DeSoren Family

Our Christmas tree is up and decorated, the front yard is ablaze with thousands of LCD lights, the holiday season is back. Anthony has once again turned our home into a Fudge, Divinity, and Fruitcake factory. If that wasn’t bad enough, this year Anthony has shamelessly stolen the classic Sorensen family chocolate chip pumpkin cookie recipe and has added that to the production line up as well. There is no doubt that Christmas as come to the house.

We have had a big full year. We have moved out of Portland, survived Hurricane Rick at sea and managed to keep a roof over Sam’s head for another year.

But our biggest news this year is that our adoption home study was completed in September and more importantly paid off.

We have made it though the classes and background checks and all the inspections. We are right on target for adopting a kiddo or kiddos sometime in 2010 and have made it to the matching stage. Our caseworker has been sending our home study to potential kiddos caseworkers that we have an interest in. If the kiddos case worker likes what they see in us, then we get some more information about the kiddo sent back for us to review. It’s like exchanging business cards. Right now we have our home study out for about 12 different kiddos and sibling groups. So far we have had additional information come back twice. Sadly both times, the three of us (us and our own case worker) did not feel it was a good match.

So far the waiting & matching process is proving to be a very hard and emotional process.

We have been keep trying to find adventures and projects to keep us distracted. The biggest adventure was a 7 day cruise to Mexico. Neither of us had been on a cruise before and neither of us had ever been on a cruise in the middle of a hurricane.

So we were able to check two items off our bucket list. You can read all about our adventure with Hurricane Rick and our Mexican cruise at our family website (click here). We had quite the adventure!

Now is also a good time in our Christmas letter that we should also mention that we have made very good progress this year in disproving the slanderous rumor and lie that has been spread among our family and friends that “we” have some sort of Disney theme park “addiction”. Just so you all know and for the record, we did NOT make our fall pilgrimage to Disney World as we have been doing annually for the past few years. Furthermore, we only visited Disneyland twice this year, only once in the spring for our anniversary and only once in the fall as a tie in to the cruise. Clearly, we have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we don’t have a mouse addiction. And the rumor that Anthony has already started planning our future kiddos first trip and we are hopeing to have as many family and friends with us for a large grand gathering is also just a rumor.. until we send the invites out.

During the Spring we took a long six week parenting class in Love and Logic. Our caseworker recommended it as it would give us some great parenting tools to us with our future kiddo. We loved the class! If you are a parent, grandparent, teacher or babysitter you need to take this class!

They teach a real innovative way to help your kiddo make little mistakes as kids when it’s safe. Rather then big mistakes when they are older and it is much more life shattering. It also helps parents let the kids to the hard work when it comes to parenting, meaning make the kids think and learn from their actions and behavior rather then having the parents worry, fret and helicopter over the kids which only helps on setting them up for failure as adults.  We find ourselves using the techniques every week, and they work!

We have been very blessed this past year to have been able to provide some child respite care on our weekends. Our adoption caseworker got us connected with a young mother and her son who was recently placed with her.

Every Sunday we have had an 8 year old boy dropped off at our front door and the fun begins! We get to play games, go on hikes, cook, go swimming, work on science projects, go to OMSI, or work on spelling words. Sometimes we get more then one kiddo. Recently, we had three at once, a 8 year old, a 5 year old and a 3 year old.

Helping out and being apart of this kiddos life has been a great learning experience for us. A lot of our posts online at www.desoren.com this year have been based on the experiences we have had with him. It has been very rewarding knowing that we are helping while getting some hands on experience with special needs adopted kids. More then once we have been able to draw on some experience with him when looking at potential kidos profiles. That and he is just a super cool kid, we have been very lucky!

At the beginning of the year, Joshua received a promotion and new job position at Banfield as a Jr. Pricing Analyst. He is currently in the process of moving positions again at Banfield. The company apprently thinks of him as upwardly mobile and a good key player.  Joshua also has about one and a half years to go still on his degree in accounting from the University of Phoenix.

