Happy Birthday Mikaela!

Mikaela has now entered double-digits! Wow! My how the years fly by! She's become such a big kid! She's gotten to be a huge help and very responsible. As we celebrated her birthday this year we really have reflected on how much we enjoy having spending time with our "big girl". She's quite a special kid! Some things to know about Kaela - well she's a bit of a tom-boy. Pink and purple "make her puke" and she loves to read, bake and practice babysitting. She's become a great help to our nanny and a big help when it comes to teaching her brothers. She is doing some great work teaching her biggest little brother to read - they're making great strides! Mikaela loves to eat rice (almost as much as desert) and while she doesn't like to sleep in she doesn't like HAVING to get up in the morning. She's active - loves to do gymnastics and dance and play soccer. Adventures in Oddysey is one of her favorite radio shows and Kathleen Fuller is her favorite author and Toby Mac is her favorite singer.

Mikaela's birthday had a Hawaiian theme this year which was really fun and lifted our spirits despite the 3 feet of snow in our yard. We've started the tradition with our older kids of starting their birthday with a special gift of something they have to wear all day or else face the dreaded birthday spankings. Mikaela received a flowered head-dress as well as a lei and bracelet. We also decided to be extra-silly and give ourselves Hawaiian names for the special day. Mikaela was Prnicess Kiwi, Mikenzy was Bananas, Mikah and Mikalister were Sand and Water and I was Mapoopoo. The girls also had a couple friends and their family join them for supper - Coconut and Volcano added to the fun. We served the kids a Silly Supper and they ordered off a delightful menu at the Aloha Café. Mikaela's favorite was the hot lava special (a fruit smoothie).
Mikaela was pretty tired by the end of the night and was ready for bed when we realized we still needed to get to the presents - she was pretty excited to come up and find a new bike in the living room. She got her first bike with gears! She really outgrew her kids' bike last year but she made it last through the fall anyway - until the chain continually kept falling off and tearing up her pants - do you know it causes big wrecks when your pants get stuck in your chain!? Who knew! Good thing she's tough! She loves her knew bike.

Happy Birthday Max!

Max turned 2 on March 7th! It was a big day for our littlest man. He spent the day getting treated like a prince with Kari and the whole gang and then wrapped up with a birthday dinner of and presents. He kind of seemed to miss the fun of the presents when as soon as he got all the hard-work of opening one, his sisters would sweep it away and enthusiastically start him on the next one. Finally when all the opening was done, he was delighted to find a big, heavy John Deere trike in the kitchen. THE BOY WAS IN LOVE! He screamed bloody murder when his mean parents made him get off to eat his cake and ice cream! YAY! Max is 2!

February 2011

Ah, the love month. I love it because it’s the last month of the most brutal winter weather here in Fargo. Sure, February does not bring the end of our huge mounds of snow or blizzards or kids trapped in-doors for weeks at a time, but things do get *better by March. It’s cold but not AS cold and it’s snowy but not AS snowy. Look, in all reality, we can get snow storms easily through April here, so we have to hold on to what little glimmer of relief we get with a little warmer temps! This year, due to all the snow we’ve had the weather service is expecting a big flood year. Fargo started calling for volunteers to make sandbags starting on Valentine’s day. Microsoft is giving us two days off work to start with to participate. More will be negotiable when the reality of the flood level is upon us. I’m tired of the arctic cold – I’ve got my sandbagging boots on – LET’S GO! We don’t foresee any sandbagging being necessary on our property – unless things get really crazy – which is always possible.

There's not anything to terribly exciting that happened in February here. I went back to work February 2nd after being home since before Christmas with the addition of Max to our family. I had just started working a compressed week shortly before Christmas so going back to work has meant really getting into the swing of the new schedule. I work four 10-hour days and take Tuesday's off. The schedule enables me to have an extra day at home to get the kids' medical appointments in and have a little more time to do school with them as well. It seems to work really well.

Casey's is enduring his slow time well this year. The spring looks promising as he's been doing estimates pretty intensely and that's usually a good sign of work to come. He has several projects he's excited about and several smaller ones he's been able to work on this winter as well. One week was especially busy for Casey in February as he remodeled the Mrs. Fields in the Fargo mall. It's a small job but the remodel involved squeezing 2-weeks of work into 6 days. It looked awesome when he and EZ get done with it. The project only involved one ER trip! Casey somehow managed to get some medal in his eye, which didn't slow him down one bit until it started to rust. Apparently the rust was more irritating to the iris than a hunk of medal. He had to make 3 or 4 trips into the doctor but all ended up well and good.

The kids were getting a little wild being cooped up inside so they started a gymnastics. All four of the big kids got classes AT THE SAME TIME ON THE SAME DAY! Yeah, unbelievable! I couldn't pass that up! They've enjoyed it.

