Christmas blessings

As I sit here and write this, my heart is so very full. I am so blessed to have my loving family, including five amazing children. They all touch my heart so deeply. I only wish we could include Morgan in all we do in our everyday lives. We miss her so very much, and can only hope she knows how much we love her and desire to see her again. I am so blessed to have a husband who serves the Lord with all his heart and provides a warm, loving environment for all of us. I am blessed to be able to stay home and watch my children grow and flourish; seeing each day all that they accomplish and learn.

On the flip side, my heart also breaks as I think of our soon-to-be little boy who is in an orphanage so far away. He probably doesn't even know what Christmas is, and possibly doesn't know who our Savior, Jesus Christ, is. This will be the last Christmas he spends in less-than-desireable circumstances. Even though he's in a "good" orphanage, there is much that can be given to him with a forever family. I shudder at the thought of him not being held, hugged, kissed, and genuinely LOVED this holiday season and every day. I am thankful for his caregivers and know they do all they can with what they have, but nobody can truly fill the void of a family or home until they have one. We are truly doing all we can as quickly as we can to be able to provide a home and family for him. I miss him even though I don't know him. I love him even though I have never touched or seen him. All I have are pictures and the knowledge from God that this is what we are supposed to do. I cannot wait to get to Eastern Europe and hold him in my arms and tell him how much I love him and how the last few months have seemed like an eternity. I can't wait to tell him that we are his mommy and daddy, and although we did not birth him, we know he was meant for us and we were meant for him.

I am so blessed to have family and friends who support this journey we're on. It is unbelieveable the network we have created in such a short amount of time. I look forward to sharing many stories of our future with our family as it grows to include Micah. I look forward to hearing stories from others as they go through this same journey. It is not easy. But Christ said so perfectly, "I never said it would be easy, only that it would be worth it." I always knew that meant this journey of life we're on to return to Him one day, but it also includes all the small journeys we go through each day, including this one of adoption we are on.

We love you all and wish you a very Merry Christmas, and invite you to take a moment to realize what you are truly blessed with and grateful for, and to thank the One who gave it all to you, even Jesus Christ, our eternal savior. I am thankful beyond anything else that I have my salvation and that my family is sealed together for eternity. I am thankful for Christ, who laid His life down for me, the greatest gift that could ever be given. And, I am thankful for being able to return gifts to Him by serving others in His name.

As I close this post, I want to leave a picture of our children. Morgan is missing, but Gracie made sure that Micah was included. Do you see him? I love the tenderness my children show me every day.

In the name of Jesus Christ,

Amen.

Whew!

It has been an overwhelming couple of weeks. Things are moving along, literally. We moved into our new house on the 11th and have been unpacking and decorating for Christmas. We are finally ready for Christmsas after doing ALL of our shopping on the 18th. We really love our new house and things are finally feeling settled.

In the meantime, we have diligently been working on our dossier and homestudy paperwork. We had 15 pages notarized and are sending them off to be apostilled in Sacramento. Basically, an apostille is a state certification that the seals on our forms are valid (like birth certificates, marriage certificate, notary stamps, etc.) It costs $20/page in California!! The dossier is the big stack of paperwork that eventually gets translated and sent to Micah's country.

The homestudy is almost complete. We have gathered most of the paperwork, and have done our first meeting with our social worker, Heidi. She is really nice and we had a great visit yesterday. She is doing homestudies for three Reece's Rainbow families! I think that is so amazing :) She is really focused on getting the report done quickly, so after our home visit next week, I'm thinking we'll be able to send off for the I600a (to USCIS - immigration) by the 10-1th of January! If all goes well, I would LOVE to be able to send our completed dossier to Eastern Europe at the end of February. It would be SOOOOO awesome if we could go get Micah in March or April! Oh, how I hope.

Of course, the other part of our plans is the fundraising. We have raised $7,000 to date and have about $18,000 more to raise. We are planning to do a pancake breakfast/silent auction on March 12th. And we are PRAYING daily for miraculous giving :) We were so surprised and blessed to hear about a friend of a friend sending in a $500 check to our FSP (grant at RR).

If you feel led to give, especially during this holiday season and before the tax cutoff, please visit our FSP at reecesrainbow.org/sponsorray, or you can click on the button to the right with Micah's picture and it will take you directly there. Also, our chip-in is still available if you'd like to donate funds for us to use immediately for things like the $20/page apostilles :)

Don't forget about our puzzle funraiser for only $5/piece (see posts below). We sold two more pieces today! (Thanks Mom and Dad!)

