun! A few pics from the party:

Warming up with Miss Kayla for the ballet lesson:)

Birthday girl enjoying some cake!

The spread

Party favors! Mini Ballerina Bags with Ballerina Music CD's:)

My lil Bugaboo

My not-so-little baby Adalaise:)

Me and my precious birthday girl!

Alona had her first visit to the dentist last week. We did not know what to expect with her love of sweets, but we were pleasantly surprised! While she does have 8 cavities, they are fairly small...yay!! We were expecting a lot worse. We went to today to have the first 2 filled and she was a champ! We will have 2 more filled next week, and then finish up with the other 4 after Thanksgiving. 

Last Friday, I got  to read to Aislynn's kindergarten class (SO much fun!) and Alona and I attended a fundraiser for my father's university, OBU. Our local newspaper was there to cover it, and snapped a picture of my family. You should have seen Alona's eyes when I told her that the picture was for the newspaper!!:)

My favorite Kindergartner!

My fam...Mom, sister Ashley, Dad, Alona, sister Holly and me at Stepping Up for Ouachita

Alona had her very own photo session last week as well. My little ones have had their pictures taken professionally, oh....a thousand times ( I'm a junkie!!), and so I wanted Alona to have her very own photo session as well. We had her hair cut and manicure done a couple of days before the shoot so that she will feel extra pretty. Thank you so much to my MIL for arranging the pampering and the photo session! A few sneak peeks from the session:

 

The sign just about sums it up!

Pretty girl!

My sweet daughter!

Through all of the hustle and bustle that is our life, I have been trying to take a step out my little bubble and see the needs of others. While my life is crazy, I know how blessed we are. I have seen in these last couple of weeks 2 friends that have had their adoption plans and dreams put on hold long term and abruptly ended. In seeing those struggles, I have tried to make it a point to reach out to people that the Lord has placed on my heart and simply let them know that they are being thought about and prayed for. Such a simple thing that I normally would not do. It would be so easy for me to be all-consumed with life within the walls of my house, but the Lord is really putting it on my heart to find ways to minister outside of these walls. Not necessarily in big ways, but enough to keep me from becoming shut in;) The Bible verse Malachi 3:10 comes to mind, 

"Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it."

When I am tempted to say, "Enough, Lord! My plate is beyond full!!!", He is teaching me that it is not too full to do something, however small it might be, for someone else. And through that obedience I am finding that He is blessing me more than I could ever have imagined. 

I have a few ideas floating around in my little head of how I can minister to others. As soon as I figure out which ones I am going to move ahead with, I will let you all know!

A few days these past few weeks have been really hectic and tough. On one particular day I thought to myself, "I am absolutely shocked that I am not just in a completely terrible mood!". And then it hit me... there are people out there that are praying for me and our family today, and it is because of them that I still have a decent attitude despite the craziness of this day". So for those of you that have been so faithful to pray for us...thank you!! Your prayers are literally felt!