Thanksgiving and Xmas decorating!

Well, just like everyone else, we managed to survive Thanksgiving without exploding. We may have went up a few pants sizes however. Wendi and I had thanksgiving dinner with my family in Peru since her family is half way across the country in Pennsylvania. We will be visiting them for Christmas. Here is a nice photo of my three youngest nieces from Thanksgiving day. I'm not exactly sure what they were doing, but it made a nice photo.

The day after Thanksgiving....known to most as "black Friday" we decided to avoid shopping at all costs and just spend the day relaxing and decorating for Christmas. To completely understand what Christmas means to Wendi, you would have to visit her mother's house and see the "christmas room" that stays decorated for Christmas all year....ALL YEAR!!! Wendi has boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of decorations that we had to find (remember we moved since last Christmas) and bring in.

We have a really great, artificial tree that we got from my brother. It is huge and this year we have a lot more room for it. Last year, it pretty much, filled our living room. Anyway, I put together the tree while Wendi decorated the rest of the house. We stopped for long enough to see the Purdue Men's Basketball team get beat by Oklahoma. After that, we finished decorating the tree. It looks great! Now all it needs are some presents under it. I guess we will have to go to the stores after all.

Here is the tree (and Wendi) in their full, festive glory!

A Common Bond

On Saturday evening, we hosted the Lafayette Yahoo Group of families who are adopting from Ethiopia. There are approximately 10 families in the area who are at various stages in the adoption process. It was so much fun to meet everyone! I can't tell you how good it feels to know others who are walking a similar path. We shared a good laugh when we thought about the future and what our gathering will look like a year from now with so many children running around! I think it's safe to say that we're all looking forward to the days when we'll introduce our children to each other. What a peaceful feeling to know that there's a supportive community of loving, kind people journeying with us.



Three of the families already have their referrals and two of them have upcoming court dates. Chris and Sarah's court date is this Tuesday ... please keep them in your thoughts and prayers that they will make it through court the first time so that they can travel in December to be united with their son.



We're looking forward to more good times with this new community of friends!

Living Room Makeover? Done!

Bah-bye, fuzzy blue carpet! So long, institutional gray walls! See ya later, 1982 fireplace! Hello, 'new' living room! The new carpet was installed on Friday and we are so excited to check this project off the list. With this project now complete, the house truly feels like our home. Now we're looking forward to decorating for Christmas!

Mmmmmm .... Chocolate!

On Monday night, the college that I work for at Purdue, Consumer and Family Sciences, held an event at the Indiana State Museum. The Museum is currently hosting, Chocolate: The Exhibition. Our staff had the brilliant idea to host one of our 'Boiler Mixers' (an event for alumni from our college -- we are the Boilermakers at Purdue, thus 'Boiler' Mixer) in conjunction with this exhibit. We hosted a reception in the Museum and invited a professor from the Dept. of Foods and Nutrition to speak about the truths/myths of chocolate as a health food.

The Museum did an outstanding job of hosting us! The food was beautifully presented and absolutely delicious. I had to take a few photos to share. One of the highlights of the evening was the chocolate fountain. We also enjoyed eating other chocolate desserts. It was a fun and yummy evening!

Here is my friend and co-worker, Christina, enjoying the chocolate fountain. (I'm sure she'll be so happy to be making a guest appearance on our blog!)

To learn more about Consumer and Family Sciences, you can go to www.cfs.purdue.edu. To learn more about the Boilermakers, you can go to www.purdue.edu.

Halloween Revisited

Remember our post earlier this month about going to a hot dog roast at Mark's parent's house and how I left the camera in the backyard and it was out there all night and I had a dream that the backyard flooded? Well, the backyard didn't flood and we got the camera back earlier this week. Here are a few of the photos that I would have posted earlier if I had't forgotten the camera.

This is our great-niece, Braylee. She is 15 months old and is always on the move!

And this is our other great-niece, Lily. She will be 1 in December and is a very easy-going little girl.

And here's a photo of (right-left) Mark, our niece Caitlyn, and Mark's sister Jennifer standing around the fire pit.

Home Study

We had some good news today -- our home study is complete! Hooray! We thought we hit a snag earlier this week because my Illinois background check was stuck in the system but it arrived today to our agency. I was preparing to re-send it as a precaution but now I don't need to. We are excited to have one more step completed. The home study is being reviewed by our adoption specialist's supervisor and then we should receive it by the end of the month. We are planning to go to Indianapolis on Friday to take our dossier to be 'sealed' by the state of Indiana. We're planning to also stop at Abyssinia, the Ethiopian restaurant for lunch. Watch for a report this weekend!

A Christmas Story

Attention all ye fans of the movie, A Christmas Story!

This is the 25th anniversary year of the release of this great movie. The movie is set in a fictional city, Hohman, IN, but is actually based on Hammond, IN, the hometown of the author, Gene Shepherd. Hammond is near Chicago in northwestern Indiana.

Check out this website to see all of the cool things they are doing to celebrate:
www.lakecountycvb.com/christmas

I don't know if I'm more excited about the 'eat like a piggy' contest or the Christmas theme writing contest!

I have to go to Chicago for a conference in mid-December. I am already making plans to stop and see the display ... stay tuned for a report next month.