Merry Christmas!
~Shelly

We are so very blessed!

Tonight was another fundraiser, this time at Pizza Factory in Phelan. We were able to earn 10% of the night's sales by helping bus the tables. It was a pretty good turnout for the first part of the night. I was so happy to see friends from my local area, as well as friends travel from Victorville to see us. We also held a bake sale, courtesy of friends' Maria Macdonald and Gina Snow's amazing baking skills :) There were many very supportive customers for our cause that bought baked goods, and some that even donated money just to help us out. We also sold two pieces for Micah's "Pieces of Love" puzzle (Thank you Cooper's and Peek's)! We raised $119 just on the bake sale and donations tonight. We will find out how much our 10% is in the next couple days.

Again, it was so amazing to connect with new people over our story. There was a neonatal nurse who talked to me for a while, then a woman who is adopting a little girl (this week!), and finally a special needs teacher. We had really good conversations with great people. And once again, I feel so tremendously blessed at the support we are receiving.

Thank you to everyone who came and helped out! A big thank you to my wonderful son Fischer and our friend Elyssa McAlister, who came and helped us bus tables and do the dishes. You are amazing kids :)

Progress being made

Monday our homestudy agency received our retainer and emailed the guide and forms for everything we need to do. I was pleasantly surprised (and honestly very impressed) that Barry filled out his personal history form yesterday before I even got a chance to look at mine! So I did mine last night and emailed those back. Then today, I made appointments for our fingerprints the same day that we have our physicals (Tuesday the 7th). All of this is coming into place nicely, and I feel like we are finally making some progress in the paperwork department. As soon as Barry's original birth certificate arrives (ordered Monday), then we can send off for our passports. His employer is already working on his letter of employment, and now I have to send off the guidelines for reference letters to four of my friends. This is all for the homestudy portion. The dossier guidelines are in process of being sent to me and a lot of this will be able to go in both files, but the dossier is going to be much more detailed. They call it "the beast", so that scares me a little. I'm also very scared about all the notary fees and later the fees to have everything apostilled (although this sounds like apostle, it is a VERY different meaning). In California, it costs $20 per page (the most expensive in the nation from what I've seen). And we have to either mail the forms to be apostilled or walk them into the office at the capitol building in Sacramento (yeah, that's an 8 hour drive). Fun, fun! I'm just glad to get the ball rolling in an official manner finally. We should be hearing from our social worker this week, yea! :)

In other news, we are moving into our new rental on the 11th. I'm very excited to be saving $300 per month, but that is Chloe's 3rd birthday and only 10 days away. I am mentally ready, but have not packed a single box. I will be gone with Fischer Saturday for Marching Band Championships and have so much going on next week with our Pizza Factory fundraiser for Micah on Monday, appointments on Tuesday, a band fundraiser on Wednesday, the winter concert on Thursday, and then moving! When do I have time for homework? Oh yeah, never. Crazy busy life :)

On to more paperwork and phone calls.

Pieces of Love for Micah - Our 2nd Fundraiser!

I got this super creative idea from my friend, Marianne (the one who told me about Reece's Rainbow). She did this same fundraiser for Darya (www.ahomefordarya.blogspot.com). So I ordered this adorable picture puzzle with Micah's photo on it. It has 252 pieces. I stole Marianne's idea that if for every $5 you chip-in to our adoption fund I would write your name (or whoever you want to designate it in honor of - your son, daughter, dog, whoever!) on the back of a puzzle piece.

As you read in my last post, I had a supportive yard sale shopper (Kathleen Serrano) donate for this, so the first piece is shown below.

As soon as I have a few pieces with names on the back, I'll post a picture on here and continue to update it as it is being put together. Once it's all finished, I will glue and frame it so Micah will know who helped bring him home and how many friends and family members loved him before he even got here! This is the beautiful tin it came in and what the picture looks like.

And this is what it looks like now, so please help us put it together! You can use the red Chip-in link to your right on the sidebar to donate :-)

Thank you all so much!! We are truly humbled and grateful for all your support, love, and prayers!!

First Fundraiser a Success!

