Yes

Y'all might not remember this, but back in July when we announced our plans to adopt Sweet Baby Wyatt, I told all six of my readers (two of whom are my husband) about how we were approved to adopt two children from China.  This is important, folks.  I want the record to show that I did warn you of this possibility. We really didn't know if two more Robinsons was God's plan for us at the time, so we waited and prayed and wondered.

2012 was an interesting year for Team Robinson, a time of much reflection and prayer and seeking God's leading for our lives.  If there is a word that would characterize 2012 for us, it would be YES.  God drew us closer to him as we said "yes" to some pretty exciting things and some pretty hard things, too.  We've experienced His blessing in beautiful ways that I struggle to put into complete sentences. His provision....His grace....His mercy....His LOVE!

There were times in 2012 when the possibilities of what might be captivated us with expectation, anticipation, and excitement.  There were times when we experienced disappointment, loss and frustration, too.  More than once we questioned whether we had heard God correctly.  I've even wondered why some things made the pages of His story in our family.  Ultimately, we experienced a year like many before, where we've found blessing in obedience to Him and peace and joy in saying "yes".  Each "yes" from 2012 brought us to this moment where we are right now - prepared to say "yes" in this New Year to more than just ONE more Robinson.

I've been sitting on big news for over 2 weeks, waiting and waiting for the letters P-A!!  They finally arrived late Sunday night.  We are beyond excited to share the news that we've received Provisional Approval from Ch*na to adopt a second child, a precious little girl we're calling            .  Actually, we just call her the baby.  We're still contemplating her name.  Dean has offered up a few suggestions that are completely unacceptable....Fiona is Shrek's wife, right?  And I'm just not diggin' that for a baby name.  He's also contributed the name Josie Wales.  I can assure you, that will NOT be her name.  I'm not sure baby namin' is Daddy-O's gift.  Josie (from Joseph), however, means "God will increase", and that's oh-so fitting for a member of Team Robinson.  I also like Jubilee, but I've not really strayed that far from the mainstream in baby names before.  I don't know.  We're just not sure yet what her name will be.  Name or no name, I'm sure you'd love to see her now, wouldn't you?

She is ADORED already!!!  Since we have already received Wyatt's LOA (that's adoption mama hipster talk for Letter of Approval), we're hoping that our precious little girl's paperwork will make its rounds through the necessary channels very quickly so that we can travel to pick them both up at the same time.  We expect Spring 2013 to be one wild ride, indeed!

How DO we school so many children?

Alrighty.  It's taken over three months to find the time to write this post - mostly because we're schooling 7 children with two working parents while completing the adoption of another child from China.  There's not a lot of free time around here these days.

School is not one of my favs.  Over the past 12 years, I've tried a million different methods and curriculums and approaches.  Well, not really a million, but you get the point, right?  I've never really found anything that I like right out of the box.  I've tried the whole unschooling thing, but I am WAY too uptight to be successful with this method.  The kids would totally go for not schooling at all, but the fabulous State of Georgia won't let that fly, and neither would I, honestly.  I'm a bit of a high achiever.  I like As and all -- neat little rows of capital As in my tidy little teacher's grade book...7 subjects and 180 days, check!

As much as I like the tidy rows in my teacher's grade book, 7 little pupils and 7 different grade levels have rocked this school house.  I've had to learn to chill, man....let things go.  And you know what?  My little pupils are thriving, even when all the boxes don't get checked.  It's all good and all that jazz.  I get a little freaky every now and then and standardize test everybody just to make sure we're not depriving the little scholars of all the potential that State standards ensure. Our kids are geniuses, and I've got the standardized test scores to prove it!

A typical week day is pretty full around here.  I work full time.  Dean works full time.  The kids have a full day of school.  It's a balancing act, and no two days look just alike.  Both Dean and I work from home, covering for each other when one has to be out of the house.  It sounds like it would be a hassle, but it's not really.  It's no more complicated than figuring out who's picking Suzie up from drill team, and who's dropping Billy off at baseball.  I know many a parent with kids in public school that seem to have more hectic and busy lives than we do, even without two working parents.  Everyone makes choices about how to spend their time, and this is just how we divvy ours up.