Anthony is still working at Minuteman Press as a production designer. He recently step-downed as Speaker of the House for the ICS International Parliament. Anthony was one of the key founders of their new Parliament which is comprised of 70 non-profit chapters within the International Court System. The I.C.S. is a GLTB non-profit group that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity annually across Canada, Mexico and the USA.

June 2010 will be mark 2 years of living with Sam. His short stay seems to be getting more and more permeant. Right now, Sam is looking for a job. A few weeks before Thanksgiving he was laid off from Safeway. Which is currently being looked upon as a mixed blessing. It has made things bit harder for us, as we had to cover everyone’s expenses. But he was stuck in bad job, so it really is for the best. The goal is for him to get in to a better job with more pay and hours or at least enrolled in school by January.

Our latest big adventure was having to move to a new home. Right after we booked and paid for our Mexico vacation, our landlord called us and gave us the bad news that she needed to sell the house. This set us into a real panic. With our home study freshly completed and paid for, moving was the last thing we wanted to do. Getting a good home for our kiddo was something we had really invested a lot of time and energy in to the first time around. Trying to do it again and quickly, was a huge task to hit us with.

Luckily, we quickly got a great real estate agent who was a friend and she got us in touch with a great loan officer. With their help we looked into our options and the possibilities of buying the house from our landlord and/or buying a new home. But in the end we just did not have the time to get together the financing that we would need. Home ownership is in our life plan, it just wasn’t expected right after paying for a holiday and adoption.

After we got back from our hurricane cruise, we had about a month to look for a new house that would meet our needs and our future kiddos. We found a great new-construction corner two story townhouse in Happy Valley. Happy Valley is just outside the Portland city limits in Clackamas county near Oregon’s largest indoor mall Clackamas Town Center, just north of Oregon City and the end of the Oregon trail.

The house has amazing views, 3 bedrooms & 2.5 bathrooms. Gas everything and the cats love the carpeted second floor. Their new favorite spot to lounge is the top of stairs, it gives then a good view of the whole house.

The new house is the furthest from downtown Portland that we have ever lived. Seems each time we move, we move farther away from downtown. But, one of the big plusses is it is right on the new Tri-met greenline lightrail system. So both of our workplaces and downtown are just a short train ride way. We also found out that our new elementary school looks to be a much better school for our future kiddo. It scored outstanding in every category on it’s 2008-2009 school report card.

Our new house has many plusses over our old house, the biggest being it’s cheaper! The new little worry is that because this place is so nice we might get spoiled and have a hard time finding our next place. But it’s something we are willing to risk!

So from our new home A.K.A. the fruit cake production factory… from both of us to all of you

Merry Christmas!

Joshua & Anthony

Looking for that perfect Christmas present for our family?

Sunday brought us our weekly visit with Shawn. Shortly after 9:00am the door bell rang. Anthony walked over to the door and opened in. In walked Shawn, followed by Donny (Shawn’s 5 year brother) followed by Ram (Donny’s adopted brother age 3), followed by a weary looking Sara.

It was her weekend to host Donny for one of his regular visits with his big brother Shawn. Donny lives with his forever family up in Seattle. On this visit he came down with his new adopted brother Ram.

After we got all the coats and shoes off, Ram announced that he was hungry. All three had already eaten breakfast, but Ram was still hungry. Something that would be a theme all day long.  So we quickly got three table settings out and a fast breakfast of cheerios and juice.  Ram had his with milk, but Donny preferred them dry which was fine but he had a hard time keeping the dry cheerios on his spoon. So as each cheerio slid off and on to the floor, Claudius (one of our cats) sprung to action. So picture this if you can, 2 cute boys eating a 2^nd breakfast while a large fat cat is batting and chasing dry cheerio’s underfoot on the hardwood floor much to the amusement of both of them.

After 2^nd breakfast Shawn headed off to Sam’s room to talk Star Wars while other two boys discovered the kiddo’s room and more importantly the Legos. After about an hour of Legos and books, we got the boys downstairs and started to roll out some gingerbread dough. Joshua and Shawn loaded up in the car and headed to Fred Meyers to get some icing while Anthony, Donny and Ram all played with the cookie dough and cut out gingerbread men.

