The recipe of family life

After the planting waiting for the Babies!

2009-04-14T14:53:00.004-05:00

I went out on Saturday the 11th to water the garden & check for paw prints... And I saw this in Bed 1. I squealed with excitement. My micro greens have sprouted.

Here is a close up!

Not much else is above ground yet. Miss Rollie keeps stepping in the Chive square. I will post what is in each square soon.

We enjoyed the rosemary again on steak Sunday night. Can't wait for other fresh herbs.

The Beds are DONE! ~ Plants are IN!

2009-04-08T12:48:00.008-05:00

Here are some photos... And a quick Post

The first weekend in April we bought the plants. My parents went with us for the ride around town.

First Stop was Central Market.. They were having HERB DAYS. Lots to choose from, we lost Dad in the store as he wandered looking for samples.

Second Stop was Calloways... More veggies... Lots of Peppers ( Sweet and Hot), a few veggies and 2 tomatoes.

Third Stop was Shades of Green... We finished up our Herbs and got 1 more pepper plant. They had pinion wood burning so we nabbed a bag of that too.

Mom and I planting.... "Blame your Son-in Law for the bad angle on the photo." - meg

Mom and Dad planting the plants, I did all the seeds. Do not worry we treated them to a T-Bone steak dinner that was soooooo good. Jay added some of the fresh rosemary to the steaks while he grilled... It was wonderful!

Rollie Checks out the Garden! She is having issues staying OUT of the beds. I guess I will have to put up the fences.

The Compost Bin... Love it! We added our first stuff Saturday April 11. I noticed Sunday night it was already getting warm.

Next post... Babies... Lots of Micro Greens!

Traditional Workouts on HOLD - New Workout - DIRT

2009-03-25T12:04:00.004-05:00

Wow! We worked HARD last weekend! We got the old gazebo down and took what was left to the dump. It will finish rusting and returning to the earth in no time! LOL We finished painting the new gazebo, patio furniture and bakers rack for the patio. WOW! I should have painted my old bakers rack a long time ago! It looks wonderful.

On to the Garden!
We bought all of the items for Mel’s Mix * 1/3 Peat Moss (easy to find) * 1/3 Vermiculite – Buy the coarse grade in large 4 cubic-foot bags at any garden center. (Not so easy to find, but here is a source! At U-Line Shipping * 1/3 Compost – Buy bags of it at the garden center to get started, but make your own as soon as possible.

Oh My! It took up the entire back of Jay’s truck. Eek, did we over buy? Nope! Then it was off to Lowes for the wood. I wanted cedar, but settled on Pine. I decided to paint it. Not a good idea, by the time I bought enough paint, I could have bought the Red Cedar. LOL live and learn!

We cut the wood, drilled the pilot holes and painted, and painted and painted. Finally we had them ready to be assembled! Whoop the 3 boxes are built, the grids are cut and painted too, and we moved the boxes to the back yard.

Up next… oops! LAYOUT issues oh my!
So we have 3 (4’ 1½” by 4’ 1½”) boxes. The SFG guy Mel Bartholomew suggests 3 feet between boxes. So we completely ignored his suggestion and placed the boxes where we thought we wanted them… It was not right. We moved them… and moved them… WHY did we not draw this part of the yard to scale on graph paper and work on the placement? I do not know! But in the end our boxes are 3 feet apart and it looks good!

Mixing Mel’s Mix
Well this was fun. Did you know hoeing works your quads? I did not until Sunday night! We got all the ingredients unloaded from Jay’s truck and in to the back yard. Talk about your upper body workout. We unfolded the tarp and went to mixing it up. Peat Moss when dry is light and flies all over the place, we had to keep misting it so as not not bother our neighbors family BBQ. Vermiculite same thing… so it is all mix and we drag the pile over to the furthest box. Jay, my sweet, loving, wonderful, husband, shovels it in while wait to wet it down. It took forever to get the peat to soak up water. But by 7:00 pm we had a box done, smooth and fully wet. We it was smooth until Rollie, 2 ½ yr old pup ran through it; guess we will need fencing.

Monday night to tired to mix, and I was doing an allergy RUSH therapy tomorrow so we held off mixing box 2. Tuesday however we did get box 2 done, even though Jay did not feel good. What a good guy!

So that is where we are… I hope tonight I can get either box 3 done or get the grids pit together. Also, we have to decide what to do in between the beds.

Well there will be no gardening today… I just heard thunder… I work in an office with no windows, so when I went to the fed ex box; I see that it is raining cats and dogs.

