August 23, 2013 By 2 Comments

Good Things

THANK YOU!!!!  You guys are crazy kind and I just really don’t know what else to say other than thank you, thank you, thank you!  We are already almost half way to our goal of 5K for the Heart Walk.  $2340 to be exact.  This is simply stellar.  I may have been pretty weepy yesterday as my phone would go off to alert me of another donation.  If you didn’t read what we are up to yesterday then you can READ THE POST HERE.

If you still want to donate in honor of Amon to help aid in heart research CLICK HERE to donate towards our family’s fundraising goal.  I am just so excited about this.  And if you make a donation of $15 or more in honor of Amon, as a thank you, I will mail you a pretty little key fob.  I’ve already got my list going and cannot wait to start cutting up fabric and sewing away.  And don’t forget, after you donate just send me a message HERE and let me know your mailing address.

Huge happy Friday thank yous.  My heart is so full.  You’re incredible.

Okay so other good things have been happening around our house.  I have been working like a mad woman getting so many orders done and accomplished and instagramming it up all along the way.  You can find me at pitterpatterart and follow along.

I adore when my kids want to create right along side me.  Sunday morning Harper and I chilled out and got busy creating.  I love when she does this.  I love her heart and I love her creative side.  They’re both really good ones.

Amon Kelley you are ridiculous.  Ridiculous.  We’ve had some pretty easy happy babies, but he easily takes the cake.  Minus the whole communicating thing 🙂  Crazy, happy, wild, into EVERYTHING, fun, loud as all get out, sweet and dramatic.  We’re all wild about Amon.  And we think he’s kind of wild about us.

We got a chance to eat lunch with Josh this week…not once, but twice.  I know three small Kelley boys who were thrilled.  Huddy, Sol and Amon easily think their dad is the best.  And I am coming to terms with the fact that Amon likes Josh better than me.  It’s rude, but I’m dealing.

My sewing machine recently broke and has been at the repair place for 3 weeks.  THREE LONG WEEKS.  So many things I’ve been wanting to sew.  So many trips to my MIL’s house to say, “Can I use your machine for a minute?”  But I finally got her back this week and she is sewing like a dream now.  Be still my heart.

And last, but certainly not least, Amon decided to take his 4th kidness to a whole new level.  I was working and Sol and Huddy were playing play-doh at the table with me.  I realized the house was far too quiet.  I looked over at the boys and said, “Hey, do yall know where Amon is?”  They’re always my eyes and ears.  Huddy without even looking up from his play-doh said, “He’s asleep under the table.”

I peeked under and sure enough.  Dude was out like a light.  I proceeded to document with picture taking and then felt a little bad for him.  I promise he has a schedule and actually sleeps in his on crib, but he’s also this amazing little adaptable 4th kid who will apparently rock a nap out on our hardwood floors under the kitchen table.  I did scoop him up after lots of pictures and put him in bed.  I like him.

That about wraps it up.  Thanks for reading.  Thanks for stopping by.  Thanks for being kind and nice and generous and thoughtful and encouraging.  This week didn’t start out so grand, but my my my, how it’s turned around.  Hope your weekend is super good.

Happy Friday.

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August 22, 2013 By 8 Comments

That Time I Asked You For Money

I’m smiling.  I really am.  A big smile too.  I shouldn’t ask you for money.  I mean, we’re internet friends and usually you only ask close, in person friends and relatives for money right?!?!?!  And I hear that can get pretty messy 🙂  Josh Kelley laughed when I told him I had set a $5K goal for this year’s Heart Walk.  And rightly so.  It’s a lot of money.  I definitely know that much.  But this is important to us.  Our family and Amon have been greatly impacted by congenital heart defects.  Amon and his heart are vital to our family.  He made us a “Kelley party of 6”.  I hope when I write about Amon…when you read my words…you’re able to see and hear and feel the love our family has for him.  It’s huge people.  Ginormous.  My heart is totally full…he’s our ace of hearts.  God blessed our socks right off with this kid.  And we could not be more grateful to Him.  We’re also over the moon about his doctors and surgeon and the hospital for all they did for his sweet little heart.  What they did for him, oh my goodness, we could never repay.