Once they were cooked and cooled we sat each kid at the table and the frosting adventure began. Each of the boys did a great job.  But keeping the icing tip out of Rams mouth was real trick. After all the cookies were decorated, they were put away harden up and Joshua started to make lunch of everyone. Anthony took the boys and they all curled up and watched 101 Dalmatians while lunch cooked.

After a great lunch and seconds and thirds for Ram, we headed off for quiet time. We divided the boys up into 3 bedrooms. Ram in the master bedroom, Donny in the kid room, and Shawn in Sam’s room. Anthony read to Ram who cried a few tears because he didn’t want to take a nap, he wanted to eat cookies. It took about 10 minutes of reading and Ram as snoring up a storm. Joshua read to Donny and he too was out like a light.

When quiet time was over Shawn played with Sam’s game boy for his video game time. But both of his brothers were dead asleep and way too cute to wake up. Ram as also a little sick so the extra sleep time for him was a good thing.

We woke the boys up one at a time, first Donny, then Ram We gave them a snack, made sure everyone had restroom break, got shoes back on and coats zipped up. We then matched single file out the car and began the loading and strapping in process. 3 kids & two booster seats later, 3 plates of cookies load each with a special one each child had picked for Santa. And we were ready for takeoff.

Normally this is where our weekly blog ends. But not this time… Because of the seating arrangements there was only room in the car for one adult. The sucker.. err..  lucky person was Anthony.

Right past Oregon City on I-205, Ram from the back seat announces in a clear LOUD voice, “I need to go potty!”. So Anthony took the next exit and unpacked the kids and snuck in the backdoor of a McDonalds and marched them quickly into the restroom. Shawn ran right in to the only stall and locked himself to do his business. The two younger boys both instantly became nude… They dropped their little pants to the floor yanked their shirts both up to their chins and begin the bound leg penguin wiggle dance over to urinal, both boys fighting for who gets to do number 1 first. Anthony quickly tried to shut the bathroom door, to block the view of the nude review while laughing uncontrollably.

We had a wonderful time with the 3 boys. It is defiantly a day that will help us on our path to adoption.

Looking for that perfect Christmas present for our family?

Saturday became our official unpacked day. We got the kido’s room bunk beds rebuild and opened and put away the last moving box. Yeah we are here at last!

Sunday morning, Joshua woke up sick. So when Shawn came over for his normal Sunday we have to quickly come up with some non-Joshua activities.

First thing we worked on was Shawn’s spelling test that he had the following day. He came with a list of works and Anthony and Sam worked with him for a good hour on learning the spelling of the 10 words on his test. We made a game of it.

After the spelling we all bundled up in heavy clothing and headed outside. In our old neighborhood holiday lights were a mandatory event.  The whole HOA became a lighted Christmas wonderland as each house tried to outdo each other. Last year we spent a small fortune trying to keep up with the Jones. Well this year in our new HOA, a few people put a few lights out… which meant we would at last be the Kings of Christmas.

Anthony and Shawn carried out the 3 huge red and green plastic storage bins. We popped them open and started to inventory our goodies.

Sam untangled the big net lights and with Shawn’s help they wired up a big evergreen tree in our front lawn. Anthony ran the ground curb lights and decorated the smaller bushed. It was really really cold. So we took a break inside and Sam and Shawn made some hot coco for us all. After are break we headed outside to finish up. We got all the lawn decorated, but it was just too cold to work on the house lights, that and Joshua really wanted to do them. So we decided to wait on the house light for when Joshua felt better and we headed inside for some video game time and lunch.

After a nice lunch of Anthony’s homemade burritos we had quiet time. Quiet time was a bit harder for Shawn this time around. Shawn refuses to take an afternoon nap, so we invented quiet time were everyone goes to their bedrooms for 30-40 minutes to read or nap. Since Joshua was in the master bedroom being sick Anthony stayed down stairs.  Normally Shawn listens to read along books or reads some of the kid books we have.

But Anthony, being down stairs, proved to be a big temptation. So we had several trips downstairs to get a sneak peek at the TV… ahhh I mean to use the bathroom and ask about headphones and ask how long it has been  and to use the bathroom again.

