Bobby and I just got an email from our adoption agency that we are “in the book”! This basically means that we are now in a waiting game – hoping for a birthmother to select us. The final step for us getting “in the book” was having our birthmother letter accepted. It took a few revisions, but we finally got there. Here is the final version in case you want to see what it looks like. (FYI, the big blue square is where we glue the picture of ourselves). Earlier this week, Bobby and I spent an evening gluing pictures to 105 letters and then hand signing each one. IAC got the copies today and have said we are good to go. They’ve added a link to our website on their site which will hopefully give us more traffic and higher search rankings.
So now we wait. IAC will now start sending out our letter to birthmothers who request them. Hopefully, someone will like our letter and give us call. And hopefully that will lead us to a match and child of our own. I’m so nervous now when the phone rings. It could be the mother of our child. What do you say? What do you not say? How do you express how much you want a child, are ready to raise a child, how grateful you are for them considering adoption, how much respect we have for her? I guess like most things in life, you fret and try to prepare, but in the end you pretty much just wing it.
Thanks to everyone for their support and well wishes through the process so far. And a BIG thank you to James for his help designing our birthmother letter and Brian for taking such wonderful pictures of us. Because of them, our letter turned out amazing! People kept asking who we hired to have it done, and got to smile and say, “Nobody – we just have very talented friends.”
I purchased a new camera recently. It’s one of the reasons the pictures on this site have improved. 
Our last camera ended up getting a lot of scratches on the screen because we had no case for it. I wasn’t going to let that happen to this new one, so I made a case myself.
My sister and her family visited during the winter holidays. While they were here, my sister borrowed one of our scarfs while she went on a walk through the neighborhood. Afterward she commented how warm the scarf made her feel. Apparently, she had never felt the need to wear one before and didn’t know how great they are. So now that she is a scarf convert, I thought it only appropriate that I make her one.
I let January get away from me without doing an Inspiration post. I’m not going to let February slip by. This time around I have a couple of great recipes I discovered in the blogosphere that I can’t wait to try and something to spice up my couch.
I recenlty bought Amy Butler’s “In Stitches” book. It is full of great projects for making items for the entire house. But when I saw her Kitty Tunnel pattern, I knew that had to be my first project to tackle. I made some 
Some friends threw a murder mystery party last weekend.
I hate when I’m cooking, my hands are dirty, and I turn to the cookbook to check the next step only to find the pages have flipped. I don’t want to use my hands to flip it back because I’ll get the book dirty. But it is a pain to wash my hands just to flip a page. Well, I came up with a simple solution.