Today's the day!

Meet Fred and George

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:08:00 +0000

Our menagerie grew by two more today:

This was Liam's Christmas gift to me this year, only the store sold out of them so I got a gift card and the care pack under the tree. They finally got them in this week so Liam and I went to pick them up.

Since we can't tell them apart, we've decided that whichever one is on the left at the time will be Fred. They appear to be low maintenance and at least they don't come with live food. This now puts the pet count at EIGHT! It should be interesting next time we want to go away for a week.

Of course the Greeting Cat was on hand to ~~terrorize~~ welcome them to our home.

Fred and George will have a special place, high up on a cat proof shelf!

Tamales

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:33:00 +0000

This months Daring Kitchen Challenge was Tamales. While I've heard of them, I had never had them and had no idea of what to expect.

Blog-checking lines: Maranda of Jolts & Jollies was our January 2012 Daring Cooks hostess with the mostess! Maranda challenged us to make traditional Mexican Tamales as our first challenge of the year!

The first thing I had to do was find some ingredients that we didn't readily have on hand and couldn't get at the grocery store. Luckily Pete's Frootique had everything I needed.

The first main filing ingredient was tomatillos.

I wasn't sure if they were spicy like a pepper, but they taste pretty much like green tomatoes. I roasted them and then blended them as part of the mixture for my Green Chile Turkey Tamales.

Tamales have a dough made from "Masa Mix" which is really just finely ground corn. Which is great since it makes them glutten free and I was able to invite friends over, one of whom has celiac.

The last ingredient I needed, isn't really an ingredient, since you don't eat it. The tamales are wrapped in dried corn husks so that they can be steamed

I made 4 tamales for each of us: 2 with Green Chili Turkey filing and 2 with a black bean vegetarian filling.

It's a good thing that the friends I invited over are great friends! They knew that I was making tamales for the first time as part of the Daring Kitchen Challenge. Which was a really good thing, since the tamales were HORRIBLE! The filling tasted great (and most of us ended up scooping the filing out just to eat that) but the dough part, while it had nice flavour, was like eating paste! It stuck to the roof of your mouth and was pretty much raw, though I had steamed them for more then 40 minutes.

Luckily we had a nice Mexican salad to go with it, so no one went hungry!

Since everyone else at the Daring Kitchen was having great success with the recipes, I decided to not give up and try again. There had been a lot of filling left over that I had frozen, so I defrosted it, mixed up some more dough and tried again.

This time I had a better steaming set up, and I let them steam for a full 2 hours (as had been mentioned by some of the other Daring Cooks).

SUCCESS! The dough cooked through, was not at all pasty and Hilary and I enjoyed some wonderful tamales. I've promised my friends that they can come back another day and have some edible tamales with us.

Tea Time

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:32:00 +0000

There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea. ~Bernard-Paul Heroux

We enjoy a good cup of tea around here. While we still start our day with coffee, we enjoy a nice cup of tea in the afternoon and finish many an evening off with a nice cup of Rooibos. Even Liam will enjoy a cup of Chai with us when it's cold out.

The problem is that once you are labelled as "tea drinkers" it makes for an easy gift. I've even fallen prey to that, picking up new and unusual flavours for Hilary. Eventually though, you are faced with this:

That all came out of the tea cupboard today. Some of them are at least several years old, and one I had no idea where it even came from or why we would have ever bought it. These have all now found there way into the compost and we have a nice tidy cupboard of fresh tea that even had room for the new teapot that Liam bought Hilary for Christmas.

Most relaxed cat....

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 01:14:00 +0000

An Active Christmas Day

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:30:00 +0000

Both Granny and Grandma got Liam some great outdoor toys for Christmas. Luckily the snow had cleared enough that he could get out and enjoy them.

Merry Christmas!!

Adoption Reading Challenge - FAIL

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:33:00 +0000

Last year, Firemom who writes at The Chronicles of MunchkinLand, put out a challenge to read adoption themed books over the course of 2011. I aimed for her level 3 challenge: Read 12 books about adoption, 6 non-fiction/6 fiction.

I have failed with a miserable grade of 33%. I only managed to read 4 books from my list this year.

I have two reasons/excuses for not meeting my target.