On the last trip down the stairs Anthony headed up with Shawn and gave him some legos to build, which did the trick. After about 20 minutes longer than normal quiet time Anthony checked in on Shawn and he was intensely building. The two of them played for a bit before Shawn asks “When is quiet time over?” it was very cute.

We headed down stairs and watched an episode of Wallace and Gromit, The wrong trousers. We then worked a bit more on the spelling words.  Several of the words he knew all of the letters, but just had a hard time getting them in order. So we moved over to our big dry erase board and he wrote each word he missed out and we tried different letter combinations until he got it correct.

By the time it was time to go Shawn had each word down pat. Fingers crossed for his test!

UPDATE He only missed one word!

This month ended in a bang for us. First we helped out a friend by holding a huge estate sale for her, and then we had to move ourselves to our new home. It feels like we have been packing and moving for 4 weeks now…

Our friend could be considered a border-line hoarder. But she hoards good stuff, rather than garbage like some of those poor people on Hoarders (A&E TV Show). Just like us she had to move and was already dealing with enough stress in her life. She asked us if we would help out. So she took what she wanted to keep and left the rest for us to sell.

The sale was a huge amount of work and involved several long drives. Her house was out in Gresham, and even from our old house on 102^nd in Portland, it was a 35 minute drive each way. It took us 4 days (a few hours every day after work) to get the house completely setup for the sale. The biggest task was discovering and sorting what was there. We setup the master bedroom as a huge clothing boutique. Racks and racks of clothing and a large assortment of designer and designer knock off bags.

The sale ran for two days, Saturday and Sunday from 8:00am to 4:00pm both days. The first day we were awash in nonstop people. The second day it was fairly slow but a few big repeat customers came back to help clear us out. In the end, we sold most of the items and got a nice little commission check.

In the run up to the sale, we had an adoption update. We said no to two boys, as after reading their expanded profile, we just didn’t feel we were a good match for their needs. This was much more emotional than we thought it would be. Our “No, thank you” came at very early stage. They were not close to even offering a placement. But that didn’t stop it from feeling like we were saying no to our only chance at the adoption process. It isn’t of course, but it was an unexpected stressor, in a sea of home moving stress.

Our moving day was planned for Black Friday, November 27^th, just five days after the estate sale. So we spent most of Thanksgiving Day taking apart furniture, and loading boxes in to the garage. Anthony cooked up a nice mini thanksgiving dinner. Turkey (loaf), mashed potatoes, candied yams, fresh rolls, homemade stuffing, and two wonderful pumpkin pies.

Moving day started at 7:00am with the drive to the U-Haul for truck pickup. We got the 17 footer. Imagine Anthony driving a massive truck…. Yeah it was pretty funny. In the end it only took us 3 loads to get everything moved.

We moved from Portland to Happy Valley. We are still on the MAX line, green now rather than blue. The elementary school in our area just got a great report card so our future kido’s school is an upgrade from the old one, which did not score so well.

Our new house is larger, but smaller. The living room, dining room and kitchen are all in one huge open space on the main level along with a half bath. Gas stove, Gas heat and Gas hot water! Upstairs, we have 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a nice sized laundry/cat room).

Our new master bedroom is huge, about 3 times bigger then what we had. It has its own master bath and huge walk in closet. We immediately splurged on a fancy new rain shower head for our shower. This was worth every penny. We keep taking longer and longer showers. It was a real god sent for our aching muscles! (Getting out of the shower has become an issue.)

The big change is this is a townhouse. No yard work to worry about, but no raspberries growing the backyard. All of our old neighbors are upset to see us leave, while our new neighbors seem upset to see us take up a parking space. In fact the day before we moved Joshua had to ring the door bell of almost all the other homes to get someone’s car out of our driveway so we could get to our garage.

The move is over and we are 100% in our new place now. Handed over the keys last night and our old landlord was shocked how clean the house was (She gave us 100% of our deposit back!).

So for now we are living a sea of boxes, but hopefully in the next week or so everything will find a new place in time for our Christmas party.