Way to long to write!!

Wow, I know I know, I have not written in forever. I looked today and saw that I have lost all my followers as well. That's my fault , I know. I don't know how people do this when they have so much going on.

My oldest is 12 going on 13 soon and it has been so interesting lately. She has always been glued to my side. I have enjoyed being best buddies with her for so long now. Now she has made new friends, which I love, but I must admit, I miss my friend. We have a neighbor that is older than me that loves the kids to come over and play. Its o.k. with my boys because she has boys their age, but she has no girls. She keeps asking Faith, my oldest to come hang out and watch movies and go to the park and things like that. We were o.k. at first with all this, but now its every day. Me and my hubby just think that its weird right???

She keeps asking her to spend the night now to with other girls. She talks all the time about how she wishes Faith was her daughter.

So last night we told my daughter she could not hang out over there anymore. I now have to figure out a way to tell my neighbor this. Faith really does not understand this either. She liked my neighbor a lot. I just feel its a weird situation to begin with. She gossips about every neighbor their is and you find it so hard to not join in, so its better to just stay away from the situation.

Other than that everyone else is doing great. We are looking at adopting another baby girl from the Ukraine named Kristin I believe in number 16 where we adopted our others from. She is such a cutie.

I hope everyone will stick with me as I try to post more often, If you have any advice on my drama feel free to tell me anything!! Thanks, Leah

My Sick Nessie

The days are really getting harder for me here. I feel like I'm loosing control. I have always told myself I would adopt a lot of kids, but we would never let having to many kids get into the way of us living a normal life. When I say normal life I mean going out into public with our family to eat, and just going to the grocery store, and going to Fiesta Texas with our family. We love to do things as a family, and told ourselves we would continue to do so. We have done well with this until now. Nessie has been screaming for so long that now we can not go anywhere. When she screams I think she is just doing it because she has gotten really spoiled. Tony thinks she is in pain. When we tell her to stop though, she gets it, she will stop for a moment, then she just starts all over again. We have seen a few doctors, but so far she is fine. If we put her down after holding her, she starts her scream. Its is a high pitch scream that everyone hears. We went to the beach this weekend, and we could not wait to come home. She screamed the entire time. Today we went to eat, and we left before we were even done.. Now I feel like I have finally done it..I can not go out in public anymore. I am stuck in my home because I have a child that everyone will stare at me and wonder why I can not keep her quite. She even screams when she is happy. When she stands up she gets so excited that she just stands there screaming.

My neighbor would come get her to watch her while I tried to have chill out time, but now she wont even come around anymore because she does not know how to handle her either. I sooo wanted to adopt more babies, and more children, but now I don't think I could handle anymore. I hope that this is just a short phase and that she will grow out of this, but for now it just keeps getting worse.

The other little ones are happy and growing so fast. Little Leeska surprises us everyday. She learns so much from her new school, and haves so much fun there. Eli has started to smile at us more than he used to. Hr is never to affectionate, but he getting closer to giving us a little lovin!!

I will try to post more pictures, but for now this is what we have for now. Thanks, Leah

End Of The School Year

As the year draws to an end we sit here trying to figure out if we should home school again, or send them all back to school. For us we like homeschooling, but we do not know a lot of people that do it, so its hard to talk about it to others. They think we are just sheltering our children from what needs to happen. I do not do it to shelter them, We do it because we feel like we can give them better education, while teaching them about God. We also like to be together all the time as a family. We do more family functions, and vacations. We do have a few of the kids that WANT to go to public school. So, I think we should send the ones that want to go, but hubby thinks we do all or none!! That's what we have been debating all week this week.

As for the babies, well, we have had a long hard week with Nessie. She has had something wrong with her for 3 long weeks. The doctors are trying to figure this out, but no luck yet. She just screams all day. It seems like something inside of her tummy hurts her, but nothing is showing up on anything. We went to the beach for a little weekend trip, and it was awful. She ruined the trip by screaming the entire time. We don't know what to do to console her. The other babies are doing great. Leeska started school last week. It seems to be going OK, but the teacher does not tell me what is going on. She does not like kids being added to the end of the year. Leeska really loves to get on the bus and to go to school, so that makes us happy.

We enjoy our nigh time together when we can all sit together in our chair together and just watch the babies cruise the room and play with each other. They have grown so much in the past 3 months, and they have learned so much as well. We can not wait for the day that God calls us to do this again.

This week is a busy week of trying to go to new appts for Nessie to understand her pain. Pray that God will send us to the right doctors so that her pain will end forever!!

Posting on Fridays

I have been so busy that I have not been blogging at all anymore. Tony thought that we should close it all together, but I really did not want to do that because we are thinking of exciting things for the future with maybe more adoptions.

We have been reading Chrissie's blog lately because she was adopted from Reece's Rainbow right before we did. Chrissie had open heart surgery and has been fighting for her life since last Monday. Her parents have inspired me to adopt again. They knew when they adopted her that she had a bad heart, yet they obeyed God and adopted her and gave her the best life she would ever have. I'm just amazed at how calm the mom is. I did not ever think that I could bring home a child that may die, but now she has me thinking again. Maybe that is the child I need to bring home. It will take a lot of praying for us. I know that right now we are talking about it. My husband really wants to start an Orphans Outreach program at our church here in San Antonio. He thinks that's where God wants us right now. So, We just need to see where God is taking us right now.

For now on I think Im going to post every Friday. I feel bad that we are not posting as much as we had, but we are having a lot of therapy right now, and Elisa is stating school this week. She is so cute with her little bag. I will have alot of pictures on Friday for you guys. Thanks for reading.

