GIVEAWAY WINNER!

Congratulations to Patiently Waiting! I'll contact you on your blog so you can send me your address! :)

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. DH & I arrived home this afternoon, and it only took us an extra hour with traffic. (In years past it's been 2 or 3 extra hours- ugh!) Thank goodness we left early this morning. On the way home I was so excited to get my Prayer Buddy name! Woo-hoo! I can't wait to see what God has is store for all of us this Advent.

Happy First Sunday of Advent Everyone! :)

St. Cecilia & BLOG GIVEAWAY!!

Happy Feast of St. Cecilia!!

I started piano lessons in third grade and knew even then that my life would center around music. Now, I really have my dream job - teaching children to love and appreciate music. I can remember my high school choir director telling me that he'd never been to work a day in his life. I'm so fortunate to say the same... I'm paid to do something I love. And I've been blessed to get to know some wonderful children and amazing families over the years.

When I was in Italy for the first time visiting a close friend for Easter, we went to the Catacombs of San Callisto where St. Cecilia's remains were found, and were said to be uncorrupt. Our tour guide said that she was found with one hand extending one finger and the other hand extending 3 fingers indicating her love and belief in One God and the Trinity. I have a little statue in my piano studio of St. Cecilia and have often told her story to students. If you'd like to read more about her, go here.

I'm sure I mentioned it before, but one other special reason I celebrate today is that my wonderful husband proposed on this feast day! It's 5 years today! :)

Now... for the giveaway!! I'm going to give away the latest Christmas album by Michael Buble. I had hoped to have in my hot little hands at this point. (Yes, I am bad and I have listened to Christmas music before Thanksgiving!!) Unfortunately, there was a little problem with the shipment and I didn't receive it before DH & left for our Thanksgiving trip. So, I've had to settle for listening to the album on Yo.uTube so far. I think I could listen to his voice all day.

How to enter the giveaway....

1) Follow my blog if you haven't "officially" started yet and leave a response to this post letting me know you have... and leave a prayer intention.

2) If you are already following, leave a prayer intention for me! My husband and I have a weekly Adoration time at our church and I'll be taking your intentions with me during Advent.

I will post the winner on Sunday the 27th!

Good luck and Happy Feast of St. Cecilia!

2:30 AM

Apparently lemon tea with honey sparks terrific imagination. Consumed right before bed. So that you wake up at 2:15 AM raring to go. In more ways than one...... ;)

Sooo... after lying there for a bit trying to fall back to sleep, I decided to get up and do something about the ideas buzzing in my head. And now, 5 1/2 hours later, my profile book is almost done! :-D

And it looks really good, if I do say so myself, haha. :) I even wrote our Dear Birthmother letter! Of course DH has to add his part to introduce me, and go over the birthmother letter. I'm sure he'll have things to add or edit. But I feel great about it overall. The only thing I do need is a good cover photo.

Question for all of you who have done profiles... here's the one I'm considering:

This was on our Italy trip last fall and I really like our smiles. (Hello!? Of course we're smiling, we're eating breakfast outside a little cafe in Venice!!) But, the random guy between our heads... Maybe I can try to fade the background or something.

Or ... should I go for a more formal photo and put this on the inside with our Dear Birthmother letter? I want a photo on that page to break up the writing. (I don't actually have a formal photo yet. I'm hoping to get a friend to take some pictures of us outside this weekend as long as it's nice.

Anyway... your thoughts??

Oh, and I also have 2 other smaller photos on the cover page, but this is the "attention grabber". The one that says "PICK US!! PICK US!!!" :-D

And now... well.. I'm a little tired now. The adrenaline must be wearing off... I hope I don't fall asleep at mass!

Woo-hoo!

For 2 reasons... :)

1) DH & I had a great trip to Pittsburgh this past weekend - fun times with family and the Steelers game on Sunday! It was a late game and we got back really late Sunday night, and I am still recovering from sleep deprivation, but it was worth it... especially since the Steelers beat the Patriots!! Fin.a.lly. :)

I tried loading a video of the crowd cheering after the Steelers got the safety at the end of the game, but since it's taking forever to upload (the file is probably too big), this photo I saw posted over and over again on fac.ebook will probably be enjoyed also by the lovely Rebecca and Patiently Waiting... who are both Steelers fans!