My reading time has been virtually non-existent. Life has a habit of getting busy and one of the first things to go is your leisure time when you can curl up with a good book for an hour. And then my mother introduced me to the Twilight series and I was hooked. So my limited reading time has been spent finding out if Bella was going to choose Jacob over Edward.

I've kinda stopped writing about adoption. I wish I could say that I've stopped thinking about it, but it is a part of my life that is always there, sometimes closer to the surface then others. When things came to a close with my own reunion this past summer, I needed to step away from adoption topics for awhile. So while I still follow a lot of adoption blogs, and can't seem to watch a single TV show that doesn't have some sort of adoption topic, I couldn't bring myself to read adoption themed books.

I still hope to read some of the books on my list, and I'm sure I will pick them up at some point, but for now I'm okay with my failing grade for this year.

2011- A year in review

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 12:27:00 +0000

I don't often reflect and look back at the year as the New Year approaches. But a lot happened this year, so here it is.

JANUARY

Dad died.

FEBRUARY

Oscar night. We served Thai food this year.
The doctor tells me that I'm pre-diabetic.

MARCH

Lice!
We celebrated Hilary's 40th birthday in the ER with Liam's first (and so far only) migraine.
Liam was matched with his Big Brother "D"

APRIL

I decided to take up cooking and photography as hobbies.

MAY

My first Daring Kitchen Challenge was to make Gumbo.

JUNE

June was a great month for Liam! A new trampoline, going to Monster Truck Jam and spending the night at Great Wolf Lodge.

JULY

My own adoption and reunion journey came to an end.
Liam turned Nine!
We had a new front porch built.

AUGUST

We had an interesting vacation in PEI.
I turned 41.
Gary and his food joined our family.

SEPTEMBER

I almost killed Gary.
Liam became a Young Old.

OCTOBER

My Mom came for a visit.
I finally fit into my "skinny" jeans.

NOVEMBER

Liam had eye surgery.

DECEMBER

Liam finally started to gain weight.
Hilary and I celebrated 18 years of togetherness.

and we still have 2 weeks to go!

Liam's auction

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:50:00 +0000

Thursday, December 15th is Fair Day at Halifax Independent! This is a very exciting semi-annual event. In every classroom of the school, students and teachers are busy preparing speeches, displays, models, songs, dances and much, much more. This is the students’ opportunity to shine and we love welcoming all of you on that special day and enjoying their success, together.

Fairs at HIS take place in late Fall and in late Spring. They are a culmination of all of the Theme Studies for each term, and an opportunity for all of the children in the school to present their work to parents and the school community. Students from Littles to Middle School write speeches, plays and songs based on their learning experiences. We feel that it is important for the children to be able to present their work to others in the form of public-speaking as a means of developing self-confidence and a thorough understanding of their research

This term Liam's class studied Great Canadians. They made objects special to various Great Canadians out of clay and then auctioned them off to the parents during Fair.

Here is Liam auctioning off a toy model space ship from Roberta Bondar, the first Canadian woman to go into space:

After some heated bidding (sometimes between Hilary and I!) Hilary came out the winner, having only spent $60.00.

Daring Kitchen - Cha Sui Bao

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:40:00 +0000

Blog-checking lines: Our Daring Cooks’ December 2011 hostess is Sara from Belly Rumbles! Sara chose awesome Char Sui Bao as our challenge, where we made the buns, Char Sui, and filling from scratch – delicious

When I first read this challenge, I had no idea that it was for one of my favorite Dim Sum buns. This month's host is from Australia, and they refer to Dim Sum as Yum Cha. After a few minutes with Google, I had an AHA! moment when I finally figured out what the challenge was for. BBQ'd pork buns!

This challenge called for a trip to our local Asian grocery store, where I got the necessary ingredients and set to work.

The dough is a simple flour, yeast and water mixture, with no egg. There was different recipe, with eggs, that you could use if you wanted to bake your buns, but I much prefer mine steamed.

While the dough was rising, I cooked the pork tenderloin that had been marinating in the Cha Sui sauce. I would have been quite happy to just stop there and eat the meat as is, but I kept going.

The pork is then finally diced, mixed with onion and another sauce that is thickened.

A tablespoon of meat mixture is rolled inside the dough, and formed into nice little buns.