  Last year I literally watched out his hospital window as people walked to and from the Heart Walk.  I decided last year, that we would definitely walk and raise money in 2013.  I even put the walk and raising money for The American Heart Association on my list of goals for 2013.  It’s just crazy important to our family and many other families as well.  I know it might not be important to you or your family and that’s totally cool…I get it and no worries at all.  But if you feel so inclined, we would greatly appreciate any donations made in honor of Amon.

You can donate and check out our personal fundraising page HERE.  We are currently at $900 and that is simply amazing.  So a huge thank you for those who already donated.  I have already begun working on “thank you” notes…we are truly grateful.  You guys are the best!

So there you go.  We can now put this awkward post behind us…except when I bring it up again between now and October 12…but we can reminisce and laugh jolly loud laughs…”bahahahahahah, remember that time I asked you for money.”  Good times people, good times.

Oh and I totally forgot the best part.  If you make a donation of $15 or more HERE in honor of Amon, as a thank you, I will mail you a nifty key fob.  I stocked up on some brand new fabrics just last night and I hope I get to put them to use.  Maybe I’ll get to make 273.333333333333 key fobs and will knock this goal out together.  After you donate, just send me a message HERE and let me know your mailing address.  It would be an honor to reach this goal with your help.  Big, big thank yous in advance.

Happy Thursday!

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July 25, 2013 By 7 Comments

In Other News…

Amon is changing so much.  He’s so crazy and so fun.  He’s had a big week and will be starting some new therapies soon.  I’m especially anxious to see how speech therapy goes for him.  Right now he really wants to talk, but just cannot communicate so he does this ear piercing scream…like screams when he’s excited, happy, sad, mad, laughing, etc.  It’s got some serious pitch to it.  We’ll all be a tad happy when it’s gone and words are there in it’s place.

He also got some shoes finally.  Yep, he’s been walking since March and I just now bought him shoes.  He loves them.  I figured it was definitely time when I was reprimanded by our friends’ 4-year-old for Amon not wearing shoes at the ball park.  #4thkid

He’s an eater…just like Huddy.  They will have many fond memories of food together.  I love that he loves to eat…especially when it’s at Chick-fil-A.

And upon taking some photos of my friend Natalie’s Hooked On Consignment sale this week, I discovered Amon loves those little Fred Flinstone cars…like true love.  I was there for about an hour and he stayed in the car almost the entire time.  I so need one of these at our house.  #icouldgetsomuchdone

By the way, Natalie’s sale starts this Saturday for all you locals.

I’ve actually made some goodies this week.  Made up a baby gift for a friend and some Minnie shirts for some cute little girls I know.  It was really nice to sit and sew.  It’s been too long, but summer is winding down and I know August will hold a lot more time for creating.

And we enjoyed a family date night this week.  This is so rare for us to be spontaneous and just up and do something randomly fun.  This is in huge part because I’m a planner.  Now I love me some fun, but I have extreme OCD tendencies most of the time, so I like a plan…you know, preparation.  But I am trying to be more care free and wild and spontaneous.  We decided to head out to our local mall, which is ginormous and it was almost bed time…that’s me being spontaneous.  We ate dinner at home, so we let the kids pick out some candy at one of the candy stores.  I may have cried as we walked around the mall watching them eat their random bags of candy they picked out.  It was just a lot of fun and they were super cute and thrilled and I could tell they felt special and loved.  That made my heart swell…which resulted in tears in the mall.  I am a complete lost cause at this point, so I just welcome the random tears at this point.

At the Lego Store.

Candy and Sol who is king of “I’m always going to make a strange face for pictures.”

