Cricket

My sweet furbaby is spending the night at the vet and I have sure missed her today. She is finally old enough to do a front declaw and we went ahead and had her spayed at the same time. I imagine she's going to be pretty upset when she finally gets back home. I, on the other hand, will be so happy that those little sharp claws are gone.

I never told you what happened a few weeks ago when I woke up in the middle of the night. Cricket had knocked something over and startled herself. Well, she ran up on the bed and then ran across the pillows, the one my head was laying on! I woke up with blood running down my face and a big gash where she nailed me between the eyebrows. Ouch. Even worse was the face that no one at work really ever commented and asked me about what happened. I'm thinking to myself, I know you people see this big scratch but do think it's a zit?!

Huggles,
Deana

To vacay, or not vacay

We've had a week of vacation scheduled for next week since the beginning of the year. No real plans exactly, just the pressure from upper management to have the week scheduled on the calendar. Most of you know, we haven't been traveling much the last couple of years as we've been focused mainly on saving money for our big "vacation to China." All summer long though, I've really had the wild hair to just get out of town for a few days. It didn't have to be anywhere fabulous...I would have even been happy to just go down to the coast.

After thinking about it, we decided we'd just go ahead and use T's hotel reward points and buy a tank of gas. Then we kept reading all the rumors about baby referrals possibly happening...possibly not happening and thought maybe we should just stay home. Upon rethinking it for about the upteenth time. We're going! We don't want to put our life on hold while waiting.

We're going to drive out to New Orleans for a few days. It's not Mardi Gras time, but I've never been there so we thought it would be fun to do something new. After seeing the sights and eating some great food, T will be headed home a few days earlier for a work meeting that he doesn't want to miss and I'm going to visit my extended family in Mississippi.

Vacay, here we come!

Too good to be true

Love this doodle-icious poem found here.

Refresh the page!

There's no news and no rumors about referrals happening this week. I keep watching and hitting refresh daily. Plus, I have added it as a bookmark on my blackberry so that I can check it at work!

I liked it before when I wasn't watching for any hints of information.

Call me obsessed...

Poppin' Up

Working all weekend, so nothing new and exciting around here.

Except for this....




a gigantic mushroom growing in our backyard.

Think we should eat it?

We better not, Mario might come looking for it.


Huggles,
Deana

Scrap Happy

A picture you've seen but now on a new layout using the Heidi Swapp Invisibles paper.

Thomas is traveling this week, Abilene and now Austin. That means I get to spend more time in the nook! I just received my September Cocoa Daisy kit this week, so that's where I'll be.

Huggles,
Deana

Matching . . .

There's a rumor that the CCAA is preparing to match babies with families!! I'm excited but not feeling very positive that we will be in this batch since last month they only referred 2 days.

I hope, I pray we are....though it would be a miracle.

I do want them to at least match through 3/28/06. *crosses fingers*

Then we will KNOW for sure that we are next!

Our dossier is more than likely laying in that room, on one of those shelves, waiting for our turn...

waiting for Ladybug...

13 Years Later

Thomas and I celebrated our 13 year anniversary on Monday. It's hard to believe we've been married that long...time passes by so quickly. Except when we're waiting for Ladybug's referral! That wait is crawling by at a snail's pace.

This is the unbelievably awesome gift that I received from T. He's very sneaky and thoughtful for special days and holidays. I would never have put this on my wish list as it is such an extravagance. But I totally love it! I called and canceled my pre-order for Dan Brown's new book and downloaded it onto my new kindle. He knows how much I love to read and said, "You're not lugging 2 or 3 books to China."



Enjoy the day,
Deana

Ladybug List

A couple of months ago, we made lists of the things we thought we'd need on our trip to China to pick up Ladybug. Our lists were based on other couples' lists of what they ended up using and what they didn't use at all. Each week on a shopping trip to buy household supplies or groceries, we pick one thing off the list to purchase. The goal was to make the financial burden a little bit easier when we actually got ready to travel. Here's our little stash of items that have been purchased so far.



Okay, so maybe the hairbows weren't actually needed. But our little Ladybug probably isn't going to have any hair, and bows are sooo sweet!

The first hint of a rumor regarding baby referrals came out today. I'll keep you posted. I'm praying that it's going to happen for us this month!

Our long wet day

Thomas was pushing me out the door around noon yesterday, "Let's go, let's go." Evidently, there's a lot of preparation in getting ready for a UNT football game that doesn't start until 6:00. Supplies, food, and pop-up gazebos. I'm sure glad we had those, it was raining the entire day!

Thomas cooked box after box of sausage. I was in charge of sticking about 120 of them with a skewer and wrapping for the hickory on a stick.