The buns are then steamed, giving them an unusual but light, bread texture. I was pleased to note that you could steam them ahead of time and then re-heat them in the toaster oven for lunch the next day. They weren't as pretty (the deflate a bit), but they were just as tasty.

Be sure to check out the full Daring Kitchen Cha Sui Bao recipe.

Happy Birthday Heather!

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

My friend Heather knows how to celebrate her birthday in style. She's changed it from a single day event to a full week extravaganza, making sure she can get as much cake as possible. This year she is doing something different:

Here's what I'm hoping we can do for my birthday: I want to have a worldwide celebration of helping others. Paying it forward. Doing good deeds. If can get 40 people to do 1 Good Thing between now and my actual 40th birthday, that would be just about the best present ever. (Or 20 people to do 2 Good Things. Or 10 to do 4. I'm not picky.)

She issued this request on September 30th, giving people 2 and half months to do some good deeding. I love me a good challenge, so here are the good deeds that I have done while thinking of Heather's birthday wish.

Paid for a man's Thanksgiving dinner. No one should have to eat dinner alone at a restaurant on Thanksgiving, so I hope I made his day a wee bit brighter.
Helped tourists by offering to take group pictures. There is nothing worse than always being short one person in the picture because they had to be the one to take the picture.
Arranged a play date for a boy from school who doesn't have very many friends.
Turned the lights off on someone's truck in the parking lot so that they could get home after work without having to find jumper cables to get their truck started.
Filled a box of needed items for a 10 year old boy staying at a shelter for abused women and children over the holidays.
Gave a man money for breakfast on a cold Sunday morning.

I had really hoped that I could get much closer to 40 good deeds, but I'm still pretty happy with my list.

HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY HEATHER!

The Nutcracker

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:44:00 +0000

Liam loves the Nutcracker. He collects them; he listens to the music; he twirls about while humming it. And so we've started the tradition of seeing the Symphony Nova Scotia version each year before Christmas.

But my favorite version will always be this one:

Liam Performs the Nutcracker at age 7.

Be sure to watch (or fast foward) to the very end. The best part happens in the last 3 seconds.

"18"

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:26:00 +0000

Today Hilary and I celebrate 18 years of being together!

Happy Anniversary My Love.

Three and Three Quarters

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:28:00 +0000

3 and 3/4 pounds or 1.7 Kilograms, as the Dr. announced (and I was glad to see that she had to use the calculator to figure it out too).

That is how much weight Liam has G.A.I.N.E.D. since our last paediatrician visit in September. More then 1 pound a month! This might not seem like a lot for an active, growing boy, but considering that he had LOST weight on every previous visit (albeit very small amounts, but losses still), this is great news!

We still have food issues - the number of things that he will eat can be counted on both hands, but slowly his appetite has been increasing. He now eats 2 Mama Burgers from A&W and not just one. Even one was way up from the days when he would only eat the bun from a Baby Burger.

We are going to try some new medication for the ADHD - something that is NOT in the stimulant category so that his appetite will hopefully continue to grow and that he can start having better, longer sleep. It's not unusual for me to go to bed close to 11:00 and find him still awake when I go to turn his light off and then have him up when my alarm goes off at 6:30.

Hopefully the transition to new meds will not be too bumpy. He only has a few days of school left before the winter break, so any rough patches will likely occur at home. Oh joy! But if it helps in the long run, I'm sure we can make it through.

I want to parent like this

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:33:00 +0000

I can only hope that I can parent Liam half as well as this man's parents raised him. What an amazing speaker.

Happy Unbirthday

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:52:00 +0000

Have you ever had one of those weeks when everyone is grumpy and nothing seems to be working? We've been having some of that around here. So I decided we need to have a little fun!!! So I threw us an "Unbirthday Party"

There are decorations.

There are presents.

There are loot bags.

There's even a cake!

I think everyone should celebrate an Unbirthday!!

OA Interview with Claudia

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Thanks again to Heather at Production Not Reproduction for setting up the Adoption Bloggers Interview Project. Heather paired together 120 bloggers for the project this year. I had a chance to be introduced to a blogger that I didn't know; I got to read through her posts and send her interview questions in order to get to know her better.

I would like to introduce you to Claudia from My Fascinating Life. Claudia is an adoptive Mum to boy/girl twins from Ethiopia. Be sure to check out her blog for some very cute videos of her wee ones.