Bass Pro Shops

And my personal favorite moment of the night was in Bass Pro Shops.  They have tons of taxidermied animals through out the store and we had lots of conversations about killing animals and “stuffing” them and what all taxidermy entails.  Very enlightening stuff to two 4-year-old boys.  Then as Huddy sat there in that canoe with Sol he pointed behind me and asked, “Did they really kill the people too?”

“No, Huddy.  No they did not kill any people.  That’s called a mannequin.”

Happy Thursday.

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June 21, 2013 By 5 Comments

When We Met…Hearts Were Changed

1 year ago today we met Amon for the first time.

Long before we saw his face I sat in church one day and God led me to Amon’s verse…the verse I would hold tight too and will forever be Amon’s.

“How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the JOY we have in the presence of our God because of you?” 1 Thessalonians 3:9

It’s so very true.  He is joy.  And he brings Joy.  He makes joy well up and a smile stretch across your face.  When we met Amon our hearts were forever changed, yet again.  This kid owns every.single.one.of.us.  We are all so smitten and I love hearing Harper, Huddy and Sol all just make over him like he’s the grandest thing on Earth.  We are so glad we decided to take Harper with us to meet Amon for the first time.  They have a crazy sweet bond and I always imagine them being very best friends as they grow…despite being the oldest and the youngest.  She absolutely adores him…makes over him…brags on him…mother hens him to death…and he always saves his biggest smiles just for her.

I sat yesterday and just cried like the biggest baby ever as I looked through pictures and watched videos of our first time with Amon in Ethiopia.  I was so overwhelmed by God’s goodness.  God has been incredibly gracious to our family and just blessed us beyond our wildest dreams.

The road to Amon was not easy…in fact, our process to Amon contains my most heavy hearted moments of my life.  I lost mom and I just don’t know if I’ve longed for something as deep and as hard as I longed for Amon.  My heart and head learned a great deal about God and His love and sovereignty.  And even more, I learned God is always in control and even when we don’t think we see Him moving and working, He is.  He is always there…in the pain, in the longing, in the grief, in the overwhelming, suffocating moments; He is there.  And then He’s there in the joy too.

Sometimes the hardest things yield the most beautiful outcomes.  In our case, Amon brought joy and hope.  And God used a terribly hard part of our lives and this absolutely incredible child to renew our spirits, change our hearts and add to the loveliness of our family once again.  So today, no matter what the day holds, I’m just thankful.  So thankful and grateful to God for hard roads and beautiful outcomes.  And for joy.  Joy is such a beautiful thing.

Dear Amon,

We all love you like crazy.  We are completely wild over you.  Thank you for just being your joyful self.

Love, Mom

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May 8, 2013 By 12 Comments

A Year Ago

A year ago I had just gotten home from Craft Weekend with my cousin Rebecca.  You can read about our trip HERE and HERE.  I had spent the weekend in the best place for my heart at that very moment.  I was in such a different place than I am now.  I was in the thick of grief, losing Mom just 5 months before and my heart was about to burst in the wait for our third son.  We had been waiting almost 18 months to see his face.  At Craft Weekend all the ladies chatted and got to know one another as well as you can in a weekend and I made sure to share the anticipation and wait I was having to finally see my boy.

I still remember the emotion wrapped in taking a picture with a group of ladies I had only shortly known with our Waiting for You sign…the tears shed and the sincerity that these woman showed on behalf of me, our family’s wait and our child we just so longed for.  It is etched on my heart.  And the hugs of these woman…my Mom’s hugs are the #1 thing…tied with her voice & her words…that I miss about her.  And as these ladies embraced me with hugs I just let the tears go because I needed those hugs.

I came home exhausted, but so thrilled and blessed to have had the opportunity to attend Craft Weekend…the privilege to meet all these ladies and to spend good time with Rebecca.  It was an amazing blessing.

