Ikea Couch Real Cheap

Last week Ariel decided that he could no longer tolerate our half mangled Ikea couch. It did not stand up well to our children...since we have less than no money due to our adoption, he somehow had to come up with a new couch that cost very, very little - but was still better than what we have. This led us to Craig's list and a near miss of my dream couch; a red Pottery Barn sectional for 200$. We finally settled on this nice looking big sectional and rented a U-Haul to drive fifty miles to pick it up. After finding out that the rental truck wasn't really 20$, but in fact charged $.60/mile I wasn't super thrilled - I was pretty okay with our decrepit Ektorp.
After going through a seemilngly very long drive to get to the seller's house - I was not going to leave without a new couch. The good news is the couch is in good condition and is a very nice, high end big, comfy couch - the bad news is it is pretty ugly. It has a very weird grey/tan quilty pattern that doesn't match at all with what little aesthetic I have. Combine that with getting lost, almost running out of gas, stopping at a very sketchy gas station, and letting Isaac eat an entire bag of sugared gummy worms - and it made for a VERY memorable evening. But now our new, somewhat ugly, but still very nice couch sits monopolizing our living room. I figure at least I won't feel that bad as our children slowely destroy the couch over the next several years.
Anyone want an Ikea couch for real cheap? Must Pick Up.

Happy Father's Day!

I just wanted to say that this is my husband, who is one of the best fathers I have ever met. He gets his kids breakfast in the morning and sits down to watch cartoon with them....he puts them to bed every night after reading them a story...he spends seven hours baking them birthday cakes....he draws Big Wheel racing courses in our cul de sac and spends hours racing around with them. He is fun, and loving and wonderful. it is truly a pleasure to get to watch him be a great Dad.

We Love You and Thanks for being you! - Mary Ellen, Isaac, and Elias

June Birthdays

Ariel has a tradition of making really fantastic birthday cakes for the boys...June 7th was Elias's 3rd birthday and Ar made him a train cake. Everything you see on this train is completely edible - it even has candy tracks. Sorry the picture is to small to appreciate it fully - I am still not very good at this photo shop thing.






My birthday isn't until the 27th - but Ariel bought me this very snazzy wetsuit last time we went surfing. He didn't even tell me that it was all mine - I just thought that the surf shop had really upgraded it's rentals. Ariel is winning kudos left and right.

Isaac is done with kindergarten next week, and any day know we will learn our travel dates to Ethiopia. If you haven't already recieved an invite (and you live in Western Washington) my 30th birthday is now an adoption shower - and we would love for anyone we know to come!

Calgon, Take me Away

Since my to do list today includes writing a paper, studying for a test, putting away a pile of laundry so big it makes me want to cry, and convincing my lovely two year old son that peeing on our elderly dog is not even a little funny...I decided that what I really need to do is write a blog.

I picked up a Lonely Planet about Ethiopia and now have a much better idea of what to expect in our July trip to Addis Ababa. There are some neat sounding ethnological/historical museums, a giant outdoor market (the largest in Africa) with lots of pickpockets, yummy restaraunts, and thanks to Ethiopia being the place where coffee was first discovered and having been occupied by Italians - lots of great coffee shops. And it is not a malarial zone, which I am really, really grateful for since a previous round of antimalarial medication left me somewhat unhinged. Best of all, of course, Ethiopia is were our soon to be daughters are living. Since we have found out that we only need to be in Addis for five days, I have decided that Ariel and I will be spending 3 days in Paris on our 'layover'. This will our first and probably only vacation until our kids reach adulthood -so I am seizing the opportunity.

All this thinking about trips has got me making mental lists of trips I want to take as a family -and what better thing to do with a mental list than post it on the web??

• Take a train trip across Canada from Vancouver to Nova Scotia - with stops in Banff, Montreal and Toronto



• Taking our entire extended family to Saladita, Mexico for a few weeks, where we can surf this wave and speak spanish.