We have two littles, two middles and three bigs - not necessarily in order of birthdate.  I group the kids more by ability and need for oversight than I do by age.  The littles require a lot of oversight and a lot of help with academic tasks.  Their schoolwork isn't time intensive, though, and the middles and bigs each help out by taking time to play with a little brother.  The middles are able to complete much of their assignments on their own now, and the bigs are pretty much independent learners, coming to me only when they need help with their schoolwork.

During each weekday morning, the kids work through their daily tasks, chores and independent schoolwork.  They have a folder that I prepare ahead of time with certain assignments that they should be able to complete on their own.  These are skills they've learned before that they can practice and reading assignments that will prepare them for our afternoon lessons.  The littles usually need help, and there is nothing a kindergardener has to learn that a 5th-11th grader cannot teach him.

Developing talents is also part of our morning.  Some play the piano.  Some play the guitar.  One likes computer programming. They like to sew and draw and cook.  They play and build and color and cut and paste.  They feed the cats and chickens and race each other to the barn and back.  By the time 1:00 rolls around, there's a guaranteed solid hour of clean up that occupies littles and middles alike.  Lunch is loud and I usually miss it.  I'd love to sit at the table with them, but mostly I don't.  Food is a big time babysitter for me.  I can get a lot of work done during that lunch hour.  And yes, they eat for an hour.  I don't know about your kids, but mine can pack away the PB&J!

From 2:00 - 6:00, it's school house rock.  We knock out the geography, social studies, science and math.   We read about people and places and talk about God's word.  We conjugate up some Spanish verbs.  We discuss injustice and chickens and whether twins will be allergic to the same things.  We take placement tests when I start to feel insecure about how much they're learning.

Some days we have guitar, piano, art lessons, 4H or baseball.  We love loving on extras and often have more than our own children here.  We love visiting with friends and neighbors and driving to town for Chick-fil-a.  We can fit a whole lot more into our lives, even with two working parents, than we could if Team Robinson made the daily trek to three different schools.

So why do we go to all the trouble?  Why not just let someone else fill their little noggins with all that knowledge?  The truth is, we like it, y'all.  It's our beat.  It's our thing.  It's what we do.  We're buckin' the system...changing the way it's done....making academic strides.  It's an amazing life, really.

If you're thinking about homeschooling, and you're thinking it might just be a bit too much, drop in on Team Robinson for a visit.  This little gig we've got going is truly a blessing!

Math Camp

I'm not sure if any of you other parents get a kick out of messing with your kids, but Dean and I live for it!!  Back around the end of December, we broke the news to them that we had signed them up for  math camp - five days of mathematic fun with homeschoolers from around the nation.  Pack yo bags, peeps!!  It's going to be a blast!!!!

The news brought mixed reviews from Team Robinson.  The teens were less than happy.  What kind of homeschoolers wouldn't want to go to math camp?!?  One of my peeps asked me what math is, which concerned me a bit since we work the numbers every.single.day.  There were several excited shouts and an abundance of bouncing at the word camp, but overall I didn't get the response I thought we would.  Bahahahahahah!!!!

The funny thing is, we really weren't going to math camp.  We only told the kids we were to mess with their heads.  Hee hee.  That's just the way we roll!!  The plan was really to take the team here.  And it was AWESOME!

Our little campers had matching t-shirts and everything, thanks to Uncle Larry.  Our master trickery was really a joint effort with our faves, Larry and Laura Lea.  It was a hoot!   We packed the pencils and notebook paper and made it all the way to the front of the hotel without a one of them suspecting a thing.  Well, one of theirs suspected something since this isn't the first time Larry and Laura Lea have pulled a fast one on their little scholar, but it was fun just the same.

I love this little video clip, although I hate that you can hear my voice laughing like a goofy goober.....The audio isn't great....oh, and Tate is totally not listening because he's changing out of his math camp t-shirt the whole time.