2) Another BIG woo-hoo is that we are Home Study approved! I got an email from our agency Monday morning that our copy is on its way to us. Yay!! I'll feel better when I have it in my hands, but all the same, it's good news. For those of you adopting, how long did you work on your profile books? I'm creative, but I'm worrying that my perfectionist tendencies are going to make it take longer. Maybe I should just give myself a deadline. :)

Happy Wednesday, everyone! Don't forget to keep praying for this sweet blogger who had surgery yesterday!

Thankful Thursday

1) First, thank you Rebecca for hosting these! Thankful Thursdays along with today's post by the lovely Lauren are a great reminder that we all have much MORE to be grateful for than we usually think...

2) My wonderful, amazing husband. (He's always going to be at the top of my list). He's compassionate, caring, generous, thoughtful, hard-working and the bestest friend ever. I'm so lucky to be his wife!!

3) All of you bloggers... your comments on my last post gave me so much hope... and I don't feel quite so alone now. THANK YOU!!

4) Our agency... AFTH. We're having a class this Saturday for waiting parents, and the topic is relationships with birthparents. There will be (I think) 2 birthmothers along with the adoptive families there to talk with us. I'm really looking forward to it. And hopefully, we're soon to receive our home study approval. The next job is to complete our profile book and video. Then we're "in the books"!

5) Ahhh... it's that time of year. It's fall. Which means football season. GO STEELERS! And hockey season. GO PENS!!! :-D

6) I'm thankful for the challenge of a dairy-less pizza. I just started trying to go without dairy 2 weeks ago, and have noticed a bit of a difference already. It's essentially paleo- meats, fish, eggs, and lots of fruits and veggies. Nuts and good oils for fats. We'll see. Obviously, I'll never go back to gluten, but dairy I may end up cheating on every now and then!! So anyway, tomorrow's pizza will be topped with fresh tomatoes, spinach, green peppers, sausage and maybe a bit of onion. I'm going to stick with my GF dough, since I still have a ton of packages left!

7) A wedding date (my mom's birthday!), church, reception hall, and dress for my sister V's wedding. She found the dress when I was visiting a few weeks ago. She looks BEAUTIFUL!! :) Please pray that she finds a photographer soon! :)

What are you thankful for today?

CD1 through 3...

Warning... this is not a happy post.

CD1 arrived... in the middle of mass... this past Sunday... on the Feast of St. Gerard. Lovely.

Later that evening I had a wonderful sob-fest on my DH's shoulder (seriously, he is a saint to put up with me), after reading about yet another person who had Crohn's disease who essentially cured it by DIET. Not by steroids (though she had been on LOADS of them, just like me), not by having her colon removed, but by DIET. That's it. So cheap (well, except that organics and a gluten and dairy free diet are not particularly cheap which is what I'm doing now), and so simple. Why, oh why, wasn't I more persistent? Why did I just accept the doctor's answer when he said there are no links? How can there NOT be??? If you're putting something in your body that your body doesn't like, OF COURSE there will be a reaction. And it certainly makes sense that if it's food, your body will react somewhere along the digestive tract. Part of me knows (and DH said this too) that I did the best I could at the time, but the word that just kept coming to me on Sunday night was failure. I'm failing in what is supposed to come so naturally. If it weren't for my colectomy, I probably wouldn't have so much trouble conceiving. My hormone levels are good now. CM is usually pretty good (some cycles not so much, others it's great). But all the adhesions... my uterus fused to the back of my abdominal wall. The tubes and ovaries buried in a mass of adhesions. For 6 YEARS before I got married and tried to conceive. I was so utterly clueless. And... I just feel like such a failure.

I used to thank God all the time for my surgery because I was so sick before. And I was so happy not to be going to doctors offices every few weeks. Little did I know... it wasn't really a cause for rejoicing. It was only going to give me more YEARS of grief. I would laugh at the irony of it all, except it's not funny any more. Not at all.