I am just sad I do not have seed and plants soaking up the rain.

Growing my Salad

2009-03-17T13:54:00.002-05:00

Well… I am planning my garden a little late, but oh well. I have to say Cindy Bodie is one of the main reasons I have the urge to garden. I do not have the space she has so I am going to have to get a little creative.

It is too late I think to get seeds from mail order, so I hope I can find some goods ones at Shades of Green here in Frisco.

I found an article outlining gardening in a soil bag. This sounded promising; save me time and then I add the soil to the beds next year or in the fall. But, then I remembered how my dad did his garden Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. So maybe I will do a little of both.

I hope to get “planting” this weekend mid March. Send good thoughts out to Jay so he will want to help.

My goal is to grow our salads, lots of peppers, herbs, and a few tomatoes this year.

So here I go… my own little Victory Garden!

Christmas Cookies

2008-12-17T10:09:00.003-06:00

Until we get full swing in to the adoption process I am going to just blog about life. More to come later.

Recipie oops...

2008-10-29T19:36:00.002-05:00

I have been bad.. I have not kept up my blog. Well the process is on hold for a number of reasons. Most are economic. I hope to be back on track in 2009, but that may depend on who wins the election. ugh. I will try to start telling the rest of the story soon.

The Weekend of Cooking Lessons

2008-05-23T14:09:00.002-05:00

I am behind on my posting... I need to get in a grove to keep this up to date. Our Weekend of Parent Adoptive Training was as Jay said "everything you need to know and everything you did not want to know" about adopting from the foster care system. April 24-26 2008

We went to The Gladney Center for 3 8 hour days of training. It was amazing to see the room full of folks there to adopt, around 15 or 20 couples. From all over North Texas. We went over successful adoption stories, the hurts the children have endured, how we have to change our thinking on punishment, car seats, CPR, "do overs", CPS, and many more topics I will write about later. We met a couple, Scott & Marie, that live near us and we went to dinner with them on Friday night. It will be quite nice to have a friend going through the journey at the same time.

We are working on CPS proofing the house & getting it ready for the photos. Lots of little things we have to do to get the home front ready for inspection. Working on our profile book.. taking photos much more on this later, officially joining our church and completing our membership class, and more.

A Tweek to the Recipe

2008-04-22T16:42:00.008-05:00

It is offical the first part of the application has been e-maild to The Gladney Center. A funny story about that. We received our packet in Feb 2008, I was a bit disapointed. It was so messy, bad copies, pages that had been coppied so many times they now partialy slid off the page.

So I e-mail the Gladney center and ask for a better copy of the application... What do I get but a scanned copy of the same thing I already had. I make presentation packets as part of my job... the sloppiness of my adoption packet made me crazy. So I e-mailed again and asked for the document in word? I was told they did not have it in word. BUT the path to the document is clearly printed on the copy that was sent. sigh... There was but one thing to do...

Re-Build it in Word. So I took my *.pdf, performed OCR on it... Copied it and pasted in to Excel... Rebuilt all the tables and converted to Word so Jay could proof read it. This took 3 1/2 hours. Now we had to fill out the application. Oh what fun... finding old address for job of companies that are now gone. See a sample of our work below...

Orginal PDF

New Word Version

Training starts this Thursday... oh my...

More Ingredients

2008-03-28T12:12:00.006-05:00

Our friends little girl was in NICU for a while. Jay and tried to go visit them as much as we could. It was wonderful to feed her a bottle and see her grow. And grow she did! I have to say this tiny little girl was the baby I have been Gaga over. Her tiny little hands had us all wrapped around her little finger. It broke my heart to see our friends so wanting to take their little girl HOME. It took a while but she came home. - Fall 2004

Later she tells me it is my turn. I laugh... but on the inside I was thinking "it would be kinda nice to be next." But I knew it was not an option at the time. This is when adoption started to pop in to my mind. Hum it might be the best way to have a family. Maybe an older child. This was the beginning. As each year passes with birthdays and holidays... I wish a little bit more for Jay and I to have a family. However I put up a good front. I doubt even my family knew the way I felt. It was easier that way.

This past year or so Jay and I began to talk more about adopting, but we did not have any action behind our talks. On our way home from Austin after Christmas this year our talking became more serious. I prayed about the thought of adding to our family through adoption it felt so right.