So, the moral of the story is, if you want to spend several weeks messing with your kids' heads followed by five days of amazing fun, tell them you're taking them to math camp and then take them to Wilderness at the Smokies instead.  Wavepooling, body surfing, water sliding, and Sky hiking beats math camp any ole day!! Oh, and then - because your kids are all out for the night by 7:30 - you get to spend hours talking, laughing, sharing, drinking coffee, dreaming and casting visions with some of your favorite people in the whole wide world.  Math camp is AMAZING fun!!

So, how DO we wash clothes for so many children?

Laundry stinks.  I hate laundry.  The truth is, I don't actually do laundry, y'all.  I assigned the task to the children.  Ha!  That's how we wash clothes for so many children!!  Now before anyone goes off and screams child abuse, it's not really that way at all.  It's team work!

One of our dear ones has the job of sorting the laundry.  He's really good at it, too.  And he's little, so he needs a job he's really good at.  Builds confidence and all, and I don't have to hear him say, "I gots no jobs", a million times a day.  There's ALWAYS a load of laundry he can sort if he gots no jobs!!

Another precious angel puts the loads in the washer and starts that bad boy up.  She's one of the bigs.  You need one of the bigs for this part, otherwise there will be homemade laundry soap and vinegar (used for fabric softener) everywhere and who knows which buttons will get pushed.  When the timer goes off, one of the middles moves the laundry to the dryer and presses go.  Don't feel sorry for my little Lauren.  She's happy and well-adjusted. Besides, the dryer really does all the work anyway.  I know it would save money and be more in line with farming if we hung our clothes out to dry, but I'm just not there quite yet.  Maybe one day.  For now, everything goes in the dryer.

When the little bell goes "ding", still another sweet child sorts the load into baskets where the laundry sits and is never, ever folded.  That's where it stops, folks.  Laundry baskets line the back wall of our family room, arranged from youngest to oldest and with clothes spilling over the sides in excess.  There is no plan to move the baskets.  There is no plan to fold the clothes inside the baskets.  That is just the way it is.  

This is why I hate laundry.  It's always there, piling up and spilling over and causing wars between pre-teen girls that lay claim to their sisters' sparkly tank tops that land by happenstance in their baskets.  The crazy thing about all of this is no one ever seems to be able to find anything to wear at all.  It's insane!

Not long ago, I tripped over our display of excess and decided that enough is enough.  That's right, we have enough.  We have more than enough.  So, I sorted through our cleverly-developed system for storing that which we do not actually treasure, and we pared down our possessions.   After two long weeks of sorting, each person has 5 outfits - three for play, one for town and one for church.  They also have three pair of shoes, three more than so many children in this world- one for play, one for town and one for church. When you see our children wearing the same thing out and about week after week, do not be alarmed.  We are not struggling to keep them in clothes.  In fact, if you saw the INSANE amount of clothes I've weeded out the past two weeks, you would think we were hoarders.  I should post a picture.

This has made our lives so much easier.  The children no longer challenge each other to timed races up to the top of Mount Laundry.  We collect and sort dirty laundry every morning, wash it, dry it and sort it back into their baskets where it sits until the next time they wear it.  We still have no plan to fold the laundry or put the laundry away, but it won't sit and never, ever be folded because it's going to be worn again in a day or two.

Well, thats all she wrote, the how-to on laundry for a large family.  The moral of the story is "Have less laundry and many hands make light work."

Up next, how do we school so many children...

So, how DO we feed so many children?

When it comes to answering "how" questions, food is always a hard one.  The simple answer is God provides!  Without a doubt, He provides!  We eat abundantly, y'all.  It's truly AMAZING!!!  There is no way we should be able to eat this well with the number of people living under our roof.  I can't recall even one time that a person around here has gone hungry out of necessity.  Praise Him!