I also walked around to the other vendors and offered sausage sandwich trades. I scored a smoothie! Thomas was much better at this than I and scored a funnel cake, corn dogs and a bag of kettle korn. Yum!

It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work, and I was wet and tired when we finally got home around 10.

We're headed out this morning for brunch.

Happy Sunday,
Deana

p.s. UNT lost the game in 2nd overtime.

T G I F

We made it through our 10 day "Dinner at Home" challenge and celebrated by ordering Chinese food tonight.




Now it's time for a 3 day weekend! I luckily got some time off, Saturday through Monday, and begged Thomas to take Monday off so we could go somewhere. He's been traveling so much during the week for work and I just knew he was going to say yes. Unfortunately, he has a concession stand at the University of North Texas Football games and tomorrow is their first home game. So, instead he's invited me to the game to help peddle sausage. I went to help for one game last year and it was pretty fun.

No beaches or bright lights for me this weekend. But we are going to take vacation the first week of October and hopefully actually go somewhere inexpensive and interesting at that time. If there is such a thing...I'm definitely surfing the internet trying to find it!

Enjoy your weekend,
Deana

Calm after the storm

It was a long working Labor Day weekend for me, so it felt nice to have the day off today. Didn't do much:

Got up early with T, he was headed out for another trip this morning.

Went for a pedi and did some shopping.

Bought a new purse...in an eggplant color. A crazy stretch for a gal who owns about 6 black handbags.


And played with my camera.



Huggles,
Deana

She picks sea shells by the sea shore

Nikki and I were shopping the other day and wandered into a completely random gift shop. They had a huge glass cage full of pretty shells and I just had to stop and take a quick peek.



This got me into some trouble quite a few years ago:

It was the summer and we had traveled down to Biloxi for a family vacation. I don't remember how old we were, probably 11 and 13 or so. The weather was cloudy with some sprinkles, definitely not swimming weather so we were dressed in these cute white jumpers. On the beach there were these very large, long pipes that stretched out into the ocean. I decided it would be a good idea to stroll out across said pipe and dragged Nikki along with me, since that is what big sisters do. About 50 feet out into the ocean, I saw all these pretty shells on the pipe. I plucked them off thinking how nice they were and kept stuffing them in my pockets until they were full. When my pockets were full, I grabbed a handful, as many as I could carry and slowly began to balance my way back to the beach.

All of a sudden, those pretty shells starting moving around! I completely freaked out! I threw them into the ocean and then I was frantically trying to get them out of my pockets. In the process of this, I fell into the ocean. Of course, that made me freak out even worse! I had fears of jelly fish and sharks and those little crabs coming back to get me. Even though Dad is yelling at me, "Just stand up! Just stand up!" I didn't want to stand up, I didn't want to be in that ocean. I eventually did stand up, and the water was up to my waist. But instead of walking back to shore, I heaved myself onto that pipe and threw my leg across it to climb back on. I did make it, by the way...but my leg was all bloody and raw. It took out a gash about 6 inches long.

And so our trip to the beach ended early because of a wet girl in a now see-through white jumper with blood running down her leg!

Oh the memories.

Dinner Plans

Last Monday we challenged ourselves to cook dinners at home instead of going out to eat for 10 whole days! Wow, was this going to be tough! As you know, I don't cook very often and in order to accomplish this difficult goal, we had to have a plan. We looked at what we had in our pantry/freezer and made a list of what we could value add to make it through these 10 long days.



The dinners are just listed out so that we can randomly pick whichever one we want. I got home from work tonight and T had already grilled pork chops and baby corn cobs. He forgot the black eyed peas though...it seems he wanted to deviate from "the list." How dare he?!

It will be nice to get the pantry and freezer cleaned out for a change. I won't tell you that I found some frozen veggies that were dated 2008. Don't worry, we didn't eat them!

Perhaps if we make it through our 10 day challenge I'll treat myself to this: Dream Dinners. How neat is it that you can go and assemble a dozen dinners to take home and cook every night for about an average of $13 a meal?

Or perhaps this domesticated cooking thing won't last long. We shall see.

3 days to go!

Still waiting

I've been at home hanging out with Cricket today while T is out of town again. Spent most of the day doing chores and attempting to file the extension of our I-600a. I'm not confident I have all the correct paperwork so I'm going to wait one more day so T can look it over before I mail it. He's not going to be too happy, it's the only thing he asked me to do while he was out of town. I do believe it would be worse to mail in the wrong paperwork than to wait an extra day!

I keep checking online for rumors of matching or referrals...but haven't seen anything yet. I want this to happen in September. I really, really want this to happen in September. Can the waiting get any worse?