I Love "This American Life"

Today I was telling Laura how much I love This American Life, again. Most people know that I have a slight addiction to NPR. If I would ever have to choose my favorite show, it'd be T.A.L. hands down. If you (like my poor, unfortunate friend Laura) have never heard this show, you really need to check it out. The archives can be found here. You can stream them to your computer or download them to iTunes. Check it out!

P.S. - my favorite recent episode is "The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar". Good stuff!

Approved!

We received a letter in the mail yesterday stating that our home study has officially been approved. This happened much quicker than we thought! The paperwork consists of an 11 page biography. It talks about each of us, our marriage, our family, our strengths and our weaknesses. The good, the bad and the ugly. It was actually quite difficult for me to read. Reading answers to "What would you change about your partner if you could?" was kind of surreal. It was kind of like watching that game show "The Moment of Truth" - the one with the lie detector. Glad that part is over!

-Brook (and Stinky)

Adoption Update and new Etsy store

We are still working through our adoption stuff. We developed the required webpage and "Dear Birth Mother" letter. The letter is what gets sent to potential birth moms and she looks through them to pick a family for her baby. Once the final draft is approved by the agency, we will print 200 of them. The biggest problem lately, is finding the right paper for the letter. It must be between 90-100lb cardstock and we prefer glossy (since there are pictures on it). Bloomington has a ton of printers since it is a college town, but none of them have the right paper! I called everywhere. One nice fellow I called led me to a place in Indy who can do it, so they are sending us a sample copy. We are crossing our fingers that it looks good so we can bring it to the agency on Saturday for final review. We are also waiting on the official results of our home study, which may take another month or so. That is about it with an adoption update.



Last weekend, I helped TC (my Mother-in-law) open a new shop on Etsy to sell her amazing dog biscuits. He business is going well in her local area with a few large standing weekly orders, but now she is looking to expand. You can visit her site HERE. I had fun taking the photos. My parents were here for the weekend too, so we used Wally as a model. He was not very into it until we let him taste one of the treats - then he was very willing to help out :-)

One sick puppy

This girl gave us quite a scare this morning. She seemed fine at first, gobbling her breakfast and going outside afterward. I knew something was wrong when she didn't bark to come in. I opened the door and found her whimpering and crying. Once she came inside she kept crying, pacing in circles and stretching out her back legs over and over. I did a quick internet search and found that dogs with "bloat" have similar symptoms. It sounded like we needed to get he to the vet right away. I got ready to go, but over time she started acting more normal. We did some investigating in the coon shed and realized that she had probably eaten quite a bit of cracked corn (she is such a weird dog). Within an hour or so, she was completely back to her old self. Thankfully, we never made it to the vet.

Baklava

Corey and I made baklava last night. It turned out great and it was not as much of a pain as I had expected. You can find the recipe here if you are interested. We used mainly walnuts and a handful of pistachios. I also followed others advice and made a little extra sauce. The only change I would make is to add a few more layers without nuts on the bottom and grind up the nuts more next time. Corey says that is crazy talk, 'cause its perfect the way it is ;-)

Spring is here! At least it feels like it...

It was such a beautiful day today! The UPS man delivered our grapevines, raspberry and blueberry plants. He didn't actually deliver them to our house but stuck them in our truck. He won't deliver to the door anymore, on account of our "vicious ass dogs" (his words, not mine). They are really good guard dogs :-) We got all of the plants in the ground while listening to the deafening chorus of Spring Peeper frogs in the marshy area behind our house. Now Corey just has to make a trellis for the grapevines to climb. Bring on the fruit!

Today was our Home Study visit for our adoption and I'm happy to report that it seems as though we passed the inspection! It was quite involved, with questions for each of us separately and then more questions together. "How would you describe your roll in this marriage?" and "What has been your greatest accomplishment in life so far?" were a few of the questions. The report has to be written up and then it has to be approved by the director and then we should be on our way to actually advertising ourselves (weird as that sounds).

Tootaloo!

Funny

Sorry if this offends anyone, but this is the funniest thing I've seen in awhile. Watch the top one first. Too good not to share.