We had our first fundraiser, a yard sale, today. There were so many donated items toward Micah's adoption from close friends, and even a few extra donations today! One woman in particular made me smile. Her name was Kathleen Serrano (I hope she doesn't mind I use her name), and she was just THRILLED that we were adopting a baby with special needs. She worked with special needs children at a local school and you could just tell she had a huge heart for them. I told her we started a puzzle fundraiser (will be explained more on next post), and that for $5 she could put her name on a puzzle piece and Micah would know who helped to bring him home. She put $10 in the can and was so excited to be helping him out. She asked if I was going to glue it all together and frame it for him and I said yes! She stayed and talked to me about Micah and the process for quite a while, and the funniest part was she didn't buy one thing from the yard sale. It was like she was led here just to share our stories with each other. What a wonderful lady!

Then, another family we know from church happened upon our yard sale, bought a couple things, and ended up taking Reece's Rainbow information for a family member who is looking to adopt. Special needs didn't seem to be an issue at all! What a wonderful day of sharing our story. I felt so truly blessed.

So with all the donated items, and some things we had to sell, we sold a total of $593.33 today. We still have about half of the items we started with, so we will most likely have one more sale before we donate the rest to Deseret Industries. What a very blessed day we had!

P.S. It was about 40 degrees all day today.

National Adoption Month

National Adoption Month
We committed to Micah (on the right) November 5th. Jackson's forever family found him soon after. We had no idea it was National Adoption Month! We are so excited to be on this journey and are really grateful for the amount of love and support we've received already.

A few points I'd like to make in love though: Micah has Down Syndrome. We do not know how severe it is, nor do we care. We also do not know if he has any other health issues other than a heart condition he had surgery for last year. What we DO know is that God led us to him and we want to bring him home. We do not know how the funds will come, but we know God will provide a way. We are doing many different kinds of fundraisers in the hopes that something will appeal to someone along the way. Our intention is not to bug anyone and we do not expect everyone to help at every fundraiser. We do understand this is the holiday season and the economy is bad. However, we still hope that we will have morale support and that if our friends and family feel led to help financially that they do so in the way they feel the most comfortable. We've had friends donate $20 and strangers donate $10. We've had other friends donate items for our yard sale coming up this weekend. We've had friends interested in the family photos for $20. We've had other friends and family just HELP SPREAD THE WORD, in the hopes that someone else may be able to help in some way. There will be a pizza fundraiser night coming up on December 6th at Pizza Factory in Phelan. We also hope to do a pancake breakfast or spaghetti dinner with a silent auction.

What we'd like you all to know is that every little bit helps us get closer to our goal and we appreciate your help in ANY way you give it. Please don't take our requests as badgering. We are simply trying to save an innocent boy's life from permanent institutionalization. Yes, there are children who need homes in our own country. However there are many parents on waiting lists for these children. Most adoption processes involve the birth mother choosing the family they want for their child. Other kids are stuck in foster care. We do not wish to do foster care in the hopes of adopting a child. For us, international adoption of a down syndrome baby was our door. It's not for everyone, but it is for us.

We are grateful to my friend, Marianne, who introduced us to Reece's Rainbow. We are grateful for all that Reece's Rainbow does to help find families for these adorable and very needy children. Unfortunately, adoption is not cheap. Domestic adoptions can cost $20,000-30,000 just the same as international adoption. It is unbelievable what is involved. It is much cheaper to conceive a baby, and we are some of the lucky ones who have that ability. We do not take it for granted, but we just KNOW that we have to do this. We are in love Micah already and are emotionally and mentally prepared for what bringing home a special needs child may involve.

Lastly, we know Micah will have a loving and caring family with us and that we can offer him a forever family that will always be here for him (yes, even if he lives with us his entire adult life). We are committed to anything we need to do to save him. If we were adopting just for our personal desire we would not ask for financial help, but we are adopting him to save his life. We don't have a lot of time to get the money together to save him. He currently does not get the care God intended for him to have in his life (basic things like cuddling, playing, hugging & kissing, holding, loving, constant attention, nurturing, a mother and a father, and life outside an orphanage). We feel the need to do this as quickly as possible. This is not something we saved up for or planned for. It just sort of fell in our laps. But we know there's Someone greater than us who has had this in His plan for quite some time. Everything we've done in our lives has led us to this point. And we are ETERNALLY grateful for a loving Father in heaven who provides the way for all of us, especially Micah.

Thank you all for love, support, prayers, friendship, and donations (in any way they come).

