News!

When you have to go look for a link you posted somewhere else to find your blog...that's bad. Well it's no secret for those that read along that this isn't a steady commitment by any means. I wish it was, I often think..."I should blog that!" I just never seem to get around to it. Tyler is grown by leaps and bounds and so it seems is our family. We decided several short weeks ago that we would be open to adopting again domestically, rather than through foster care, and before we knew it, we were matched! Not only were we matched but it's with an already born baby who is 3 months old today. We have decided to call him Matthew Malachi. We are so in love. Haven't picked him up yet, but are in love none the less :) We will meet him on Tuesday, July 28th, which is also happens is Mike's birthday. We plan to have an open adoption with his birth mother, and hopefully his 1/2 birth siblings as they get older. We can't wait.

Tomorrow we are taking Ty for his last "only child" outing. We are planning to go to Richardson's Dairy. It's a working dairy farm that makes it's own ice cream, and has mini golf too. I don't know why, but I want to take Ty mini-golfing. I'm sure it will be a spectacle. Oh well.

Mike and I are both doing well. I have stopped working because 2 boys, 15 months apart will be work enough, thank you! We still have all the dogs too. I think Daisy will live forever. She's slowing down and turning more grey daily, but she's still a love. Dudley and Dewey are about the same.

Let's see, Ty will be 18 months old on Sunday. Time has flown. I could never have imagined how emotional adopting our second child would be. The raw emotion of Tyler not being my "only" and the deep, intense fear that I will never be able to love another as much as Ty. He's my baby, my little guy. He makes discipline nearly impossible by covering his face with his hands when he sobs. A quick word from Mommy seems to shake my rough tough guy to his very core. Thankfully a hug and kiss and he's quick to forgive and forget, till he does it all over again. He still loves to clap his hands, blow kisses, and call the doggies to come and play. He now calls me "Amy" which is interesting. Loud and clear at the top of his lungs. I'm sure other mothers at the play ground get confused.

Mike has taught him the wonders of puddles, just in time for all the rain we've had. He loves them. Loves all water really. Everyone gets soaked at bath time and he was a star "swimmer" at his lessons earlier this summer. Plays in his little pool for hours, very content with a cup and a couple inches of water. He's a good boy...except when he's not :)

Well I should sign off. I would make all the pretend promises to be here more, but let's be honest, you get what you get. I'm going to have even less time soon :)

Thirty-five pounds of Apples, three dogs, and a rainy day

Today was a really busy day. I made a trip up to Biddeford, ME (about an hour away) with Tyler. While I did that Mike went to Home Depot, and bought grout sealer for the laundry room, then to our local orchard and picked up the two bushels of apples we reserved, and came home. He sealed the floor and finished up just about as I got back home. We started working on one bushel of apples. 35+ pounds of apple per bushel. We currently have a turkey fryer sized pot on the stove full of apples cooking down into applesauce. We also have another 35+ pounds worth of apples sitting in our living room and I have no idea what to do next. I'm thinking spiced apple rings, or wedges, or maybe some cranberry apple relish.

Chopping, and coring 35 pounds of apples is not easy, or fast...especially when you are trying to do it while dodging three dogs that have glued themselves to your feet trying to catch every crumb that hits the floor. After almost tripping over them twice, I put a chair, and the trash can, blocking them out of the part of the kitchen I was in. Dewey...the little brat that he is, realized he could fit under the chair. So after he did that a couple times, I blocked off that\ bottom part of the chair with a laundry basket turned on it it's side. Mike and I were able to work in relative peace for about 20 minutes. Then all the sudden there was a huge commotion and the laundry basket was hopping across the kitchen floor with a panicked Dewey trapped under it. Mike and I were laugh so hard, we never even managed to make it over there to help him get out...he just kept jumping trying to run away from the laundry basket and it kept following him of course, but eventually it fell off. So funny. At that point he was so embarrassed that he didn't come back over near us for a while.

I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with us. We even broke out the juicer and juiced the cores and it was enough apple juice for us each to have a glass (so yummy) and to put some juice in with the apples so they wouldn't burn. then I took all the juice gunk and put that in a pot with some water and I'm cooking it down. I think I'm going to strain it with cheese cloth, and see if I can use one of my pectin packets and add some sugar to make apple jelly out of it. If I can reduce the amount of waste on 35 pounds of apples to the size of grapefruit, I'll be happy :)

I'm going to re-can the peaches from two years ago too. I'm thinking about making a peach chutney with it and canning that. We just haven't eaten up those peach halves like I thought we would. They are still yummy, but I want to put them in something we'll use more.

Never underestimate the comma....

Weekends suck! I know! I'm crazy right? See at one point, I did like weekends. That one far away point in my life, when my WHOLE life was not consumed by adoption. Now, on the weekends, everything slams to a stop. No posts with new situations on any boards. No e-mails from the referral agencies, cause THEY aren't getting any e-mails from any agencies, cause they are all closed. Don't get me wrong...I still check the forums everyday anyway. One never knows when there will be a baby "born" situation where an adoption worker was forced to come in on her day off an deal with it. Rare, but it could happen. So that's the story. Weekends are boring.

Then today, we get a CALL. I know I've said before how calls are good....mostly cause calls are rare. More exactingly (my blog, my made up words), Mike gets a call. I don't even really realize, he's on the phone. He pokes his sweet little face around the bedroom door and says to me. It's So and So agency, they called to say they got the profiles and wanted to touch base with us. It's all one sentance right? See the little bitty comma in there? Right between agency and they? That comma, as we all know, indicates a SLIGHT pause in his speech. During that slight pause, here is what happened to me...

My heart fell out of my chest. I wondered why they called Mike's phone and not mine? I concluded it might have just been that Mike's was listed first on the paperwork. I wondered if she was in a hurry so she called the first number on our paperwork. I wondered if there was an emergency match! I pondered what we had in our checking account for immediate tickets to Ohio. How long would it take to drive to Ohio? Should we rent a car? I can't believe she's calling on a SATURDAY? What? Hun? Oh...she's just calling to touch base...."Okay give me the phone." Really...all that in the space of a comma. Comma's a big thing....

Anyway, she was very nice, and she said our profile were great, and she was sending it right over to the social worker that was working with the expectant mother we wanted to submit to.

It was still a pretty big deal for us. We really feel great about this agency. They are excellent fee wise, they CALLED us just to tell us they GOT our profiles, and they made that call ON A WEEKEND! I will now forever hold hope that we'll get weekend calls from this agency. Weekends are a little better now.

Still no word on our bricks. I'm starting to think the guy was a brick tease. :)