Our Progress so Far

Monday will be an exciting day for us!! Little Leeska will start her first day of preschool. The school bus will come all the way to our home, which is a good 30 minute drive, and take her by bus to school. She will stay there for 2 hours, then return home. The teachers have all been so kind to us, and to her. She is the smallest kid in her class, and I think the cutest!!!

The other 2 babies are still doing great in there therapy. Little Nessie is starting to stand by herself and has now taken 2 steps. She has also gained a lot of weight. Her hair has gotten so much longer, and finally one of my girls is going to have those cute little curls!!

Eli, well Eli is ALL OVER THE HOUSE!! We had to put in a gate to keep him in one place. He really hates it a lot. He now cries when he is in it. He uses his head to push against the gate until it either falls, or moves open enough that he can get through it. Once he gets through it he uses his military crawl, really fast to get to the stairs as fast as he can. He knows once he is out we will come to get him so once he sees us he goes even faster. Its funny because he knows he should not be doing what he is doing. Eli is so big and so strong that he really does not know his own strength.. He is going to be a super strong kid!!

Last Sunday Nessie turned 2, now this Monday Leeska will be 3. We feel like they have changed so much in the past few months. God has given us so much. We know we want to adopt again, but its such a hard decision. Before Leeska was sorda picked out for us, so we just picked more kids from her orphange. Now we have the chance to pick any kid from anywhere. How do you do this?? For now we will just pray that God will give us the answer to this question. We don't need to rush into anything because we are loving what we have right now!!

I just wanted to let all the Reeces Rainbow families know that if you are adopting from Russia we are praying for you guys that your adoptions go smoothly because of what this woman did to mess up every ones adoptions! It sad that this has happened, and I hope that they do not shut down all the adoptions!! We will be praying for you guys!

Springtime in Texas

It is tradition for many families in Texas to take pictures in the bluebonnets when the flowers bloom in the spring. We do it every couple of years, but this year was extra special because of the new additions to our family. As we sat Elisa, Nessie and Eli in the sea of blue flowers, I couldn't help but think back to the 30+ inches of snow we left back in the Ukraine. They were always wearing at least 3 layers of clothes and here we are, a few months later, sitting in a field of flowers at sunset.

A good friend of ours who is a professional photographer offered to take the pictures as a gift to us. What a wonderful gift that we can now share with all of you. If anyone needs a great photographer, let us know and we'll get you in contact with Ray from Life is Beautiful Photography here in San Antonio. He is amazing...... Thanks Ray!

The first of many new posts

Today is the first day that I am writing in our new blog. We felt that the other blog was mainly about our adoption process, now we want people to see how we live with 10 kids and 2 adults.

I have to say I read another blog the other day about a lady that has 10 kids. It was funny because she was talking about how everyone always talks about them when they go out to eat. We have the same problem. Its kinda funny though because when they see us walk in you can tell they are a bit freaked out and even try to move at times. Its always good in the end though when people actually get up and almost always walk over to our table to tell us how good our kids are at the table. About a month ago I saw a man and his wife stare at us through the entire dinner. I just knew when they left they were going to say something awful to us. When they left they said nothing at all to our surprise. When the bill came the waiter said it had been paid in full by that couple and they left 50.00 in cash for us to keep. They thought that we had done a good job at teaching the kids how to sit at a restaurant and how to behave. This made us so happy because we do get a lot of people saying that sometimes we are simply to hard on them. Its times likes this that the discipline pays off. We have to teach our kids how to act in public, and we have to teach them that we are different than normal families. People are going to be looking at us already because we have so many. Even when its not a restaurant I get the question all the time, 'Those are not all your right?? You are babysitting right?" I always laugh it off and say ," No, they are all mine,"

I think my friends think that my life is very hard and that its very stressful on me. Its the total opposite. I'm so fulfilled. I'm so overjoyed and happy. I want more, a lot more kids. I have no number, and no end in sight to stop adopting and having babies. I think we are doing well with them, and I think our kids are loving it. All of our kids help each other . We always talk to them about getting more children, and they all agree to do it again. I do think at times I go a little nutty, what mom doesn't, but its so short lived. All of our children have their chores that they must get done before leaving the house. They all get their allowance at the end of the week. If their chores are not done they do not get their money. Getting their money comes into play when we all go to Fiesta Texas and they want candy apples, or funnel cakes. Yes, I make them buy their own!! They know that ahead of time, so it motivates them to get their chores done. They also lose the Wii, or T.V. if their work does not get done. I know that people think I can be strict on them, but I also know that I have 10 of the best well behaved kids on earth!!

Now, I have to tell everyone a bit about my hubby as well. Another question that is asked all the time is if my husband likes adopting , Is he on board. That's funny to because this was his idea first. People that know this say," Well yeah, because he doesn't have to stay at home with them and raise them," Not at all right!! When Tony gets home he totally takes over caring for them. I can go rest or do whatever I need to. Even when I leave to go run errands Tony gets the entire house cleaned and cares for all the kids, He really has a gift at multi-tasking. He is the best dad I have ever met. He loves his kids and tries to always make their lives better for them. He is very hands on with them to. He takes them outside everyday to play ball and to jump on the trampoline, or just go for walks with them.

I just wanted to start this blog off explaining how our family works, and what makes our family so special. At the end of the day I can truly look back at my day and Thank God for every single little blessing he has giving to me, I am blessed, and I am so very happy!!!