It was back to normal life and things picked up right where I had left.  Huddy had been sick so he didn’t go to MDO that Tuesday and we had a late doctor’s appointment to get him all checked out.  Josh’s parent’s picked Harper up from MDO and I sat at the doctor’s office for forever. Then my phone rang.  I saw the number on my phone and noticed it was long distance and didn’t answer.  The doctor seeing Huddy that day, who was not our normal doctor, was about to be in and we had waited so long.  I didn’t want to appear rude to anyone…the doctor or who ever was on the other end of that phone call.  Then instantly it hit me…I knew that was our agency’s number.  I sat for a moment and took a deep breath.  The phone had quit ringing and I knew this was about to be a grand moment in our Kelley family history.  This was the moment our family of 5 had been waiting and praying for for so long.

  Oddly enough instead of immediately calling back I did two things very quickly.

1)  Took a picture of my phone because I did not want to forget this very moment.  And I knew when I called the number back my heart would be filled with hope again.

2)  Snapped one last picture of our Waiting for You sign before we finally knew and saw the face of who we were actually waiting for this whole almost 18 months.

Then I called back.  And I heard those words my heart knew I was going to hear, “Well, I have some information for you about a little boy.”  I immediately began to bawl like a big baby, but told our director we were seeing the doctor any minute now and I would have to call her back.  And I said, “Can you just give me a little bit of information before the doctor comes in?”  And she did.  A 6-week-old baby boy.  Teklehaymanot was his sweet, long, Ethiopian name…Tekle for short.  We still call him Tekle sometimes.

I called Josh.  Gave him the 1 minute shocker of a phone call and hung up so we could see the doctor.  We finished up and off I drove, like a bat out of hell to Josh’s parents where he was meeting me.  We closed ourselves off in their playroom with cell phones to conference call with our director to finally hear all about our son.  And our hearts flurried with joy and our hearts grieved.  Adoption is amazing, but adoption contains both loss and gain.  As adoptive parents, Josh and I grieve for what was suppose to be in a sinless, perfect, povertyless world for Sol and Amon.  We grieve for their loss and for their birth families loss.  If you ask me details of their life before joining our family…their time in Ethiopia…please don’t be offended when I don’t tell you.  It’s just how we have chosen to handle our kiddos’ stories…not right or wrong…but just our choice.

Then Josh and I opened our email.  I wish I could accurately put into words this moment.  We were finally seeing this face we had absolutely longed and ached to see.  And there he was.  And he was beautiful.

I cried and cried and cried.  For days.  Emotional wreck.  I specifically remember texting a picture of Amon to friends.  My friend Susan responded with, “Now that was worth the wait.”  We were instantly his.  He had our hearts…all 5 of our hearts…from the very beginning.  He was the newest Kelley.  And what hope God brought not only to our family, but to our hearts as well, through this baby boy.  We hadn’t had the easiest last 6 months and we had suffered a great loss and we were all injured and wearing our scars clearly.  But God used Amon and his perfectly God made heart to bring hope and joy to ours.  God used Amon to help us heal…specifically me…and Harper.  To bring smiles to our faces.  To bring this crazy amazing hope in Jesus Christ and all His plans for us.

And then it was time for a new picture.  One of my favorites.

I wish there was something beyond being grateful and thankful and humbled and honored and just amazed…because I would most definitely be it for the chance at being Amon’s mom.  I am so grateful to God.  What an outstanding blessing…a truly outstanding blessing.  Amon, our ace of hearts, we adore and love you like crazy!

Happy Wednesday.

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March 25, 2013 By 13 Comments

Amon’s 1st Birthday

Amon is officially one!  How can that be?  Where did the time go?  I still remember that day last May when Josh and I sat on the floor in his parent’s bonus room and opened those incredibly longed for pictures and stared at this adorably small, dark headed, big eyed 6 week old baby boy.  There he finally was.