With love,
Shelly

KISSES IN THE WIND...A waiting child's lullabye

I hold you in my heart and touch you in my dreams.
You are here each day with me, or at least that's how it seems.

I know you wonder where we are...what's taking us so long?
But remember child, I love you so and God will keep you strong.

Now go outside and feel the breeze and let it touch your skin.
Because tonight, just as always, I blow you kisses in the wind.

May God hold you in His hand until I can be with you.
I promise you my darling, I'm doing all that I can do.

Very soon you'll have a family for real, not just pretend.
But for tonight, just as always, I blow you kisses in the wind.

May God wrap you in His arms and hold you very tight.
And let the angels bring you kisses that I send to you each night.

The love of strangers

I can't even begin to express my gratitude today. Today, two people we don't even know have donated toward bringing Micah home... one who knows a friend, and one who we just met online through the wonderful Reece's Rainbow family (the angel who took my baby's pictures at his orphanage!) This journey has brought me to tears every single day. Stories of others' journeys, looking at Micah's picture, reading books, the gratitude of strangers, and the constant support we get from those around us each day. This is undoubtedly one of the hardest things I've ever gone through because I want Micah home with us now and we have to wait while he is in the orphanage. I pray for his warmth, health, safety, nourishment, and happiness. I pray that his country does not close it's doors to adoptions, especially of special needs children. I pray that the caregivers are good to him, and I pray that he can feel our love over a 14+ hour flight (couldn't find a way to calculate miles and got a good laugh over me trying from Barry! lol). We are so in love with that little guy and we haven't even met him. Good night my sweet buddy. We love you so much! Love, Mama and Daddy

Preparation and Donations

I've spent most of the day trying to put some of our fundraising ideas into action. I sent an email out to my local friends for yard sale donations. We are going to have a yard sale on November 19-20, in just two weeks. We will also sell cookies and hot chocolate, and have a donation can and fliers out about Micah (thanks for that idea Marianne!). I created a donation can for Barry to take to work. I created my chip-in (look to the right!) And I read the first two chapters of "The Connected Child"... how touching!

I've been able to break down the adoption costs and hope this will help explain to our family and friends why it costs about $25,000 to adopt internationally (it's actually not that much more than domestic from what I hear).

Upfront costs (already being covered)
$2700 Homestudy process
$1275 Promise Trust Agreement and fees
$375 Passports for us and Fischer
$830-1000 Notary, postage, fingerprints, USCIS (INS) Process

Costs to get to Eastern Europe and bring Micah home
$8600 Facilitator fees (includes translation, attorneys, the whole team working in country)
$3500 Apartment and food for 5 weeks ($100/day)
$1500 In country travel (public tranportation - may be much less since we aren't traveling to multiple regions)
$600 Micah's passport
$550 US Immigration and medical
$4000-5000 Airline tickets (Us, Fischer, and Micah)
$1000 Miscellaneous cushion

$20,000 sounds like an awful lot of money to raise (and it is), but I broke it down to simpler terms so it can sound attainable to me. The donations can come in any number of ways. We can raise money through the yard sale, pancake breakfast, silent auction, babysitting, mini-photo sessions for Christmas, etc. We can also receive cash donations. If it were in cash donations only, any number of combinations is possible, but in the easiest way to think about it is simple division:

20 people donate $1,000, or
40 people donate $500, or
80 people donate $250, or
160 people donate $125, or
320 people donate $62.50, or
640 people donate, $31.25, or
1280 people donate, 15.63

I really don't think we know 640-1280 people, but if you could be so kind as to spread the word to everyone you know, we can accomplish this together! It's for a good cause to save a sweet child from an orphanage. If this was a selfish thing for us, I would NEVER ask for money. But since it is to save a life of a child who won't otherwise have an option at a normal way of life with a loving family, it is crucial that we ask for your help as our friends, to help us and be part of this journey with us. He will forever be a part of all of your lives as well! Thank you!