Let’s start off with 10 quick questions to get to you know you better:

WHERE WERE YOU BORN? Brisbane, Australia
WHERE ARE YOU LIVING NOW? Just off the M4 in not-so-sunny England
WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? My first name - no. My middle name (Margaret, lucky me! Not) was a family name on both my mother's and father's side.
DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? Yes.
DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? No! I had them out when I was 25. So much more painful than I would have imagined.
DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Yes.
WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE? Their skin. I am terribly jealous of people with beautiful, smooth skin. Mine is blotchy and rashy.
WHAT COLOR SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? Blue metallic.
WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? For once - nothing
DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT? I am learning to play the ukulele!

Twins! How long before you brought the twins home did you know that you had been matched with them? Did you hope to matched with twins, or was it a surprise? We had hoped to be matched with twins, but didn't expect that it would ever happen! We were matched with them about two months before we officially became their parents - but the first three weeks of parenting were in a hotel room. I love your post "TWO" What is the best and worst part of having twins?

I don't think there's any easy way to have two kids (or one kid, for that matter...) I think the uniquely difficult thing about twins is that both your kids need the SAME thing from you at the same time, and that's usually impossible to do. Also, when they fight? Nobody is older so I can't expect either of them to take the high road! The best thing... honestly, it's probably that people make lots of allowances for my messy house, my lateness, my delay in sending interview responses (!) because of them! Oh yeah, and the adorable cuteness. But mostly the making allowances.

What prompted you to write about "The Wall"? It is such an amazing post! Have you considered submitting it to adoption professionals to use in their training?

I'm glad you liked it! I don't actually know any adoption professionals so honestly, I hadn't considered that. If any of them read your blog and want to use it, drop me an email! As to why I wrote it.... firstly, I am in the middle of trying to put together a list of links about adoption that I hope will be useful for prospective adoptive parents (and those of us already parenting). I'm trying to include lots of different perspectives and lots of different topics, and one of the topics is 'adoption ethics'. I've read a lot about it in the last few years, but I couldn't find a post that summarised any kind of a cogent position... this frustrated me. Along similar lines, I heard a lot of people disagreeing about ethics online when what I actually think they were disagreeing on was a definition of what ethics WAS.

Secondly, we were involved in searching for more information and contact with our children's first family a few months ago. What we found out was not quite what we expected... but we still felt like our adoption was 'ethical'. As my husband and I were talking about it I found myself coming to a position on WHY I thought it was ethical - before those conversations I had never actually put into words what I thought were the basic criteria for an ethical adoption. I doubt most people have; it's more difficult than it sounds! It's easy to see what an ethical adoption is not; it's much more difficult to say what it is. That's when I realised why I couldn't find a summary-ish ethics post - I didn't think one had been written, so I decided to give it a go. That's probably more information than you wanted on that question! But yeah, that's why I decided to put my butt on the line with that post.

Adoption ethics are obviously very important to you. What are your thoughts on the adoption practices in currently happening in the UK? I've put some links to what I have read below. Are these a fair representation of what is happening today?

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4

Ooooohhhh.... very interesting question. Adoption in the UK is a really difficult topic to discuss, because it's a topic where it's really difficult to get reliable information. There are a few reasons for this: probably the most significant is that adoption is all from foster care, and therefore it's all controlled by local councils (and a few voluntary agencies). These all operate independently, and have hugely different ways of working. So, one person (in Birmingham, say) can have an experience that differs vastly from another person in Leeds.

Also, a few of the national papers seem to have strong agendas to push when it comes to adoption. The most common seems to be the story of the lovely, white, middle class couple who were refused permission to adopt because they were too lovely, white and middle class. Does this stuff really happen? I think it probably does. But is it normative? I'm not really convinced that it is - partly because it seems that the same stories about the same lovely, white, middle class couples get recycled ... and recycled... and recycled. One of the stories you linked to is about one of those couples! I'm sure there is some bad social worker practice going on, but I hope it's not as widespread as the newspapers would have us believe. What we never hear is - what sort of child were those couples looking to adopt? Were they just wanting very young children? If that is the case, well, maybe they were rejected because the council really didn't need any more PAPs who were looking to adopt young kids. Maybe they already had plenty, and if we're really interested in child welfare then surely that's fine? If they were interested in sibling groups, older kids, I'd be much more concerned that the councils really were losing out on potential resources that they could have used to find children a new home.