I’ll be honest in saying I’ve always struggled a bit with Sol’s birthday…and now Amon’s.  Today was a very hard, celebrated, tear filled day.  With adoption there is so much joy and beauty and love, but also sadness and grief and questions.  I ache for my kids in many different ways and I grieve for Solomon and Amon and all the questions and possible sadness that they will face…especially on their birthdays.  I so wish I had all the answers.  I so wish I knew exactly what to say.  But I don’t and Josh doesn’t either and this is the part of adoption that is really hard.

But, I am thankful for the amazing, incredible parts of adoption…the ones that fill my heart to the tip top and make me absolutely weep with gratefulness to God.  These moments out weigh all the hard ones.  Today I cried so much…tears of sadness for Amon and tears of absolute thankfulness for this child.  He is just amazing.  He blows us totally away.  I wish I could accurately describe how honored and grateful and blessed and just in awe of God for allowing us to be his mom and dad we feel.  There are really no words to even begin to capture our gratefulness.

We choose specific verses for our kiddos before they come along.  I remember sitting in church scanning over 1 Thessalonians when I read Amon’s verse.  I knew the moment I read it it was suppose to be our next little boy’s verse even though we had no idea who he was yet.  And I held tight to that verse…hard.

“How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the JOY we have in the presence of our God because of you?” 1 Thessalonians 3:9

Every time I think of Amon’s verse now, I am thrilled with God’s loveliness.  I adore how He moves and works and enjoys even the smallest of details like a scripture that absolutely nails our son…long before we knew his joyous personality.  Amon really is joy.  I opened a card from my Aunt Linda today to Amon for his birthday and absolutely sobbed.  She nailed it.  My Aunt Linda understands what this child means to our family.  What hope we have found in God through this crazy, beautiful boy and his beautiful heart.

So today was Amon’s day.  We ate muffins for breakfast and had doctor’s appointments, and shared cupcakes with medical staff who take mad care of our family and we enjoyed cake ourselves and we enjoyed each other and we loved on Amon hard.

And like everyday, he brought smiles into our family.  And he brought his typical joy.

Amon Kelley you have rocked our world in the best way ever.  God has used you my joyous baby boy and will continue to do so.  You have touched hearts with your perfect one.  I am honored to be your mom and CANNOT wait to see what God has in store for your little life.  I know it’s going to be grand.  I know you are going to change the world.  I love you madly!  Happy 1st Birthday to our Ace of Hearts!

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February 19, 2013 By 2 Comments

Ace of Hearts

Cardiologist appointment days are super nerve racking.  I reminded Josh a few nights ago that Amon had an appointment this week and he said, “Wow, all of sudden I feel like I could throw up.”  That’s pretty accurate.  Of course we want to know how his heart is doing, but there is also this great nervousness that goes right along with the anticipation.  How is his heart doing?  Is everything working like it should?

So when today’s appointment was done, we sighed a big sigh of relief.  Amon’s heart is doing well and his scars are still healing up nicely.  His chest is even less raised than it was last visit which is great.  He still has a leaky valve, but his heart appears to be handling it just fine.  All was well and of course he was amazing as always.

Oh the curls.  Goodness.

Everyone was fantastic at the doctor’s office…including all the big wee Kelleys too.  They were really fascinated getting to see Amon’s heart.  Maybe we’ll have a heart doctor in the family one day.  And we enjoyed Chick-fil-a for lunch.  Success.

Oh and Amon’s first little tooth has finally cut through.  Ignore my fingers all in his mouth.  You do what you have to do.  It’s the cutest tooth ever.

Hope your day was good too.  Tomorrow is Wednesday…the weekend is already so close.  Yipppeee.

Happy Tuesday.

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February 12, 2013 By 8 Comments

It’s The Little Things…

that totally make my day…really, my week.

It may seem small and not so grand to some, but wow…to our family it’s awesome.  We are so proud and just think he is making great strides.  It’s kind of crazy amazing being his mom.

Happy Tuesday!

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