Love,
Shelly

Funny story

Barry was handling parenting duties by himself yesterday while I accompanied Fischer for his band competition (they did GREAT! 2nd place for band and sweepstakes for auxillary). So Barry attempted to make corndogs and fries for dinner in the oven and said the corndogs turned out hard as a rock and the fries turned out "nasty". So good 'ole dad took the girls to Burger King instead. While at the counter ordering their food, Chloe (our 2 yr old) points out to the cashier "Micah is my best family." She said "oh". Gracie (our 4 yr old) said, "He's gonna be our brother." So Barry explained we were adopting a little boy. Chloe repeated, "Micah is my family" to everyone she saw in there. He said it was so cute that they were telling everyone. We also have his picture on our desktop and everytime I minimize a window, Chloe points and says "MICAH! He's my family!" :) I love my girls so much, and can't wait to bring Micah home to share this love we have for him. ~Shelly

Committment to Adopt

We have talked, prayed, cried, and laughed over this little guy for the past few days. His name is Micah and is in orphanage #5 in Eastern Europe. He has Down Syndrome. He will be our son very soon. We committed to adopt him today and we are on our way to bring him home in the Spring of 2011! I am so blessed to have a husband who was on board from day 1, in love with him as much as I was. We are blessed with funds we weren't expecting to get the process started. And now we work, pray, and fundraise! Once the adoption is final, his name will be Micah Charles Ray. Micah means "who is like God?" and we found it fitting to keep that for him, and Charles was Barry's dad's name. It's funny, in all our pregnancies, we've always wanted another boy, but we could never really settle on a boy name that would stick each time. Charles was always the middle name, but Micah is not something we would've ever picked out on our own. We had Benjamin, Joshua, Hudson, Henry, Garrett, and others, but none of those fit him. He is a Micah :) And he will soon be ours!

Reece's Rainbow

A friend of mine from high school just adopted a beautiful girl from Ukraine this past month (http://www.ahomefordarya.blogspot.com/). As I watched her chronicle her journey with the process, I started thinking more about these sweet children who have very little chance of finding a home. I have always had a heart for kids with Down Syndrome (DS) and Autism, and always thought that someday I could possibly have one. I just always thought it would be biologically. I'm the type of person who never has amniocentesis tests done during my pregnancies because it doesn't matter to me, I would keep the baby no matter what. I firmly believe God knows what he's doing and will never give me more than I can handle.

Recently, Barry and I have thrown around the idea of having one more baby. We want a boy so bad, but of course there's never a guarantee. So we thought we'd just take the chance and see. Then Marianne posted something on her Facebook page about a boy named Sam yesterday (http://www.reecesrainbow.org/). It made me wonder how much international adoption costs, and what the process is really like. So I've been asking questions and doing some research the past couple days. Who knows what the future will hold for us, but we are looking into the options and wondering if this is really possible for us. When I told Barry about it, he was as moved as I was. He said he'd been thinking about adoption, but hadn't even thought of kids with DS. We both fell in love with Micah (http://reecesrainbow.org/micah-5). I am hoping that I can get some donations posted for this sweet boy to be adopted by a family, even if it is not us. So, please view his page and post a donation of whatever can be afforded. I am going to pray for this little guy every day to be found by his forever family.

Thanks!
Shelly

Camping at Lake Hemet - May 2010

Lake Hemet was a blast! I bought my brother's tent trailer the beginning of May for a birthday/graduation present for Barry, and we took it out for our first 2010 camping trip on May 21st. We had never been to Lake Hemet, but we got a really great spot right next to the playground. This first picture was the view from our site.

The fish were flopping and jumping all over the place. The lake was FULL! We tried day fishing, night fishing and every kind of fishing in between and didn't catch one single fish! It was really a shame.

Our cute little angels: ALL FOUR OF THEM! They had a great time enjoying the beautiful outdoors.

What a great little location. Our site backed up right to the opening of the playground so the kids could go swing, slide, and climb whenever they wanted. Annie did so good on her first camping trip and Fischer even enjoyed himself reading books and a little fishing too! :)

The trailer was awesome. The first night I couldn't get the gas to come on, then figured out my human error the next morning so we had heat the 2nd night. It was really icy cold and windy during the day and night so it was good we got it to work.

Next trip: Green Valley Lake, July 16-18!!!!

Biscuit - the new puppy

Barry brought home a new puppy on June 8, 2010. Much to the girls delight. We named him Biscuit. He is really cute and loves to be around people all the time. Abby seems to have adjusted well to him. Here's some pictures the day he came home at 10 weeks old.

And here are some new pictures a month later at 15 weeks old. He's gotten so big already!

