December’s Goals – Week Two

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I made progress last week on both of my December goals. First up was lots of cleaning and decluttering.

Here’s the wet bar, though we don’t use it for that. We actually turned the water off to this faucet. I’m so confused about why this was installed right next to the fireplace, but what do I know? I think the neighbors have a book case in this location, which I would love to have!

Before

After
I forgot to take a picture of our entertainment center before I started cleaning it. The top was covered with several stacks of paper, remotes, and five pumpkins! This picture gives an idea of how cluttered it was:

Before

During

After
And, for fun, we put the Advent calendar there for the remainder of the holiday season, along with Cin-Ru’s framed photo.

Here is my next project, to be tackled tomorrow.

Books, books, and more books
I also made some solid progress toward my Chinese goal (12 lessons completed before the end of the month). Last week I finished 2.5 lessons, which put me at 5.5/12 complete (I finished up the .5 lesson today). I studied 5.75 hours last week, which isn’t too shabby. I just hope I can stay on top of everything when my Mother-in-law arrives on Sunday!

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Fun with a new Advent calendar

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We found out that the social worker is meeting with Cin-Ru next week! Our coordinator has requested a report as soon as possible, as she’s going on vacation at the end of next week. We’re hoping to find out what Cin-Ru thinks about our family and about us adopting her. Hopefully it is good news!

We bought a Hello Kitty advent calendar to count down to Christmas. It’s so cute! We’ll share photos of it with Cin-Ru in one of our later care packages. I sure hope she likes Hello Kitty. They make such fun clothes!

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December’s goals – week one

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I have two goals this month – to clean my house from top to bottom and to make significant progress in my Chinese class.

Cleaning – I’m not doing too bad but I need to pick up the pace. There have been several days of adoption excitement and that took precedence over my cleaning. I did declutter several areas last week but there is lots more to do. Tomorrow I’ll be tackling my upstairs bathroom.

Chinese – This is where all of my progress lies. Last week I completed just under six solid hours of studying, plus about two hours of listening practice by watching Taiwanese television shows. I finished three lessons from YoyoChinese, which meets my goal requirements. I’ve already studied an hour today and might squeeze in a bit more before bed. With the adoption process moving forward, I need to keep studying. I don’t want to be in Taiwan wishing that I had learned more!

In adoption news, our photo album was mailed off today. We sent a photo album, a stuffed animal, and a small interlocking hearts necklace. Hopefully she likes everything! I can’t wait to hear back the report from the social worker’s visit with her later this month.

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Pre-approval!!

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We received our pre-approval today!! I’m so excited!!

I printed the photos at Walgreens and picked them up today. This weekend I have to finish assembling the photo album and we’ll be mailing out the care package on Monday morning. It will be forwarded to Taiwan immediately because the social worker will be visiting with her the third week of December to show her our photos!

Over the next few weeks, I will be praying that her heart is prepared for a family. The social worker reports that she wants a family; hopefully she will want OUR family to be her family!

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Baby steps

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Decluttering.

Simplification.

Minimalism.

Whatever you want to call it, I’m very slowly plugging away at it. I’ve been convicted lately that if I can’t keep my home clean, it’s because I have too much stuff. It’s crazy how stuff keeps trickling in, even if I don’t realize it. We don’t shop a lot, but we do shop some, especially for our adoption. We want our kiddo to see photos of our home and our life and see that we are eager to have her join us, that she will have fun here.

But there is still a lot of excess. We live in a 1,200 sqft home with a terrible layout and not much storage. We hope to adopt two girls while living here, so four people will be living in a house with a small dining room, a small living room, and two bedrooms. My husband works from home. I’ll be curious to see how this plays out, since he has no office!

I digress. I’ve been working here and there this week, whatever strikes my fancy. I figure it all needs to be done so it doesn’t really matter what order I tackle it.

Some before and after photos of my progress thus far:

My junk drawer

No more junk!

Tiny mountain of papers

A clean table
I’m also tackling a Huge Mountain of Papers but am not quite finished with it. There are a few things I just don’t know what to do with. I have a feeling I will need to clean out my overflowing file folder so that I can find space to file the things I need to keep. A lot of it is adoption paperwork.

I look forward to a cleaner house, one step at a time.

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One last photo shoot

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We finally got our Christmas tree! This is my first Christmas tree since I was a teenager. We bought a real one so our house smells divine. I just have to remember to water it every day!

Tonight we took a couple more photos to finish up Jenny’s album. I still have to print the photos and put them in the album, but all the photos have been taken. The present in the photo is for her after she comes home. The fox is going in the care package. Hopefully we receive pre-approval soon so that we can send it to her!

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December goals

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This month I have two goals.

First – I want to clean my house from top to bottom. My mother-in-law is coming to stay with us for a week at Christmas. I don’t want to leave the cleaning to the last minute and be scrambling to complete everything right before she arrives. I’ve done that before with other guests and it’s not fun! This is the first time MIL is coming to see us in Seattle so I want to make sure we all enjoy her visit! Having the house clean will take a lot of the pressure off.

Second – I need to make some serious progress with my Chinese studies. At the beginning of October, with all of the bad news we received, my studies fell by the wayside. November was much better with 16.5 solid hours of study. However, I’m not making as much progress as I would like. I had stated earlier that my goal was to finish the Intermediate Level of YoyoChinese by the end of the year. That is not going to happen. I just finished lesson 13 of 50. The class schedule is to complete two lessons per week; I am aiming to finish three per week. This is completely doable if I stay on top of my studying. At that rate, I will finish the year with 25 of the 50 lessons complete. I will be happy with that amount of progress.

I have a couple incentives for finishing the Intermediate Course. I promised myself that I would buy myself several graded readers once I complete the course. Amazon has several fun ones like a Sherlock Holmes book and The Secret Garden in Chinese. I also told myself that as soon as I finish the Intermediate Course, I will start writing on the Lang-8 website. I may rethink this goal, as I may already have enough Chinese knowledge to start writing short blog posts. Maybe I will set aside one day this month to see if it’s possible for me to write a paragraph in Chinese.

I’m sure it will be a busy month but I’m looking forward to it! I love the Christmas season and look forward to sharing it this year with my husband and his mom.

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Bible stories in Chinese

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I decided tonight that it was time to tackle some stories in Chinese. It took a bit of searching, but I finally found some children’s Bible stories written in traditional Chinese characters. What’s great about these stories is that you can read them in both English and Chinese to make sure you understood everything correctly.

All I studied was the first three sentences and found 13 new vocabulary words to learn. Some of these will probably be used repeatedly throughout the stories. Here are a few of the words I need to learn:

Hanzi / Pinyin / English meaning

上帝 / shàng dì / God
天地 / tiān dì / heaven and earth
因此 / yīn cǐ / thus, consequently, as a result
怎樣 / zěn yàng / how, why
這些 / zhè xiē / these

I need to learn all 13 of these words before moving on to the next paragraph. I’m excited to see how quickly I’ll be able to understand what I am reading.

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