School has been enjoyable. I'm not sure who learns more - the kids or the parents. It gives us lots of interesting things to talk about though.

Well, we've come to the end of the things I can remember as interesting in the least for February so I'll have to close. I suppose I'd do a better job of remembering what went on if I didn't wait until 2/3 through the next month to write the previous month's summary. Sometimes you just have to let some things slide if you're going to make it through, though. I better get a jump-start on those two birthday posts and the March one too!

January Recap

January went by in the blink of an eye this year. I was home with the kids on parental leave after the addition of Max to our family in December. So, we were getting to know Max and working on school.

School
The girls are getting into the swing of doing school at home, for the most part I do believe they are enjoying it. They definitely have more time for creative projects and our home is often cluttered with construction paper, stickers, glue, string, pipe-cleaners and tape. Kaela has been studying about Mexico in social studies, in Math she’s working on multiplying two and three digit numbers, in English she’s diagramming sentences, using the encyclopedia, possessive pronouns and writing in cursive. She’s also working on a literature study on the book The Crown. Kenzy is learning about the different kinds of communities and what goes on in those communities in Social Studies. In Math she’s working on adding and subtracting large numbers, counting by 7’s, simple multiplication and fractions. In English, Kenzy is working on possessive nouns and learning about verbs. The girls do science together, we’re doing Astronomy and they’ve been studying about the moon and Jupiter in January. They also do Literature together – we’re reading a book called Kingdom’s Hope by Chuck Black. For History the girls are reading a book together about Hellen Keller – they can’t get enough of it. That’s so awesome! J
 
Mikalister and Mikah are working on letter recognition and beginning reading with a program on the computer called Reading Eggs. They’re both excited to be reading a few words now. They’re also working on their counting and writing their numbers. They love coloring and working on craft projects.

Max is working on his vocabulary. In January we’ve focused on a couple of animal sounds and body parts. He can now tell you what a kitty, doggy and cow say. He also knows where his eyes, nose, feet and tummy are. He’s also got quite comfortable telling us “eat”, “down”, “Wanna. Get. Owwwwwt”, “wanna go”, “hat” “please”, “bath”, “NO” and “shoes”. He nods his head “yes” when we ask him if he can say yes. Instead of just saying “I”, he says “oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy” – super cute. So his most common phrase when he wants to get out of his bed or the car is “mama, oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy wanna. Get. Owwwwwt” – precious.
 
Mom, I want a PONY!
We had some exciting news from the Merryman family this month! Grandma Lin bought the kids a pair of miniature ponies! Their names are Tyke and Titan and they are trained to drive a cart in addition to ride. When the kids heard the news, of course they wanted to go right down and see them, so . . . . ROADTRIP! Yes, I’m 50% out of my mind 100% of the time! I took all 5 kids on a 8+ hour car ride to Grandma’s house in the dead of winter! (I make up for in adventure what I lack in sense.) It was a great trip and the mini’s are just wonderful pets. The kids absolutely loved them and the weather was nice while we were there. All of the kids rode (and fell off and got back on) and started learning a bit about horses.
 
The grand plan is for the mini’s to live in NE in the winter and then Grandma will bring them up to live with us when we’re not buried in snow. They stand 35” tall and I’m absolutely positive our snow is deeper than that in our yard. Grandma Lin also got the harnesses the ponies use and the their cart too. While we were there, Grandma and Lucille harnessed them up and took all the kids for a ride. The mini’s did great and the kids were in love. There were a few tears when we had to say goodbye but they’re looking forward to Daddy building a fence at our place when the snow melts so the ponies can come to their summer home.
 
Visiting Family
While we were in town we got to go over and see Grandma and Grandpa Merryman. Grandpa is 95 and Grandma is 92 I believe. They are still the sweetest, most in-love couple I’ve ever known. I really enjoyed visiting with them. Their minds couldn’t be sharper. I asked them what their secret was to such good health, happiness and longevity, Grandma said “we just sit around and reminisce about all the great things we’ve gotten to witness. We laugh and think about all we’ve been blessed with all day long and we let the other stuff go. We enjoy each day together so much.” You can see why I love visiting them. They enjoyed seeing the kids and catching up on the latest events with our family – meeting Max of course.
 
There was a mild snowstorm (by our standards anyway) the day before we were leaving NE so we decided to make a bit of progress towards home and visit my aunt and uncle and their family – Tom and Stephanie and their kids Will and Libby. The kids had a great time – they love playing with cousins. They were able to exchange phone numbers while we were there so now the girls can text with them on my phone. Kaela loves having more people to text with.