While we've never gone hungry, we haven't always eaten exactly what we'd like to eat for every single meal.   And that's the hard part, because we Robinsons LOVE to like what we eat.  And we LOVE it to look nice on the table before we eat it, too.  Presentation is important here....or was important here....before we had so many children.  I used to spend countless amounts of time preparing menus and spreadsheeting very neatly organized shopping lists.  I had a system of spreading our favorite recipes throughout the monthly menu calendar in a way that made us all feel satisfied and happy.  Now that I think about it, my little menu-planning and shopping list habits might have been a slight bit over the top.  Ah-ha moment here.

Well, it just so happens that we added a few children and my satisfied and happy little family began to ask for seconds, only to gaze into an empty pot and look up at me in despair. So, I doubled the recipes.  And then we added a few more children.  So I tripled the recipes.  Our grocery spending went through the roof, and yet we always felt like we never had anything in the pantry (that we wanted to eat).  We felt dissatisfied, and we complained....a lot.  God didn't leave us there, though.  When we took our dissatisfied, complaining selves to Him, He drew us closer in, filled us with the Truth and gave us hearts of gratitude.

With hearts of gratitude, we began to explore less expensive and healthier ways of eating.  You are what you eat, you know?  And when food is less expensive, you can afford to feed more people with it than you could before.  The time that I spent before planning menus and organizing my grocery lists, I began to spend reaching out to other mothers feeding large gaggles of children.   We bought a wheat grinder, raised up some free-range chickens and joined a cult.  Just kidding!!!  About the cult anyway.  We really did buy a wheat grinder, a bread machine and 12 chickens.  We began to eat a much more simple, much more staple-based diet, and we began to feel more satisfied with every meal.  I think the key here is gratitude.  A grateful heart is a happy heart, and that is the Truth!

Preparation is more time-consuming now;  I won't deny that.  Making three meals each day from scratch could take the entire day if I didn't have the right approach.  Our meals are simple.  They're nothing fancy.  This change was hard for me.  I love to cook amazing and elaborate dinners, I like the table to look nice, and I want everyone gathered around with happy faces and sweet conversations.  Yeah, meal times don't always look like that here, not everyday anyway.  On a typical day, there's a lot of Mommy and Daddy serving the littles, filling their bellies and clearing them from the table so the bigs can eat.  One of these days we'll get a bigger table, but for now we enjoy our happy family time right after dinner where Daddy demonstrates WWE moves on the family room rug.  It works for us, and our special dinner nights are that much more special.  We love that the food has become less of the focus in our meal time, while fellowship and family have become more of a priority.  We are incredibly blessed because of it.  

So what does this look like in action?  First of all, we don't buy boxed food often at all.  We eat a lot of whole foods that can be prepared in large portions.  We buy beans, oatmeal, rice, sugar, milk, wheat and other staples in bulk.  We raise chickens for eggs, make our own bread and eat produce that is in season.  Oh my word, we do look like a cult!!!!  I promise we are not!!!  Check out today's good eats:

Breakfast:  scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast and apple butter
Lunch:       PBJs, apples from Ellijay and garden salad
Dinner:      Northern beans, whole wheat rolls and ham (center cut slices, even)

The whole kit and caboodle was less than $25 for a family our size.  I've heard so many people say that eating healthier is more expensive, but truthfully it is not.  Boxed and prepared foods are VERY expensive.  Every month we get better at making good choices in our food purchases and that makes me a happy momma with a gaggle of well-fed little chickadees.

Well, folks.  It's time to go do the dishes.  Up next, how do we wash clothes for so many children?

So how DO we do it?

At least once each day I am asked, "How do you do it?"   Most of the time I just shrug my shoulders and don't really know what to say.  "It" is such a general word.  It could mean so many things -  "have so many children" or "feed so many children" or "wash clothes for so many children" or "school so many children" or "work while you have so many children".  I could go on and on, but I'm pretty certain that we have a common denominator to work with here - SO MANY CHILDREN.

