Surprise Gift & Various Random Thoughts

Today I received a quilt square from my very good friend Amy and her family, husband Jim and kiddos Hannah & Evan. I became friends with Amy & Jim while we were all stationed in California. Their daughter, Hannah is exactly 6 weeks to the day younger than Eriks. There was a surprise included with the quilt fabric. I got the very cute Robeez-like shoes wrapped up in the fabric her daughter Hannah picked out for our quilt. They are just too cute and had to share!! Thanks Amy and crew! You always know how to make me smile!!!



So the WC list came out and all I will say is that there is a possibility of 6 or 7 little girls that could potentially be our daughter if we are lucky enough to be selected to review a file. We won't know anything until next Tuesday afternoon at the earliest when they start selecting families. I know lots of you are keeping your fingers crossed or are praying for us. All I can say is Thank You and I hope that energy helps channel us a daughter.

Random thoughts...

I used to love summer but now I absolutely hate it. OK, let me back-peddle a little bit. I don't think I truly hate summer, I just hate summer in the SOUTH!!! I'm a northern girl - born and raised where the windchill dips to below zero and it snows in the winter. However, when you take winters like that you actually get a pleasant summer with very few days of scorching temperatures. I have lived in the southern part of the US (with the exception of 2 yrs in the D.C. area) for all of my marriage. I don't know what the AF was thinking when it put all the active duty C-130 bases in the south. It's just past the middle of June and the temps are already in the mid 90's here. You go outside and you just start to pour sweat. How fun is that when you're cooped up in your house from about 10am until 8pm or later. I am begging the AF for our last assignment to put us somewhere that I can go outside in the summer and not worry about melting. For those of you that live in the South and love it God Bless because I sure as heck can't deal with it.

Keeping with the summer theme. So as you all know, I'm Latvian and Latvians have some pretty interesting foods that they eat. There are 3 that I won't touch with a 10 foot pole but my parents eat: pickled herring, blood sausage and aspic, usually made with pickled pigs feet. YUCK!!! However there is another delicacy that I absolutely love to eat in the summer. It's completely YUM-O!!!! My sister calls it the Pepto Bismol soup because it's very pink in color thanks to the beets that are in it. She hates it and won't touch it, but she loves pickled beets. The soup is eaten cold and I could eat this every day during the summer. It contains beets with beet greens and stems, dill, green onion, buttermilk, sour cream, and lemon juice. It took Lane several years to acquire a taste for it but now he likes it a lot. This is what it looks like:



Last thought for the day. I have to scream this at the top of my lungs. But as of tomorrow morning..."I AM DEBT FREE!!!!" Well, except for the mortgage. Some of you may or may not be familiar with Dave Ramsey. He is a hero in our books because he taught us to get our financial priorities in order. We made the decision 2 1/2 years ago after racking up massive debt adopting our son and buying things on credit that we really didn't need and financing our cars rather than paying for them in cash that we wanted to change our lifestyle so that we could save our money and invest it for retirement. According to this plan we should retire millionaires and live comfortably off of the interest. Well it took us 2 1/2 long years to pay off nearly $75K worth of debt including cars, credit cards and loans (yeah, I'm not proud), but tomorrow morning Mastercard will get their final payment. It's kind of funny how now that we don't carry balances on our credit cards the companies are now sending us "incentives" to use them. Not going to happen. And also during this time we saved money for our adoption. We're still about $4000 short but that could be easily saved since we're no longer slaves to the lender. But as of tomorrow I will be (according to statistics) in the top 4%. This means that only 4% of the US population has no debt besides a mortgage and has more than $10K in savings. Isn't that a scary statistic???? To those of you that want to live this lifestyle run to your nearest Borders or Barnes & Noble and buy the book "The Total Money Makeover" by Dave Ramsey. It will change your life!!!



Signing off for now...