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!