A Little Embarrassed

I feel a little embarrassed about a little discovery I recently made. Let me just start by saying, it is fun and dare I say, a little addictive, having people leave comments on your blog. It is nice to know that people care and are following what is going on in your life. Well, about two months ago I made some changes to my blog settings that I thought just notified me by email if I received new comments. Apparently, I changed it so that I had to monitor my comments and they won't show up on my blog or email unless I log in and accept them. I have gone two months feeling like my friends and family didn't care about me! I know, it is silly!!! I was feeling all sorry for myself, then I find this spot on my dashboard that says I have 24 comments waiting for me to approve them....OOPS! I really felt stupid!!!! I don't know if this is something I should really admit on the blog, but it was a sweet find and I wanted you all to know that I appreciate your support while we continue down this adoption (family) road.

So, there you go! My confession of the year. Hopefully I won't have too many weak moments like this one. I will be the first to admit that I'm not perfect and unfortunately I have way too many areas that I'm trying to improve in. My own self worth is one of them. I'm working on it, slowly but surely.

Now that that is out of the way. An update on where we're at with getting Masha. I am still waiting for one more form from our government. I submitted the application 5 1/2 weeks ago and I'm still watching for it in the mail. Hopefully it comes this week because I finally really pushed them this last week that I need it and pronto! Once I have this in hand I can take the whole dossier up to the capitol to get it apostilled. After I get it back from the capitol, I can send it onto Ukraine and hopefully have it submitted by the end of December before their offices close for the holidays. If I don't get it in time, I will have to wait until February of next year before I will hear anything from Ukraine concerning when our next travel date will be. I don't want that to happen. I'm hoping to hear sooner than later.

As for Nastia (Anastasia), she continues to progress in leaps and bounds. Just today, she gave the prayer and scripture in Primary. She did really well. I was very proud of her. She still has a very heavy accent, but her speech gets clearer and clearer all the time.

She is reading better than our kindergartner now. Or at least she recognizes more words without sounding them out more quickly than Tyler can. They read together sometimes to give each other some extra practice. She is right where she should be with math. In math she is actually very bright and quick. She continues to get 100% on her spelling tests, even though she is spelling words like duck, quick, luck, and sack now. I have been impressed with her ability to learn. I'm almost wishing now that we had put her with her age appropriate grade because she is doing so well. Maybe at some point we can move her up a grade. We'll see how it goes.

She continues to be my best cleaner. She keeps her room very tidy and takes pride in keeping the cleanest bedroom. She usually helps me with whatever I need without complaining. It is sooo nice because I have at least one child that usually can't help without asking "Why me?."

She is doing so much better with the tattletaling. She doesn't come to me nearly as often as she did in the beginning. We're still working on the whining, but that is getting better too.

I won't say everything is peachy all of the time. But, overall, things are good and we are happy. In fact, just today, we had to have a talk with JR and Nastia about how they treat each other. Those two continue to butt heads and it is maddening! They have set a goal to be better to each other and more than once since our talk earlier today I have heard them working together instead of griping at each other. Thank goodness!

I have some pictures from the last month to update, so take a look!