To be honest with you, the children are the easy part.  As Mother Teresa once said, "How can there be too many children?  That is like saying there are too many flowers." She was johnny-on-the-spot with that one.  I love their laughter, their questions, their love for me and their father, their love for God and others.  I simply LOVE having so many children to love.  So if I answer the question, "How do you have so many children?" from my heart, the answer is "We say 'yes' when God sends children to us." We have a heart for the fatherless, the vulnerable, the poor, the oppressed.  And we are incredibly blessed because of it.

As we're preparing to bring home one more Robinson, Dean and I have been reflecting on the other meanings of "it".  Okay, I've been reflecting.  Dean humors me and listens to all of my reflections while we sit together in the quiet of the early morning folding socks.  Feeding, washing, schooling, working....these are things that can be overwhelmingly difficult for a family our size if we do not strategize.  The reality of the situation here is that we cannot do it all and have so many children.  Our lives look so much different today than they did 10 years ago, or even 3 years ago really.  From what we eat to what we do with our time, almost everything has changed.  And we are incredibly blessed because of it.

As God shapes us and molds us and equips us to this life He has called us to, He is allowing us to be apart of His incredible work!  And that's AMAZING, folks!!  If we only did what we thought we could accomplish with what money we have left in our bank account, what time we have left in our our day, and what strength we have left over after living our ordinary lives , we Robinsons would have missed out on SO many blessings!!!

As we reflect and grow, God is showing us how to do it - how to have so many children, how to feed so many children, how to wash clothes for so many children - how to school so many children - how to work with so many children.  And we are incredibly blessed because of it.

Now I know, I never really did say "how" we do anything.  I will soon.  I promise.  But right now, I have to go.  So many children are wanting my attention, and what a blessing is that?!?  So, stay tuned, folks.  Up next....how do we feed so many children?

Problem Chicken

In an effort to be more green and farmer-ish, we have been free ranging our chickens for the past few months.  It was hard for me to let them out of the pen at first, but I did.  They're free as the wind and loving life.  None of my great fears have come to pass - until today anyway.....and to be honest, this is one fear I never even had before today.

We have this one chicken.  There's always one, right?  Well, she likes to climb in cars....and trucks....and vans.  She sees a car door open and she beelines her way across the yard in hopes of scoring a goldfish from the floorboard in front of Riley's seat.  Maybe if I was a free-ranged chicken living on a diet of yard bugs, I too would risk it all for the slimy discards of a four-year-old boy.  Who knows?  

Until today, this strange chicken behavior hasn't been a problem - annoying but not really a problem.

I was at my parent's, cooling off my little people in the pool, when Dean called from Highway 78 in Stone Mountain.  We're chit-chatting away about the day when Dean pauses and says, "I think I saw a chicken in my rear view mirror."  That's odd.  He's two hours from home, out in the big city. As the truck rolled to a stop in traffic, our conversation went something like this:

Dean (with a calm voice): "Brownie is in the back of the truck.  She's roosting up on the side of the truck right now, flapping her wings like she's going to fly off."

Brownie is our goldfish thief, the automobile invader and apparently now a hitchhiker.

Me (with a not-so-calm voice): "Stop the truck and catch her, Dean!"

"What am I going to do with her once I catch her", questioned my love.

"Put her in the cab, Dean!"

"I'm not putting a chicken in the cab of my truck!" (That doesn't sound like a very farmer-ish thing to say, my love).

So....my love drove to my parent's house with a chicken riding shotgun in the cab of his truck, because....well,  that's just the kind of guy he is!

(Notice the chewed up rear view mirror.  A big thank you goes out to Jethro, our bloodhound, for personalizing the truck!)

When he got to my mom and dad's he popped that sweet chicken into the back yard to feast on the fare there, thinking we could just pick her up when it came time to go home.  The thing is, we forgot about the whole roosting thing.  It got dark.  She roosted.  We couldn't find her.  We had to go.

There were chicken sighting for days in their neighborhood before my daddy caught her and caged her.  Dean made a special trip to bring her home to us because he's just that kind of guy.

Alls well that ends well, I suppose.  We'll get this farming thing right, eventually!