One day while reading TexAgs.com, I see a thread about adoption... it was the spark we needed. When I went to get the Web address for The Gladney Center to post... I saw they also now did older children adoption. I sent a request for information... This set the ball rolling. - Jan 2008

We went to the Gladney Center on Jan 31 2008; it was amazing to be there. I felt very connected and peaceful with our decision. It felt more than just right. I felt called. I am not sure I had ever had that feeling before, it was deep with in my heart. Our 30 min meeting lasted 2 hours. We had so many questions, and the more I learn the more questions I have. The next day this was the daily message from our pastor.

FAMILY
The ideal family is what you make it.
Keith A. Craft on
Leadershipology.com

That was such a conformation of our decision. I still want to know what he has bugged, it has to be the church business cards. - Jan 2008

The First Ingredients

2008-03-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

My journey to be a parent through adoption of an older child domestically. It has been in my heart to form our family by adoption for several years. I am adopted, my brother was adopted.

When my husband was dx'd with Rheumatoid Arthritis, I wondered if we would ever have children. I wondered would his health be good enough to parent. Would I be able to parent effectively if caring for a husband that was ill. At this time he was barely able to walk. Just months before he was in the best shape of his life. Then this hit like a ton of bricks. I decided to not think about a child right then and focus on getting him better. - Fall 2002

After 5 months of waiting to participate in a RA study we were called the study was beginning. Whoop! Maybe he will get the test drug... maybe he will get relief from the pain. Oh my heart ached to see the man I love in pain. Well we did not get the test drug, and the control drug was not giving him relief. (I started wondered at this time when was he going to be in a wheel chair. I accept I will not have the joy of being a mom, I will have be the best Aunt Meg ever. It is OK we can't knowingly pass this evil illness on to kids) -Winter 2003

We find a church or should I say a church finds us. I am unemployed, he just found out his company is closing. What will we do, I need hope. We can't be with out Medical Ins. We get a flyer for a new church in our area. A new Series is starting "Dreamsworks" Do you have a Dream. Wow... was that a message I needed to hear. We got many fliers about new churches weekly, but this one was different. We decide to go, under the radar, to see what the church was like. I was raised a Methodist, and Jay was Southern Baptist, I had a feeling this church was going to be out of my Methodist Comfort Zone. We are walking up to the school where the church was meeting, and I twist my ankle. I fall, break the fall with my head, break my glasses, bloody my forehead, knee, both hands and elbow. I sat on the side walk right where people were having to walk to get in to church. So much for my "under the radar". The greeters were great, they got me band aides. We decided to stay... my life is changed for ever. Celebration Covenant Church transformed me in ways I could have not imagined. I did know on that day, how much we were going to CCC. - March 16 2003 my birthday LOL

In April 2003 my nephew is born. He is early, he is too cute little J. We go to see him and family. He does not cry much, but that is OK. He comes home, we help get the shower gifts unpacked, and get his room set up. (I wish I would have know this would be the last time I held him.) I have a photo of the family on Mothers day. SIL looks so happy, Little J is so cute in the bluebonnets. He is in physical therapy to help with being breach. The PT notices a seizure, they go to the hospital, little J is admitted. They can not get the seizures to stop. They try for days to get them to stop. They go to Houston to seek help. The Dr.'s in Houston have seen this before, they tell them there is nothing they can do. His brain is not formed completely. The hospital arranges for them to be transported back to their home town for Little J to die. - May 2003

We are not able to come visit, we do not have the funds for the trip. I have a temp job at the most hateful place I have ever worked. We are comforted by the message Pastor Keith provides. The Sunday we find out hope is gone for little J we go forward to have the elder pray with us, my heart begins to mend. The week after father day Little J passes. He came early enough for Mother's Day and stayed until Father's Day. This event bonded our family stronger. - June 2003

Jay begins a new job and begins a new treatment for his RA. With in weeks he is getting relief. He can move better, the pain is less. The drugs help fight back the effects of RA, I see my old Jay coming back. A year passes... We find out my SIL is pregnant again! It is wonderful news, they hurt so bad after loosing Little J. I see the joy and sorrow in my SIL eyes at her shower. I know she worried. - May 2004

We get a call SIL had the baby! JWM is here and the EEG is normal! They arrive home with JWM and we come to visit. It is wonderful. - July 2004

MIL asks when will we have children? I say I do not know the drugs Jay her son, is on cause catastrophic birth defects. He would have to stop it and wait at least a year to make sure it is out of his system.

In the Fall of 04 our dear friends give birth, they had been trying for 10 years. It was not with out risk. The birth was moved up by 8 weeks, our friends body was not doing well. LKM was born, 3 lb 15 1/2" long. She was prefect, just tiny. Her little lungs were not quite ready to work. It began the NICU time.