Yesterday, CD2 had me running late for mass (I slept in because really, all I want to do is stay in bed and be miserable), missing communion because we have a new pastor who doesn't yet know me (our previous one was really kind in whenever I would be late (which I try very hard not to be) he would have one of the servers get the extra chalice). So... no communion for me. And I just started crying... pretty much the whole mass. Trying very hard not to make it obvious. Afterwards, I planned to wait a little longer than usual so the church would be really cleared out before I left, and a old lady came up to me to tell me I could go receive communion after mass... I really wanted to yell at her! A sweet little old lady! IF I CAN'T RECEIVE THE HOST DURING MASS, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I CAN RECEIVE IT OUTSIDE MASS?! Fortunately, I didn't yell that at her, I just told her I wasn't feeling well, and hoped she would go away. But I wasn't very kind.

I hate the person that I become when IF rears its ugly head. And I feel powerless to stop it.

At the post office, this morning (after I took a pregnancy test to make sure I'm "not" pregnant before taking the Letrezole-  ha!) I dropped off some final papers for our SW for the home study. On my way out, a lovely and VERY pregnant woman was standing at the self-mailer. Seriously? Why couldn't it have been an old man with a cane or something? I arrived home and pulled into the driveway only to have my neighbor getting out of her car with her BRAND NEW baby. Yeah... it's obviously going to be one of those weeks.

I feel like St Theresa... "If this is how you treat your friends, Lord...."

Maybe in a few days, I'll take this post down. It's so depressing. Ugh. I sure hope it blows over soon.

Saturday Snapshots

1) The adoption class was terrific. It was so nice to meet the SWs in the agency since they'll be the ones we work with once the HS is completed. I have to start working on our profile book though now - we have to make 15 copies (they are 10 pages long (either single sheet or 5 front-back) so that each agency can give them to the birthmothers. We also have to make a DVD - once the birthmom narrows her selection, she'll usually watch 3-5 interviews with each prospective family. They're about 5 minutes long... and the agency has a company they work with specifically in each region. We watched a few to give us an idea of what the finished product looks like. It doesn't look like I'll be able to play the piano though! Not unless I can drag it into the studio, haha. :)

2) I'm enjoying reading the Prayer Buddy reveals. I knew it was coming up but it was the week of piano camp; I was packing for 2 vacations, and getting ready for the kitchen remodel; and then official sign-up occurred during our vacation and I wasn't online that much to remember to sign-up. So... I missed it this time around. :( I'm looking forward to Advent prayer buddies!! I've been praying for all of you when I read your posts though!

3) MY SISTER V. IS ENGAGED!!! I am over-the-moon excited. :-) Wedding planning is in full swing. Next week I'll have a chance to do some dress shopping and probably reception-site shopping. They haven't set a date yet, which probably depends mostly on the reception site. They are considering a Friday wedding, I think. The only trouble is that the groom's family lives quite far away... he doesn't expect a ton of people to travel, but no one in his immediate family lives close. A Friday wedding means more time off work for people. But - we've had 3 cousins in CA with Friday weddings, and have attended a few others, so it seems like they're more popular. Plus, they're cheaper! :)

4) And hot on V's tail is my sister S!!! She and her boyfriend got together with my parents earlier this week for dinner to discuss getting engaged sometime before Christmas and married sometime next summer - after V. that is! I can't believe there might be 2 weddings in the family! S hasn't been dating her boyfriend all that long... but I really can't point fingers since DH and I only dated 3 months before getting engaged! I guess when you know, you know... :) Please pray for both sisters. Both will have to move. I remember how difficult it was to make friends at first after I got married and moved to a new city. Fortunately my sister M was only 20 minutes away. That helped tremendously. V will be a few hours from me so hopefully that will help.  S will be 2 hours from home, but she suffers from anxiety (she has a history of depression too) and any change is difficult for her. Hopefully the months of planning the wedding will help her adjust and prepare for the change.

5) We're going to surprise DH's brother tomorrow evening!!!! I'm so excited!!! :-D He is performing in the Music Man and while he knows his parents and another brother/SIL are coming, he doesn't expect DH and me. Woo-hoo! Can't wait to see him, and the show. I was in the pit orchestra in high school for Music Man and know it well. BIL is part of the quartet.

6) I joined our church choir this year. I've really missed being part of an ensemble. If I had to choose, I'd rather play an instrument (I was in a handbell choir for awhile before I got married and LOVED it) but singing is good for me... I sang soprano for years and years until finally singing alto one semester in undergrad when I realized that was what I should have been doing all along. I always hear the top notes of a chord - never the inner voices. Singing alto helps tremendously. :)

Happy weekend, everyone!! :)