Spring in South Dakota

This picture was taken this morning. We got A LOT of snow last night, and it all fell straight down. There is a 7" blanket covering everything, even the top of our fence! It is quite lovely, but I am a little worried about getting to work today. My car is completely buried in snow... but at least it is warm enough so the snow is already melting. And the dogs are having a wonderful time. Apparently they haven't heard that it is supposed to be SPRING and we are VERY CRABBY that we have to shovel again!
This is Rose with her snowball feet. Rosalyn has a lot of hair between her toes (although we try not to talk about it because it is a sensitive issue for her). Every time she goes out in the snow she comes in festooned with these quite decorative snow balls between her toes and hanging off the long hair on her legs and belly. She doesn't seem to think it is as funny as I do...

Easter Dinner

I just had to post to tell my mother that she was wrong.... absolutely and completely wrong about the wisdom of putting dark chocolate chunks in our cherry pie. I know you thought it would be overwhelming, Mom, but it was completely delicious- even though it was still funny looking. I also made a cran-apple reduction sauce for the pork roast with cinnamon, a little bit of curry powder, a little balsamic vinegar and some crushed red pepper and that was also way better than I thought it would be. I decided I should post a picture of our Easter dinner so that Mom can stop feeling bad that I couldn't get there for Easter this year. It probably wasn't as delicious as your chocolate trifle, but it was pretty delicious anyway. And I bet you didn't have an Easter bunny on top of the trifle, did you?!

Happy Easter!

This is my slightly sad attempt at an Easter pie. If you can't tell, it is a rabbit on the top. It is actually harder than you might think to make a rabbit out of pie dough... and I think the spot where the cherry pie filling is leaking out makes it look like the rabbit is bleeding. Oh well, I will just cut it up before Nathan gets home, and then tell him how beautiful it was!
In keeping with our grand Easter tradition, Stewart and Rosalyn nearly killed each other today. I heard awful noises coming from the back yard and thought the dogs were killing a cat or something. I ran outside with only my pajamas on, barefoot, to find Stewie's collar twisted around Rosie's lower jaw. I am not sure how they accomplished it, but Stew was choking to death and Rosie's mouth was bleeding. I had to run into the house and get a knife to cut off Stew's collar. I was a little afraid that Stew would have suffered some brain damage from lack of oxygen (if you have met Stew, you know that he barely has two brain cells to rub together anyway and certainly has none to spare), but a minute after I cut them loose he was sitting in the kitchen trying to figure out why I was having hysterics and asking for a treat. Plus, I have to clean the carpet in the kitchen again, because as I was running through the snow barefoot I stepped in a whole lot of frozen dog poo. It was pretty dang exciting for a Sunday morning. Happily, the funny looking pie is cooling, the roast is in the oven and the dogs are sleeping peacefully at my feet. Maybe it will turn out to be a good Easter after all!

Braiding hair...

I can't figure out how to do corn rows. In anticipation of having to learn how to 'do' little girls' hair I have been trying, but I can't get it to turn out. One of the girls on my caseload did my hair today, and I think it is funny that I have spent the last month trying to help her figure out how to count to 20 but that she can do this with my hair. The human brain is a funny, funny thing.

Go Barack!

This speech is very long, but I am a little bit in love so I thought I would share.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/hisownwords

Come one... come all!

I just wanted to post a picture of our guest room; it is newly remodeled with some help from Myr, Joe and Emily (they provided the bed, without which it wasn't so much of a guest room as a... place to put a sleeping bag). So, come see beautiful, scenic Redfield, South Dakota... and sleep on an honest to goodness bed.

In other news, on my way to work today I almost ran over a sheep that had apparently escaped from the livestock auction on the other side of town. The optimistic, some would say unrealistic, part of me is very excited for the sheep that has escaped from certain death in a slaughter house. The, increasingly more prominent, realistic side of my brain is worried that the newly freed sheep will either be hit by a car (since it is wandering around about two blocks from Main Street, although it is in the park) or will be collected by the sheriff and brought back to the auction. I would, however, be willing to go collect it for anyone who thinks that they might like a new sheep friend at their house. I already asked Nathan and he said I can't keep it. Sometimes it is hard to be married... especially, I imagine, to be married to me. Apparently not everyone feels the need to save sheep from becoming mutton.

Good news!!!