On our way home we stopped for a field trip through the Laura Ingalls Wilder (writer of Little House on the Prairie books) museum and took the tour. It was fun and educational. Kaela has read all the books so she peppered our tour guide with questions about where and when different things from the books happened. She got significant enjoyment out of that!
 

That’s about all the excitement we could handle in for January.

Happy #8 Mikenzy!

We celebrated Mikenzy's 8th birthday this week - we made a horse cake and took a family trip to the roller-skating rink. A good time was had by all!

2010 Andersen Family Photo Album

Click here to view this photo book larger

OH BABY! And More . . .

 Well, it’s been a while since I’ve last updated this blog with anything, I’ve been saving up I guess! Honestly, I’ve just not had time to even take a breath let alone string two thoughts together in the form of a blog post. That means there’s lots of news to share! The first big change with us came back around Thanksgiving time – we decided to take the girls out of school and homeschool them! Not a small change at all, huh. We gave it a great deal of thought and prayer and we decided as a family that we felt it was something we’d like to try. It’s an idea that Casey and I had been discussing off and on for several years – we finally took the plunge! Thanks to some great guidance and support from some friends and fellow homeschool families we got everything in order and are now doing school at home. Along with this new endeavor, I’ve moved to working a compressed week so I work 4 longer days which allows me another full day at home to do school with the kids. I do most of the schooling but Casey helps some as well. It really gives us a lot of quality time together and we’ve found it just really fun to be learning together. We’ve also joined a local Christian homeschool group here which seems to be an outstanding resource. We’re learning lots of fun stuff together – we’re studying Astronomy this year for Science – the girls built a model of the solar system which they enjoyed thoroughly and they can now remember all the planets in order (and I even can as well – yay mom!). The girls both agree that Literature is their favorite subject. We’re reading the first book in a series called Kingdom’s Dawn. I have to admit, I love it too – it’s a great story and we’re learning a lot. I’ll share more as we progress along – it’s bound to be a journey.

Now on to the REALLY BIG news –MAX! We are so excited to share that our family has grown once again. Maxximus Isaiah has been placed with us for adoption just last weekend. We found out we had been selected to be Max’s parents on Friday, Dec. 3rd our adoptive worker and Max’s adoptive worker and Max’s county social worker were so excited to tell us we had been selected they surprised us with a little party and a bouquet of “It’s a boy!” balloons and a framed picture of Max – it was so special and we are so grateful to have Max’s team to share in our excitement. We soon learned that Max was in a foster home of someone we knew and worked with in the past on another foster care case. She’s a wonderful and nurturing Mom and we knew Max was in great hands which was really a comfort. Casey and I went to meet Max the next day – Saturday afternoon. Max’s team ( a group of social workers that make decisions on Max’s behalf) thought it might be best to not take the rest of our kids to the first meeting as everyone was expecting it to be very difficult for Max to transition to another family and another home. However, Max was about to surprise everyone – we arrived at his home with a bag of gifts for our new son and a flutter in our hearts. He greeted us warmly as we walked in and his foster mom nestled him right into my arms as soon as I got in the door – he came willingly, gave me a good hard stare for a minute and started babbling and pointing towards some things around the house. I followed his gestures and I believe we bonded as we counted stockings on the hearth. Soon we were sitting on the floor and playing with Max’s toys as he ran around and occasionally dove into my lap. Max played and teased with Casey, Max clearly admired him right away. Casey wrestled Max around and tossed him in the air a couple times and Max giggled and screeched with delight. Max’s social worker sat and stared in disbelief. The initial meeting went so well it was suggested that we just go ahead and take Max home for a few hours and introduce him to the rest of the kids and his new home – we gladly agreed and got him ready to go. The visit at home went equally well. We took him back to the foster home and put him to bed and made plans to pick him up the next morning to spend the day with him. He had to sleep at the foster home for several more days until the appropriate paperwork was complete so Max continued to spend days with us and I would go to the foster home and put him to bed and then return in the morning to get him up. The foster mom has just been amazing to our family – I do believe we’ve probably made a life-long friend in her. The paperwork all got in order by Tuesday and Max was able to start sleeping at home as well. His first week has been great. He has settled and started showing his personality. The rest of the kids just adore him – he’s got four of the best older siblings a kid could have!

I suppose a few more details might be in order about this new miracle-boy in our life – that’s the first thing I have to say – he’s a total miracle – he’s been through quite a lot and overcome it all, as is the case for every child that endures the loss of a birth family and a life in the foster care system. He’s a really special baby and we’re totally in love with him. He’s 21 months old and his deep belly laugh brightens even the grumpiest of moods. He’s just adorable and we’re so grateful to get to be his parents. Through this first week, it’s clear to us that God has brought him to our family with purpose – Max is right where he belongs . . . . HOME.