The House

This summer has been an interesting one for the little house we live in.  I did not spend any time weeding our flower beds this year, so that the weeds run riot in them completely unchecked.  I hope to spend more time on the flowerbeds next spring.  Nathan has been very attentive to the lawn this year and seems to have given up on any thought of me mowing. Thank God!

We painted Nathan's office in the winter, but were unable to do anything with the ceiling that was damaged long ago by a leaking bathtub from above.  In April we got rid of the putrid purple-pink color on the walls of our bedroom and replaced it with a nice ice blue.  I had hoped to work on the breezway this month, but somehow the month has gotten away from us and the room is still in a little of sorry condition and the old refrigerator still sits there.  Oh well, maybe next month.

Up to Speed

So, what have I been doing since the last time I posted?  Well, working a lot, thankfully, is the short answer.  But I have also had time to do a few other things.

The day Nathan and I sent off the paperwork to start the adoption I got home from the post office and immediately began knitting baby booties.  After a few false starts in which my booties always came out looking like socks, I finally figured out where I was going wrong and have been thinking about booties and hats ever since.  Most of my scrap yarn that I'm using for practice booties is blue, brown, or a green.  I told Nathan I think this means our first child will be a boy.

I like the style to the right better, but the one to the left is the pattern that was part of my calendar.  I found the one with the button on Ravelry.com, which I have become a devotee of.

I have also had the priviledge to spend a few of my Wednesdays (which are really Sundays to me) watching our niece, Sophie, who is almost five months old now.

And I have a new favorite picture!

Unfortunately I had to stop my babysitting gig because my gall bladder decided it wanted no more of me.  I have been sick several times since its revolution at the end of last month and have yet to see the surgeon about getting it out.  I was put on some fairly strong pain relievers and anti-spasmodics and am doing fairly well now, but I go to the surgeon (finally) on Wednesday.

I won the Netflix war.  That's right.  My very first Netflix movie was a foreign film called Rosenstrasse which I had seen part of on TV one day and wanted to watch again.  Since then I have enjoyed a getting many movies in the mail and watching more on line.  I still use the library ordering system as well.

And that is most of what I have been up to since the last time I wrote.  I have yet to go back to my beloved Alton, but Elizabeth has been enjoying her summer in Minnesota with Eric, her fiancee and hopefully, I'll get back there after she goes back down for the fall semester.

Hiatus

I realize I have not been to this site for quite a while.  My only excuse...okay, I have two, is that a) I have been busy with something Nathan and I are working on and b) while I love second shift tremendously for my own sake because it works better with the way my body functions, it has not done my blog any favors.

It is my proposition, then that this hiatus comes to an end.  I intend to make every effort to blog with greater frequency again to let everyone know what is going on in our lives and really just for my own mental sake.  I hate the thought of having another failed diary.  And that's kind of what this has always been, a less intimate, more public diary.

So...what is this big "project" Nathan and I are working on?  Since I precieve it is mostly family and friends who read this page, I know you already know, but I'm going to put it here anyway, just so that I get to say it again and maybe someone will be surprised and excited for us about it all over again.

Last month, Nathan and I signed paperwork to officially begin working with an adoption agency.  It's called Angel Adoptions and functions out of Cary,Illinois.  We looked at several different agencies and ultimately chose Angel because we liked their size and the way they interacted with us when we were going through the "looking" phase and also because they were the most reasonably priced.

I always hate saying that, but it is true.  The biggest reason we chose the company that was going to help us find our child was purely mercenary.  I have since been told by someone who I know is in the middle of the adoption process that Angel is a great agency and we should be very happy with them, and that made me pretty happy.

The day we settled on an agency, I was changing the page on my daily knitting pattern calendar and the pattern that turned up for that day was for baby booties.  I felt it was a good sign.