I sent a whiny e-mail to my agency today, asking if they have heard anything about our dossier getting back from Washington DC yet. They replied, "Oh my gosh! You didn't get your e-mail?! It is in Ethiopia either today or tomorrow!" We are pretty excited. We are officially on the list at #22, but she couldn't give me any estimate for wait time. It all depends on who is waiting for what type of referral, genders, ages, etc. Now we have to keep our fingers crossed that we get our referral before July. The courts in Ethiopia close at the end of August and don't re open until October, so if we don't get our referral by July we won't be travelling until December. That seems like WAY TOO LONG to wait! We bought a package of two pacifiers to celebrate the next step being done.
It is also pretty darn exciting, but very stressful, that the Agency Representative said we could get our referral any time between two weeks and 6 months from now. How can I get up every day for possibly the next six months thinking every day, "Maybe today is the day!" I thought I was stressed out before! And don't even get me started on the realization that we will be spending 30 hours travelling with two babies that we don't know yet! I might be starting to panic a little, can you tell?

Tortoise...

We have a completed tortoise and the beginnings of a lion.

Elz and I also had great fun putting together the crib. We put it together in the guest room so it wouldn't get in the way of the painting, but I just tried to move it into the nursery and discovered that we'll have to take it apart to fit through the door! Oops. Well, it was pretty fun anyway.

Post adoption Depression

I have been doing some research (so that I don't go absolutely crazy while we wait for word from the Ethiopian Consulate) about post adoption depression. This is not talked about very often, but is fairly common. It seems that studies have shown that women who adopt children have many of the same hormone fluctuations as women who give birth to children. Also, they have the added pressure of feeling like they need to be the perfect parent to the child that they have waited for and wanted for so long. I came across this article written by Melissa Fay Greene (the same woman who wrote There is No Me Without You) and thought it was wonderful, if incredibly scary.

http://www.melissafaygreene.com/pages/adoptanthology.html

Also, I thought I would include some pictures and video of our beloved niece, Ms. Lillian Grace Schutz, because the research on post adoption depression reminded me of when she came to live with us. We were planning on adopting her and already loved her dearly, but there was about a week when both of us thought we would need to send her back. It was so hard to go from being a married couple to two parents of a 14 month old in the blink of an eye. I only had two days off from work to try to figure out how to be a mother, and then had to drop the poor kid off at daycare and try to figure out how to get to work on time. Thinking about this experience gives both of us great hope, because it only took a week to go from panicking about not being able to do this to absolute love and adoration of Lilly and of being parents. At least we know what to expect... thanks to this extremely good looking little person.

So, thanks Lilly-Monster. If you weren't so darn wonderful, we would never have realized how much we wanted to be parents.

There is No Me Without You

Recommendations for you...Be sure you read it all the way to the end. You will be miserable if you quit in the middle.

"Starred Review. Not unlike the AIDS pandemic itself, the odyssey of Haregewoin Teferra, who took in AIDS orphans, began in small stages and grew to irrevocably transform her life from that of "a nice neighborhood lady" to a figure of fame, infamy and ultimate restoration. In telling her story, journalist Greene who had adopted two Ethiopian children before meeting Teferra, juggles political history, medical reportage and personal memoir. While succinctly interspersing a history of Ethiopia, lucidly tracing the history of AIDS from its early manifestation as "slim disease" in the late 1970s to its appearance as a bizarrely aggressive [form] of Kaposi's sarcoma in the early 1980s, and following the complex path of medication (a super highway in the West, a trail in Africa), Greene rescues Teferra from undeserved oblivion as well as rescuing her from undeserved obloquy (false accusations of child selling). As with her previous books (Praying for Sheetrock; The Temple Bombing; Last Man Out), Greene takes a very close look at what appears to be the fringe of an important social event and illuminates the entire subject. Ethiopia is home to "the second-highest concentration of AIDS orphans in the world"; even as some of the orphans find happy endings in American homes, Greene keeps the urgency of the greater crisis before us in this moving, impassioned narrative."

Yesterday

We watched this movie a few days ago and loved it. I highly recommend you add it to your NetFlix list if you have one!

"Darrell James Roodt (Cry, the Beloved Country) directs this heartfelt drama, the first Zulu-language film to be released internationally. Struggling to raise her daughter in a poor African village, Yesterday (Leleti Khumalo) finds the odds stacked against her when she learns that she's HIV positive. With her husband in denial, Yesterday must somehow find the strength to go on, determined to live just long enough to see her daughter go to school."