So much has happened this week- planning and packing and shopping for the kids and for Christmas and enjoying family time, getting bedrooms figured out, church programs and all sorts of fun stuff.

Now the time is really here and in 36 hours we will be in Kiev and getting things moving for the final stages of the adoption.  In about 5 days I will have custody of Aleksa, and in about 8 I will have Wesley too.  It’s going to be a wild ride, and I daresay we are ready!!

And yes, I think Mike and the grands are all ready to handle this crew while I’m gone.  The only one I think isn’t quite ready is Lynae… she’s glued to me and it will be hardest when Mike is home and she expects me to be there too.  Just 2 weeks and we should be HOME!

Cartoons ended and a work-out show came on the channel she was watching. We only get 3 so I left it on… she didn’t mind! (excuse the missing pants, it’s HOT here!)

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

I’m happy to be able to share with you some FREE things you can have, as well as some opportunities for GIFTS that you can purchase, thinking toward the holidays

1. One FREE item that you can give to friends or have at your own home is the Reece’s Rainbow REDEMPTION 2010 Calendar! You can either download this in digital format or you can have it printed.

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This calendar is available for download by clicking the button. You can also choose to order a pre-printed calendar (for the cost of making it!). Price for the printed calendars is actual cost and does not act as a donation to Reece’s Rainbow. At the bottom of that post is a link to also download a letter to give along with the calendars that tells a bit about RR and its purpose and mission

2. This is our biggest time of the year for fundraising for all of the waiting children with Down syndrome that are waiting for their forever families… This Christmas consider giving the gift of LIFE! When you choose to sponsor a child for $35, you will receive a Christmas Ornament with a photo of the child you’ve sponsored on it. This is a wonderful gift for teachers, therapists, grandparents of a child with Down syndrome or many other hard-to-buy-for people!

Visit this link to learn more about the Angel Tree Project, and be prepared for the ‘unveiling’ on November 1st of the pages listing ALL of the children needing sponsors!

3. Help raise awareness for Reece’s Rainbow’s Angel Tree Project by posting a ‘bauble’ on your blog sidebar. You can grab the links for these baubles from the RR blog! These link people over to the RR Angel Tree Project

4. Another gift you can give is the book Gifts 2 Edited by Kathryn Soper. This is a wonderful compilation of touching stories about people who have been affected in some way or another by a person with Down syndrome! A wonderful gift for family and friends as well as your OB, pediatrician, new parents of children with Down syndrome, and teachers! Our family is featured in this book and our adoption story is told in chapter 54!

You can purchase a copy of this book for $22 (including shipping) by emailing me at mkp1982@hotmail.com. $5 from each book sale will go to Reece’s Rainbow! Note: this is a book purchase, not a tax-deductible donation. Checks will be made out to Meredith Cornish and mailed to me.

A big THANK YOU to Lu that created the baubles and the RR Redemption 2010 calendar!

Really, the only reason we decided to try out a new studio is because they seemed to have better pricing. We’ve done this once before and we got what we paid for . It wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t the high quality we were used to.

So, with some trepidation we called up Portrait Innovations and made an appointment. I called just to find out about pricing and was somewhat confused by their way of explaining it on the phone. What I did understand was that it was $15/sheet and $16.50 for 3 sheets of 1 pose. They also have a $9.95 deal that they advertise and it’s a package with a ton of pictures of the same pose. You can only do ONE of those deals “per promotional period” (not exactly sure what that means yet… because it seems to me they’ve been doing this ‘promotion’ for over a year?). Anyway, the 3 sheets can be of any different ‘cuts’. 8×10, 2 5x7s, 4 3x5s, or 8 wallets.

And depending on how many poses you buy you also receive other ‘free’ bonus things. We ordered a pose of each of the 5 kids individually and one of the 4 kids together. We did the 9.95 package for our family picture. With that order we received a CD with low resolution photos on it of our ENTIRE sitting (not just the ones we purchased) and we were told we could use them for digital stuff. The CD also has the high res photos on it, encrypted. So if we want reprints of the photos we’d bring the CD back to them for them to print them off. We also received two ‘bonus’ 10×13 portraits. We could choose from a vignette, a black and white or sepia, a ’2 pose’ picture, or a ’3 pose’ picture. We decided on a 2-pose (featuring one of each of the two boys) and a 3-pose (with one of each of the three girls).