One issue that does seem to be very real in domestic adoption over here is the (seemingly unnecessary) length of the court proceedings. When it takes a long time to make placement decisions because work is underway to reunify parents and children? Fantastic! But when that's not the case... what a waste. This is another area where it's really hard to get reliable information because the proceedings of the family court are extremely, utterly, top-secret, to a degree that means it's impossible to scrutinise what is happening.

Having said all of that... I'm not any kind of expert on domestic adoption over here. I do find the way that information is presented in the press to be very frustrating... but that's probably largely because analysing information is my non-mum job!

"we have zero non-foster-care domestic adoption". How does that work? If I were pregnant and knew that I couldn't raise my child, what option would I have?

Do you know? I honestly have no idea. I think that relinquishment (if that was what you wanted) would have to be done through the foster care system. And personally, I don't think that's a great solution because it means the woman has even less power than in a US relinquishment - I don't think she would be able to choose a family, or choose a level of openness.

Do you think that there is a place for non-foster-care domestic adoption?

Yes, I think there is, in theory, although it's something I have no personal experience with. I think that there's probably somewhere in between the UK system (at the mercy of foster care) and the US system (at the mercy of adoption agencies) that would probably work better than either. I'm not sure that any of us will ever see it!

While your children may still be quite young, do you talk to them about adoption? their past? their birth country or their first family?

Yes! All the time.

"At the beginning of thinking about adoption we were really concerned about choosing a country, but in the end it didn't really feel like a very difficult decision at all." How did you ultimately decide on Ethiopia ?

You know - this probably should be more profound than it really is, but it was a process of elimination for us. There aren't really any adoption agencies over here, so we knew we would have to do it all ourselves - in the end, we looked for a country with an ethical system in place where we would be eligible, where we knew people had successfully managed to navigate the system, and for us that was Ethiopia. When we were deciding, back in 2008, the situation in Ethiopia looked very different from how it does now- in lots of ways. It freaks me out that if we had chosen differently, we would never have met the two wonderful kids who are sleeping upstairs right now. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable talking about how we made our choices because I feel like there should have been more to it than that, but it seemed like Ethiopia was a place where there really were kids in need of homes, and we jumped. Simple as that, really.

What is your favorite blog to read? What makes it your favorite?

This is almost the most difficult question of all! I read a TON of blogs (more than I should...) and it is impossible to pick one favourite. I can tell you the first blog that I ever read start-to-finish because I was so hooked - at the time it was called 'The Road To Our Own'

And I loved it because I read this post and when I read the section at the end about isolation, it was the first time I ever thought 'oh, YES! THAT's what I feel!' from reading a blog post. I'm glad to say that I don't feel like that any more- and I'm pretty sure Lori doesn't either. But really, I think that Lori (and that post in particular) are to blame for how many hours I've wasted checking my google reader in the last three or so years. Thanks, Lori!

Daring Kitchen - Tea

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:41:00 +0000

Blog-checking lines: Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

We drink a lot of tea. While we have favorites (Chai and Vanilla Earl Gray) we also have a lot of variety in our cupboard. Some days just call out for a certain tea flavour. Even Liam enjoys a nice cup of Rooibos tea before bed.

I was intrigued by this challenge. I knew very little about cooking with tea. Hilary had made a Chana Masala dish some time ago where she soaked the chickpeas in chai tea to flavour them before cooking, but that was the only savoury dish made with tea that I think I've ever had.

Sarah from Simply Cooked provided us with 3 recipes but I decided to do some research on my own before committing to anything. That is how I came across the recipe for "Tea Smoked Salmon with Wasabi Latkes" on the Food Network website. Since one of the reasons I joined The Daring Kitchen was to push myself in the kitchen, I decided to try it for 3 reasons: 1) it had tea; 2) I don't really like salmon and had never cooked it before and 3) smoking was a new cooking technique that I figured would challenge me even further.

First things first, I had to get some tea. The recipe called for either Oolong or Black Lychee. We may have a lot of variety in our tea cupboard, but we didn't have either of these. Hilary enjoys Oolong, but I find it too strong and smoky for my taste. Luckily our local mall has a newly opened tea shop, so I was able to go and sniff a few options before I settled on High Mountain Oolong.

