Skating rink music!

I love it! Just had to put that out there. Had to make myself a little playlist of Journey, T-Rex, Queen, ELO, and Sweet. Need to think of some more blast from the past stuff to add!

Amanda's birthday

Well as usual I forgot Amanda's birthday. I don't know what it is with me and birthdays. I always forget all my friends birthdays in February and March! So I felt really bad. I whipped up a little black and yellow button necklace for her and we went to Joe's art opening at SpotArt and to eat Pizza at Luce. Now I have to figure out a way to not forget birthdays. Next is Jenny's, yes Yenny if you are reading I will remember this year!

Getting some exposure!

Exciting news on Friday! Our adoption agency notified us that they are working with a birthmother who wanted to see more families than those in the book. So we get the chance to send our profile in a little early for her to view. I almost hyperventilated when I read the e-mail after lunch. Geeze, if I get so worked up over just having someone see our profile what will happen when someone wants to meet us? I might collapse! So this weekend I have to finish our profile which is difficult. I opted out of printing all our photos and doing scrapbooking and did the profile on power point. I wish I had photo shop but since I don't know how to use it I guess it wouldn't do me much good anyway.
I hope our profile is good. It is nearly impossible to convey who you are in the important aspects of your life and tons of photos in 4 letter size pages! But I think I got it down, now to get some good print outs and deliver by Monday, wheww...

Favorites of Feb!

Dogs in clothes always top my list of Favorites! This is Olive, Jenny and Matt's precious little dog. We had an amazing weekend visiting in Madison.

I made a little bear bunting for Morgan's baby shower. It looks much cuter in real life. I need to get some better lighting for picture taking!
















I have too many projects as usual! I am decorating a T shirt for a Merona embellished T competition at work. This is by no means the finished product, but I am thinking cotton crochet flowers, maybe a crochet built in necklace sort of thing, scooping out the neckline and edging it in pearl grey voile, and adding some of my fabulous vintage buttons (even though that kills me, I want every button for myself) We will see if it turns out to be anything cute. It is not really my style, but I hope it will be "Merona" style. I will post a pic when finished next weekend.



Ice daming, is not a favorite but I guess it is one of the hazards of Texans living in Minnesota. Who knew you were supposed to scrape the snow off the edges of your roof? Good lord! So check out our insane ice sculpture. Even our neighbors commented on it at dinner a couple of weekends ago, their kids were marveling at it's hugeness!





















And I cant forget Valentine's Day! I made Brian this cute little crochet robot, and he gave me this fabulous HUGE ring in my new favorite color in the world - Tuquoise! My hubby knows just what I like!

Muti tasking

OK, I know I am not doing so great on keeping up with this blog, I really admire those of you with fabulous blogs! Bri and I have been working more on our profile, and I feel behind even in that area! We finally got a profile web page put together on Shutterfly! They have a pretty good little photo posting/blog site that was really easy to use. It also has a journal so this blog may evolve into more of a crafty/inspiration blog for me. We will see.
Anyway the link to our "web profile" is
http://brianandrobingraffadoption.shutterfly.com

On the adoption front - we finished and ordered our adoption cards, finished our web page and now I need to post the web page link to some adoption sites and mail off some cards to friends and family out of state.

Love the fancy Minnesota style hat!

 

Crochet inspiration for next fall

Cool new hats from Anna Sui for Fall ‘10

Quicky

Quick post to note that we got our adoption study approval finally! I feel a little frazzled this week from trying to get all of our networking stuff together. Web site, adoption networking cards, book profile, paperwork. On top of that I have a baby shower to make decorations for, a crochet bunting for the baby gift that I have taken out and restarted 3 times, and we are going out of town this weekend. So I have not had interesting things to post lately. But that's ok because our study is approved and we are moving! Yay!

Struggling to move forward

Hi blogland, it has been quite awhile since my last post and unfortunately there is not much new to report except my feelings of frustration that we are still not moving forward on the adoption networking. We seem to be on a little hamster wheel at this point. We have been waiting to get a letter from our family planning counselor to finish our adoption study and that has taken two weeks. We are having a very hard time trying to figure out how to build a web page that reflects us, and without that our networking tools are useless because we need some link to our profile so that anyone who picks up our card can find our profile. Right now we don't even have that. It's no wonder that so many people just wait in the agency "book" until they get picked, it is really hard networking.
HOWEVER, if we meet the right birth parents it will be so very worth all the time.
In the meantime, as always when things on the "family planning" trail get stalled out, I am getting emotional about everything. Two women I work closely with are pregnant and that means baby showers. I am helping plan one of them, and even though I am much better able to handle it than I was last year, I still get frustrated and upset because I feel like it will never be us having the shower, or seeing our baby's first little teeth, or all the million other things that I wish we could join in the conversations with other parents about. I am dreading sitting in the room with all those happy Mommies and wondering when (surely there is not an if in there any more) I will be able to join in.
I'm sure to people who have kids, and who like to assure me how difficult having kids is, that those types of yearnings seem overly sentimental, but to us they are very real and dominate a huge part of our lives.
I know with adoption that surely someday we will be connected with our future child and birthmother, but when that will be I have no idea and at the rate things are going, well....
Next weekend we will be going to Madison to visit with our best friends Jenny, Matt, Bella and Olive. I would love to have some of our networking cards to post around the coffee shops and University in Madison so I had better get some work done on this website! I will have lots of fun pictures to post after the trip because we always have so much fun when we go to visit Yenny.