• Spending two weeks somewhere in Italy - maybe Cinque Terre, maybe a farm in Puglia


• A month long camping trip down the California Coast

Thirty Books for My Thirtieth Birthday

I love books beyond just about anything else (non-living) in my life. Since my thirtieth birthday is coming up (June 27th), my MIL suggested that I write out a list of thirty books I would like to own, but don't. It was really, really fun and a huge waste of my precious time :). So I finally finished the list, and here it is.

1. Virginia Woolf The Waves
2. Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing
3. Virginia Woolf: The Virginia Woolf Reader
4. James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
5. Vladamir Nabakov: Speak Memory
6. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions
8. Jorge Luis Borges: Aleph and Other Stories
9. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
10. The Complete Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
11. Spoonful of Ginger by Nina Simmonds
12.A problem from hell –Stephanie Powers
13. Crime and Punishment – Dosteovsky translated by Pevear/Volokhonsky
14. There is No Me without You – Melissa Faye Green
15. Middlemarch by George Eliot
16. A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani
17. The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden
18. The Complete New Yorker on CD ROM
19. The Complete National Geographic on CD ROM
20. The Proper study of mankind by Isaiah Berlin
21. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson
22. Stories of Anton Chekov translated by Pevear/volokhonsky
23. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
24. Plutarch’s Lives Vol. 1 of The Modern Library Classics
25. Harry Potter; Books 1-5 and book 7
26. Ahead of All Parting: The Essential Poetry and Prose of Rainier Marie Rilke
27. The Portable Walt Whitman
28. The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer
29. The Isles, A History by Norman Davies
30. The Polish Way by Adam Zamoyski

Fishy and Sharky

We added two more vertebrates to our family. Two nice little gold fish that Isaac named, you guessed, Fishy and Sharky. I would post their pictures, but I am supposed to be writing a paper. Isaac has wanted fish for awhile, and one day, I just gave in. My biggest concern is how two tiny fish in a 3 gallon tank manage to stink so bad. We have a filter. They had all clean water. Yet, after only a few days, the tank is murky and smells terrible. I also know that I am not going to clean out that stupid tank after one week.
On Friday afternoon I had my first patient have anaphalyctic reaction to a chemo. I started his very first dose of chemo and five minutes later he was not breathing, or moving, and his heart wasn't beating.
It is funny in t.v. shows (I am think of House, in particular) anaphalyaxis is very dramatic - the patient clutches at their throat, and maybe gets a scream out. This man just slumped over. After our code team descended and took over, though, he revived and was able to leave the hosptial two days later, about the same time I stopped shaking. I am proud to say I did what I was supposed to and didn't completely lose it, though. I can now put, "made it through a code" under my accomplished before I turn thirty list.
Tonight Ariel and I pick up my parents from the airport, where in their mid sixties, they are returning from their very first trip abroad. They went to Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy for two weeks.

Sooner, Rather than Later

I have been horribly impatient my entire life. I get things done as soon as I can, and am ansty when I have to wait for someone else. So it is no suprise that I dragged Ariel through the adoption paperwork at warp speed - that's my way. Everything only started with Ariel saying last December "Maybe we should think about adopting". At the start of the process, we were told probably 12-18 months, which meant no sooner than this winter.
Now, because of my quickness and deciding on the girls who are already avaiable, we have been notified that we can expect to travel to Ethiopia in July to pick them up. JULY! I am incredibly excited to have them come home with us, but I am in no way ready. Imagine if you were expecting a baby and then got told, oh BTW, your baby is really due three months after you concieved her. So now Ariel and I have some serious scrambling to do - bedrooms, clothes, oh - and money to fly us all to and from Ethiopia by JULY. Yikes.
I think that we are going to resort to sending out letters letting people know what it is we need help with. We have kind of resisted doing this...who doesn't get a little annoyed by a letter asking for stuff? What do you think about the whole letter fundraising thing?