So… you can do the math, but it was $115 and change after tax for 38 sheets of photos! That’s just over $3/sheet

I mentioned the other photo studio that we’ve gone to up until this time… Their photos are $15/sheet. Their ‘packages’ are $40 (this is a low guess, I think it was $40 something) and are an 8×10, 2 5×7 and 8 wallets (no choice of different sizes). Really what we wanted were family photos to share and large pic’s of each child and the group of kids. We would have bought the package for that one and gotten an additional 5×7 sheet ($55). We would have gotten ourselves 8x10s of each of the kids and one of the 4 kids together ($90). Then we would have put grandparents’ names on the list of people allowed to order reprints so that they could go get additional photos if they’d like… because we couldn’t afford to give them any more! I usually have a coupon for one free sheet and 20% off additional purchases… so 10 sheets would have cost us about $110.

We got almost 4x as many pages of photos and paid $5.

And the photos are really great!

Ok, the only ‘down side’ I see… they were not as free about taking multiple pic’s of one pose or checking to make sure they got a good one before going on. So we had several attempts that we COULD have gotten a great photo, but by the time Brianna decided to smile, Kristopher had the back of his head in it or Emma looked down… Just trying an extra minute would have gotten an AWESOME picture. But it wasn’t the case.

Oh, and that whole ‘disability factor’? We DID tell them ahead of time that we had children with disabilities, we planned an appointment and made sure to eat an early dinner and leave plenty of time to get to the pictures. We also asked ahead and to see if they would have an additional person besides the cameraman available to help pose the kids and get their attention. In our case we ended up with 2 people because we were the only ones there and hey, our kids are fun! At 6:15 as we finished looking at photos and choosing what to buy… the ladies at the studio commented that they were the best behaved little ones they’d had all day. I say this not to brag (tho I guess i can do a bit of that here too since it is my blog LOL) but to say that the entire experience was pleasant for both our family and the photographers. I wonder whether they had expectations one way or the other when I told them over the phone on Friday that we were bringing in 5 children under 7 and 3 that are disabled? I think they might have a different opinion now At least I hope so!!

Anyway, there’s our photo experience. One that we’ll DEFINITELY repeat in the future.

They’ve been home only a short time and just this week they received a second diagnosis for their biological daughter- one that’s not easy to take regardless of the circumstances- and yet one that they have accepted with a grace that far outweighs anything you could expect. Polina (Polly) has Moyamoya. This is a constricting of blood flow in the brain which requires brain surgery and isn’t something that will just “go away.” They discovered this when Polly had a series of seizures paired with a stroke and paralysis of one leg.

Thank God that they have found it this early, but such a scary thing in the prospect of further strokes before the brain surgery can be performed in mid-November.

Please join me in praying for Polly and the entire family (they have an almost-3 yr old, Polly is 3, and two elementary-age daughters as well). If you have a blog please share this button tto show your support for the family as well as spread the word so that the Body of Christ can come together and lift up one of His precious children and her family in their hour of greatest need.

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Part way through you’ll see her go to the sliders and yell at “Daddy”. Well… daddy is at work. But the “little Daddy” that she CALLS Daddy would be Micah. His name is so close to Michael that Brianna has dubbed him ‘daddy’ as well!

It’s almost 5 minutes long- which is LONG- so be warned But it’s awful cute if I do say so myself!

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

PS. No, I would not REALLY want a camera to follow my kids around. It was a joke. I definitely do NOT want a TV show to tear up my family Thankyouverymuch! Just in case it might have come across that way. I would like an automated camera that I could say “tape that!” and it would be there and record it without me having to find the camera, put new batteries in, grab the memory stick that I left in the computer, get to the child, and somehow tape the kid without them having already stopped what they were doing. Just in case I wasn’t clear