happy thanksgiving!

tribute to the 80's

noah HATES haircuts. despises, fears, loathes, and dreads them. he chose sonny to cut his hair over the high priced kids salon with video monitors and suckers. o-kay. so sonny started buzzing. he paused in the middle, let noah calm his screaming, wipe the tears and snap a pic. this is noah circa 1988.

amazing combination

little house on the prairie+musical+melissa gilbert=one happy me!

my friend tonya was so kind to invite me in her husband's stead to the little house on the prairie musical! i don't understand why alan didn't want to use the ticket, but his loss was definitely my gain:) it was the heartwarming adventure of laura ingalls plus beautiful music AND melissa gilbert played ma!

sometimes it was hard to hear laura's voice playing caroline's part, but it also helped bring me back to the set of little house on the prairie i know and love.

what a great way to spend an afternoon...thank you tonya!!

God's tools in my life

my friend nicolette insisted (ok, she didn't have to twist my arm TOO hard) that i drop noah off at her house today so i could get the house ready for our social worker visit tomorrow. not only did she bless me, encourage me, but she facilitated amazing play for my son AND videotaped it. it's already up on her blog here. God is ministering to me today and he's doing it through nicolette.

aren't you certified yet?

i'm sure most of you are thinking...why is she talking about being certified as foster parents? didn't they finish that a couple of months ago? well, we finished our fourty some hours of training and turned in literally hundreds of pages of documents and had a three hour home inspection and interview several months ago, but we've been waiting for the agency to do their part, and that has proved to be a little more difficult. they've had staff turnover and transfers (which is more often the case than not) and say we just got lost in the shuffle. every time i called or emailed they said we were so close and it should be any day. well, a few weeks ago i got the hint. it wasn't going to be any day and i needed to turn up the heat a bit. the trick is to turn up the heat just enough to get what you need but not enough to get labeled. you want the workers to like you so they'll call you so you'll get a placement. our social worker told us she had picked up the phone and dialed another family's number to take noah four years ago, but then hung up because we had just called her the day before lamenting how we'd had two botched placements. so she called us! and we got a son! craziness. so, i continue to dance on eggshells and push just hard enough without cracking any.

i tell you all this because so many of you have expressed genuine care and interest and for that i say a huge thank you. it means so much that you want to know how the process is going and are rooting for us. unfortunately once we do get certified the dance doesn't end, the stakes just get higher. we'll continue to give it our best. calling when we think we should, refraining from calling (or storming someone's office) when we think that's best.

thursday we have a second home visit scheduled and after that we will need a third one. we are also waiting on the social worker to compile hundreds of documents into one fat file and check off each one. once those three things happen we will be done! (i hope:)

now i can see!!!

i am being EXTREMELY vulnerable in sharing the following pictures, but i am just so EXCITED about the results of my lasik surgery and the lack of contacts or glasses in my life (or maybe it's the aftereffects of the drugs they gave me:)

this is me, the happy, go-lucky, no corrective lense 5-year-old

this is me (pretending to be happy) at disney world only inhibited by the large, mauve, face-covering eyewear on my face.

a family photo, christmas time, supposed to be looking great with my floral pants, but overshadowed by the again, monster lenses on my face.

what's bigger? my 80's bangs or the glasses that go from my forehead to chin?

i finally graduated to contact lenses a few years later, but still was plaqued by dry eyes, lost contacts, glasses in the evening and morning, blindess as i grope in the dark for midnight feedings, and years of inconvenience. it is all over. a few slices, a little burning by a laser, and some eye drops and I CAN SEE!!!

pear-a-licious

i don't know where you are on the comfortability with repurposing continuum, but a year ago i was on the very uncomfortable side. i am moving more and more to the comfort zone and man, is it fun! it is also frugal (saving money is good these days) and oh-so-green which is in vogue these days. i don't care so much about being in fashion but i do like the idea of making something beautiful and useful that would otherwise be sitting in a dump being not so beautiful or useful. i think the best way to move yourself toward the comfort area is to see other people do it and say to yourself: "self, i could do something like that." it doesn't have to be the same, as a matter of fact, it WON'T be the same. it will be your own personal creation. can i tell you i get so much more satisfaction walking past something i re-purposed in my home as opposed to the thing everyone picked up at target and has on their shelf?

enough chatting already. here we go....

i saw this at my local goodwill. now, you need to look at the shape and lines of something...NOT the color. gold. ewww. but i liked the chunkiness and curves of this piece. a dollar later she was mine.

then i saw this little lady. kinda lonely and a lot dusty, but you cannot pass up glass cloches or apothecary jars. total faux pas in the repurposing world. another dollar later she came home.

this is what now sits on a ledge in my home. i lOVE it! and it was so very easy. i just dusted off the glass, spray painted the base and threw some pears i already had in there. spraypainting may seem overwhelming, but you can't really mess it up. that's why i love it. i didn't sand, or prime or anything. i just shook the can, sprayed and the gold was gone. now see? YOU CAN do this! if you need me to come hold your hand and take you to goodwill or a yard sale, i will! i betcha we could start in your garage and find great stuff. go ahead...try somethin new today!