Adoption update

We had our final home study visit on Monday evening and it went really well! We passed with flying colors. Our adoption specialist should have our completed home study to us by the end of the month -- yay! We're still on track to submit our dossier to Ethiopia by the end of the year. Once that is submitted, we will officially be 'paper pregnant' and the waiting begins.

In the meantime, we'll be reading more about Ethiopia, Mark will be experimenting with Ethiopian recipes, and we'll continue to do a few projects around the house. We're looking forward to picking up furniture for the baby's room from my sister at Christmas time. (Thanks, Heidi and Thinh!) Tonight, Mark framed two photos of giraffes from our trip to the Indy zoo. We'll hang them in the baby's room. Our theme is giraffes/jungle animals. We've discovered that this is a very popular theme for infant rooms! We're looking forward to being able to put it all together after the holidays.

Progress!

Friday night, we made a trip to Lowe's to get a few things to finish up the fireplace project. We decided to buy the paint for the accent wall, too, so that we could paint the area around the fireplace before Mark hung the mantel. Realizing that it wouldn't take too much time or effort, we decided to just paint the whole wall! And here's a picture of the results: We're so excited to see progress in the living room. This morning, I went to the carpet store to pick up some samples. Mark and I cannot wait to say "ba-bye" to the ugly blue carpet. We're making plans to paint the other three walls before we get the new carpet ... it's motivation to get it done!

Come on baby light my fire!

Here is the fireplace in our house. Outdated. Brass-y. Ugly. Can you say, hello 1972??



And look at what my wonderful husband did today ...

It's not finished just yet but doesn't it look GREAT!! Mark was able to set the tiles today and he framed out the mantel. He's going to sand and stain it but it's really looking good! The decorative tiles in the center are from Steve dePerrot pottery in my hometown of Lititz, PA. We love his work! We try to make a visit to Steve's studio each time we go to PA to see my family. It's kind of hard to see it in the photo but the tiles have leaves on them. We thought that they fit our house and all of our lovely trees very well. So we're on our way with our living room make-over project! It's our last big cosmetic project. Stay tuned for updates as we make progress.

Fall Weekend

We had a really fun weekend! We had over 150 kids stop by the studio on Friday night for free Halloween photos. There were so many people out trick-or-treating, thanks to the beautiful weather. And there were so many adorable kids and costumes! It was a little crazy at times but we had a lot of fun with it. Hopefully, it will draw people back to shop downtown Lafayette and to think of Ailor Photography when they want to have family portraits.

On Saturday, I finished my online adoption course through The Hague. Mark -- the star student of the family -- finished about two weeks ago. On Saturday afternoon, we drove over to Kokomo to meet our friends, Chris and Sarah, who are also adopting from Ethiopia. Chris and I worked together at Manchester and I got to know Sarah when she was a student at Manchester. When Mark and I announced our adoption plans, I got a flood of e-mails from our MC friends telling us about Chris and Sarah's adoption. I was so excited to make this connection! Mark and I were so thrilled to talk with them and to hear about their adoption journey and most importantly, all about their adorable little boy. (Believe me -- he's VERY cute!) They are hoping/planning to travel yet this year and we are very excited for them. Plans are in the works for a gathering here at our house later this month with many of the other families from the area who are adopting from Ethiopia. We are hoping that Sarah and Chris will be able to join us too.

From Kokomo, we drove up to Peru to celebrate Scott and Lorie's birthdays. Scott is Mark's older brother and Lorie is Scott's wife. We had a firepit going in the backyard to roast hot dogs and make smores. We also ate chili and Mark's favorite, hot dog sauce. Everything was delicious! Our great nieces, Braylee and Lily, wore their Halloween costumes -- a lady bug and a bumble bee. They were just too cute for words! I'd show you photos but I accidentally left the camera in the backyard at the Ailor's house. On the ground. Outside. Overnight. How irresponsible am I?!?! (On Saturday night, I had a crazy dream that the Ailor's backyard flooded that night and that my camera was at the bottom of the flooded yard. In my dream, the search and rescue team was there but I was too afraid to ask them to look for a camera. Anyone care to analyze my dream??) Anyway, Saturday was a beautiful evening to sit outside around the fire. Good food and good company. : )

On Sunday, we enjoyed brunch with our friends the Sharp's at IHOP. We hadn't seen them for a few weeks so it was fun to catch up with them. We enjoyed things like the creative face pancake (Sean, their 3 year old), nutella crepes (Chris) and more traditional things like omelettes and B&G's (Mark and Brian). Being the chocolate lover that I am, I upgraded my eggs and hashbrowns to include the chocolate chips pancakes. Can you say, yummy?? I knew that later in the day I would be raking leaves, thus the splurge.

Speaking of leaves, we spent about 2.5 hours raking on Sunday. And that was just round 1! We're fairly certain that we'll be raking at least one more time. Here's a photo of the large mound o' leaves by the road ... and believe me, the photo does not do it justice!

So that was our weekend in a nutshell! We've got a busy week ahead of us ... dinner with the faculty fellow floor tomorrow night, CFS Ambassadors meeting on Wednesday, photographing ladies night at Macy's on Thursday, cleaning and preparing for our home study visit to our house next week and dinner at our house with 'friends-who-formerly-lived-in-North-Manchester-but now-work-at-Purdue-and-live-in-Lafayette' (yes, there is such a group!) Deanna, Brian, Julie, Laurie and Josh. Can't wait! Yes, life is good.