If You Water Them, They Will Grow

For two years in a row now I have spent a lot of time and money planting lots of veggies and herbs only to have them not grow. Last year I grew a total of three green beans (not three plants, three beans), three jalapeno peppers and lots of tomatoes (which to be honest, Pete was responsible for because I don't like tomatoes!)



My friends who are good gardeners (who all seem to be from Oregon for some reason) gave me lots of possible reasons for my gardening failure. The soil wasn't right, there wasn't enough sun, I watered too much or too little. I lamented to Pete that I just wanted a garden that I planted, watered and then it would grow. Well, that's exactly what my dear husband made happen this year! Before he left for Vietnam he researched and made these nifty little planter boxes. They have a false bottom and you water them once a week by filling up the bottom of the tubs through a pipe that comes up to the top. That's all we've done and look at our beautiful vegetable plants! We have tomatoes, basil, bell peppers, squash, spinach and carrots. The squash are taking over their bin so next year we will make sure they have their own container as we didn't realize how much they would grow. So far only the spinach and basil are edible but we have a ton of blossoms for the other veggies so I think it is safe to say that we will be enjoying our wonderful bounty soon.

Correction

So this is the second time that this has happened. I posted our number on the wait list on the blog and then more referrals came in today! Three baby girls which puts us at 6 or 7! And yes, this means I will start posting our number more often :)

Jump! How High?

In the interst of full disclosure, this picture isn't really related to my update but I think blogs without pictures can be boring so I'm stretching here (plus I love this picture of Noah!)

We've been officially waiting for our referral since April 3, 2009. In the months previous to that date we were working furiously to complete all of the paperwork for our dossier which included having all documents notorized and certified by the Secretary of State in which they were notorized. A lot of other adoption bloggers have very specific timelines of dates they completed each step of the process. Me, I'm not quite that methodical. I just know there was a lot of paperwork and we were very happy when we turned in and could just focus on waiting for our referral. Well, one of our immigration approvals is expiring and now we have to renew it. Renewing this approval means we have to update our fingerprints and update our homestudy which in and of itself is a lot of paperwork including physical exams for all four of us, employment verification, financial information, etc. The good news though is that none of this has to be notarized. It is a bit humerous that we have to update our fingerprints but I just do what we're told.

The good news is we are slowly moving up the list and I think we are now about 9 or 10 for a referral of an infant girl. We also changed our request to 0-18 months old.

A Taste of Vietnam

As I mentioned in a previous post, Pete tried some interesting cuisine while he was in Vietnam. He tried to eat like the Vietnamese and didn't say no to anything.

I've eaten a few things were I saw them alive before eating them (fish, squirrel, rabbit, turkey) but for me, I think I would rather eat this one without seeing it alive first.

Warning: Vegetarians may not want to watch this :)

Birthdays

The end of April was a busy week for our family. First it was my birthday and since Pete was still in Vietnam my good friend Kate (far left) was nice enough to organize a little birthday dinner for me. I'm still not sure why a sushi place had a purple sombrero as part of their birthday celebration but the food was great and the company was even better. Having a birthday on a Tuesday is sort of blah and then add in the fact that my husband was out of the country and it was sure to be completely forgettable so I really appreciate my friends for making my birthday so fun!

Three days later was Nick's birthday and for the first time he had a friend birthday party. He LOVES Chuck E Cheese but since mom and dad don't share his passion it's become a special event kind of a place so that is where he choose to have his party.

The best part of Nick's birthday was that we started off the day by picking up dad from BART! Needless to say we are thrilled to have him back home. He has something like a thousand pictures so we'll need to sort through those before we a find a few to post.