Barry's birthday - May 24, 2010

I'm kinda posting these backwards, but oh well. Barry had a special 29th birthday in that he finished his Bachelor's degree requirements on that day! Congratulations my love and happy birthday! :) We were going to have dinner at his favorite restaurant in Victorville, Johnny Reb's, but it was closed. So we went to Roadhouse Grill instead. Barry's family joined us, but there weren't any pictures taken of his mom :( Sorry Mary!

Our 5th Anniversary - June 4, 2010

Happy 5th Anniversary!! We had such a great weekend being able to run around and do anything we wanted to quickly and without lugging extra stuff or kids! I can't believe we didn't get any pictures of our awesome hotel room or the amazing swimming pool. The first night we got to the hotel around 11pm and the night audit clerk let us into the spa after hours. It was so relaxing and QUIET!!!!


Our first day was spent at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, Ca. We had a great time acting like kids, riding all the big roller coasters and enjoying the park.

The lovebirds




Day 2 we took a drive up to Lake Piru to see what it had to offer and if it would be a good place to go camping. NOT!!! It was $10 to get in just to look around and it wasn't much to look at. The lake was really nice, but if you don't have a boat it's not really worth it. The campsites weren't as nice as we've seen in other places, so I would not recommend this place. However, there was a beautiful horse ranch on the way to the lake and we got a pretty picture:

Night 2: I surprised Barry by taking him on a murder mystery dinner train in Fillmore (on the 126, west of Valencia). The train rode along slowly to Santa Paula and back. It was a lot of fun but our dinner car got really hot (they need to fix the a/c!)

Us with the theatre coordinator. She was the drunk lady :)

Overall, we had a fantastic getaway and are so thankful for Barry's mom coming to watch the kids for three whole days. What a treat!!!

Visit from April & Charlie - June 2010

Shelly's best friend April and her son Charlie came to visit our family for a weekend in June. We had so much fun going to the L.A. Zoo, the Wrightwood Country Club, and hanging out at home. Thanks for driving all the way from Denair to see us (it took 7 hrs right?!) I'm still trying to upload the zoo pictures from my cell phone... they will be posted soon :)


Chloe and Charlie swimming



April posing



Charlie & April playing tetherball



Charlie and Gracie

Our new house

We've been in our new house since January and are loving it! All of the snow from the big storm has melted. We've had some tiny storms come through a few times where about an inch is left and melted the next day. We just had a small storm a couple days ago, and there is still some snow on our front deck because the sun isn't able to hit some areas. We are luckily surrounded by many pine trees, so we will have ample shade in the summer when we have to open our windows and let the cool air in. We don't have an air conditioner (first time in my life!) I'm not too worried though since there are so many trees, and we've been told it is usually around 80-90 degrees on the hottest days, which is nothing like the 108+ we got in Victorville. Not having an AC will help on the electricity bill too! :) Here are some pictures of our house I'm finally getting posted.

Upstairs living room.. where we hang out in the evenings to watch TV and spend time as a family. We are getting a new sectional sofa in a couple weeks, so I will post new pics then.

Notice the pretty wood-beamed ceiling and windows. We get a lot of natural light throughout the day upstairs.

Dining room view from living room. The dining room and kitchen are upstairs also. We do most of our living up here.

Kitchen view from dining table.

Master bedroom. Small, but adequate. This is also upstairs and this is the view from the bedroom window. Can't wait until that tree blooms! There is a huge mountain across the street filled with pine trees. It will never have homes on it because of the river bed below it. Just gorgeous.

Upstairs bathroom. We gave up having a master bathroom in the bedroom when we moved here, but it has worked out fine. Both bathrooms are small, but have the needed space.

I kinda posted the pics backwards, but here is the view when you open the front door. Staircase to right and hallway to the left. When you get to the top of the stairs, two bedrooms, and a bathroom are on the left. The kitchen, dining room, and living room are to the right. The downstairs mirrors the upstairs layout minus the kitchen of course. There is a laundry room downstairs and the living room is bigger.

Downstairs bathroom.

Downstairs living room/play room/office. The green couch from upstairs will come down here after we get the new sectional. This room also has a massive fireplace like upstairs, but it covered in boxes right now (still!) The sliding glass door goes out to the backyard.

Front door and porch with a little snow leftover from yesterday.

House and nice GREEN yard from street. It's so beautiful up here. I never want to move.

Annie at 7 months in her highchair.

Gracie decided to decorate around the flowers and put enough stuffed animals to surround the vase.