in other news

i wanted to do a little update that doesn't involve doom and gloom about our adoption. the truth is, i make it out of bed in the mornings. i function throughout the day. i'm not sad all the time and, in fact, am mostly joyful about life. yes, the adoption has been painful and hard as of late, but it does not totally define my entire life. so here are some very random tidbits that are a peek into our world...

jamie got me one of these for christmas.

my parents were so surprised that i would even want a sewing machine that they were convinced the box had been delivered to the wrong house. i had mentioned a few times before christmas that i might want to learn to sew. i attended a friend's baby shower back in november where she received several handmade gifts, and it occurred to me that if i could learn to sew, i could make handmade gifts too. unfortunately, i'm not a very crafty person and am scared of failure, so it took me a month just to take the machine out of the box and use it. thankfully, my friend, erin, was there to help me, and i have successfully completed two of these, though the stitches aren't straight and neither is my cutting. i have a lot to work on, but now i'm motivated.

recently, i've gone on a crusade against high fructose corn syrup. it's not that jamie and i have suddenly transformed into the healthiest eaters on the planet, but we are trying to make better decisions about what we consume. fast food, for example, is a killer on the body and the budget, so i wish we could just go cold turkey on it. i've tried to get into reading labels at the grocery store, and i'm amazed at how much stuff has hfcs as an ingredient. many brands of bread use hfcs, which offends me because people easily make their own bread and don't have to use hfcs. then i noticed that my jelly and salad dressing also contained hfcs. they even put it in yogurt and chocolate milk! seriously, soda is the only product containing hfcs that doesn't offend me because i expect it in my soda...but not in my bread.

i just finished the chronicles of narnia for the first time! i love cs lewis. i know that's the most christian cliche thing to say, but i don't care. that man has saved my faith in many ways, and i most definitely plan to give one of my sons the middle name lewis. what i love about lewis is that he pushed the boundaries while also ardently defending orthodoxy. i like to think that's what i try to do on my best days. now i'm reading a book about dogs that is proving to be pretty interesting.

hmmm...what else to say? i'm coming up on 6 months working the same temp job. i think i'm guaranteed to keep this job until i need to quit as long as the housing market continues to suck. i'm currently on the look-out for a cheap table that i can paint teal and use as a sewing table. we almost, on a whim, painted a magnetic chalkboard wall in our sunroom (which will be our kid's play area downstairs). we're still going to paint one, but we realized it probably shouldn't be done on a whim. we love our church and feel like there's no other place we'd rather grow in our faith and raise our children. we finally, i think, have names for our kids -- 1 girl name, 2 boy names. whichever name we don't use now will be saved for the next kid, which i just assume we will have (probably by adoption, but i haven't totally ruled out pregnancy).

OK, i think that's enough about me. what about you? current reads? current crusades against evil, fake food ingredients?