The next step was to marinade the salmon. It's a mixture of mirin, sugar, ginger and peppercorns.

Then I mixed the tea with sugar and rice.

The recipe said to line the bottom of your pot with tin foil before placing this mixture in. I almost skipped this step.... good thing I didn't! The sugar caramelized/burnt and the whole mixture was one solid mass by the end. The only way to get it out of the pot was to lift out the tin foil.

While the salmon was smoking, I made the potato latkes. It involved mashed potatoes mixed with green onions, horse radish and wasabi that were formed into patties, dredged in flour, dipped in egg and then coated in Panko bread crumbs.

The recipe then called for deep frying them, but I simply pan fried them in a deep skillet.

The end result:

Even I liked the salmon! I was worried at first because when I took the salmon out of the pot the escaping smell of smoked tea was overwhelming in the kitchen. I thought that if the fish tasted anything like the smell that I wouldn't like it. But the taste was much more subtle. You could still taste the tea, but it did not over power the salmon. The latkes were amazing, and I think they will become part of our regular rotation of potato options. They were even good cold the next day.

I'm feeling much more comfortable in the kitchen these days. Thanks Daring Kitchen!!

Surgery update

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:26:00 +0000

Things are going okay so far. Liam is having lots of pain and some nausea still, but is slowly starting to perk up.

The reason for the surgery in the first place. We had thought that it was only his left eye that turned in (because it's so obvious) but they actually did surgery on both eyes. I can see in this picture the slight turn to his right eye too.

Rocking the hospital gown pre-surgery!

Post-Op.

Shades and the laptop in a darkened room. No better way to recover.

Stabismus surgery

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:22:00 +0000

Strabismus is a disorder in which the two eyes do not line up in the same direction, and therefore do not look at the same object at the same time. The condition is more commonly known as "crossed eyes."

We are off to the IWK today for Liam to have surgery to straighten his left eye. It's day surgery so we will be back by late this afternoon. Please keep us in your thoughts today.

Who you gonna call?

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:00:00 +0000

A Ghostbuster of course!

HAPPY HALLOWE'EN!

A wee bit too ambitious

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 23:30:00 +0000

I've never been very good at carving pumpkins. Triangle eyes and a toothless mouth (I start off with teeth, but usually slip and cut them off during the carving) is usually the most I'm willing to try. Last year we managed a fairly decent looking Puffle, so on that success I got it in my head to do something a bit more ambitious......

Who you gonna call?

Fruitarian

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:50:00 +0000

This is our fruit bowl. We hope that this will last us a week. And Hilary doesn't usually eat apples or pears, and I might have one a day, so can you guess who is going to eat it all?

Food continues to be a struggle with Liam. What he will eat is limited and how much he will consume is appalling (humming birds eat more). BUT he will eat fruit. Lots of fruit. We often have to limit him when he's on his 4th pear for the day.

So we will continue to fill the fruit bowl.

A peculiar assortment of books. . .

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:28:00 +0000

I read a lot, when I have time. Below is a list of books that were listed as the top 100 books people can't live without, based on a Worldbookday.com poll. It was first published in 2007 - I wonder if the Twilight series would make the cut if they did the poll today?

I have made bold the books that I have read in entirety and italicized those merely attempted. You can see my final count at the end of the list.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total that I've read: 25
Total that I've attempted: 12

How many have you read?

What book would add to the list? Do you have a favorite on the list? Mine is "The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery" because of course it's not a hat!!

Open Adoption Roundtable #31

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:29:00 +0000

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don't need to be listed at Open Adoption Bloggers to participate or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you're thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table. The prompts are meant to be starting points--please feel free to adapt or expand on them.

Prompt #31: Write about open adoption and being scared.

There is really only one thing about open adoption that scares me. The adoption NOT being open. It scares me that Liam may never have a chance to know his mother or his siblings. It scares me that he will grow up with the same hole and emptiness that I did when I thought about my first family. It scares me that he may one day have to have a "reunion" instead of just having the chance to grow up with open adoption as part of his day to day life.

It doesn't just scare me, it makes me sad.

Grandma!

noreply@blogger.com (My name is Andy.) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:04:00 +0000