'Round these here parts

A few snapshots of our life these days:
The last month or so has held a lot for us - we've definitely enjoyed the summer so far . . .

*** Our bathroom is 99% finished (has been for a few weeks)! We just have a couple of finishing touches to put in place and then I'll post before and after pictures.

*** The garden is growing! We've had a great garden year so far - radishes, lettuce, snap peas, strawberries, strawberries, strawberries, raspberries, and did I mention strawberries?

um, these are the radishes.

*** Jaron continues to delight! He is quite the jamonito (say it with your best espanol accent - it means little ham). He keeps us on our toes and laughing almost constantly.

He loves to be outside.

(nose, meet concrete. how do you do?)

The dirt is his friend.

He loves to pilfer strawberries and raspberries.

The chickens captivate him - he watches them for minutes (quite a feat) and likes to stick weeds in the fence to feed them. He loves to carry sticks around the yard whapping everything in sight. He is getting *8* teeth at once!!! We really should buy stock in Hyland's teething tablets. All of his one year molars are in or poking through and his eye teeth are just about poking through.

Jaron is also quite the little helper with baking, sweeping, loading the dishwasher, chopping scallions . . .

yep that's rhubarb

*** We attended Canby's Family Fun in the Park day and enjoyed people watching and animal petting.

*** We went strawberry picking last week with friends and had a blast! Like we need more strawberries? Made a ton of freezer jam, froze a ton for smoothies and crushed some up and froze them for desserts.

*** After a great hunt we found a baby bike seat and we've been tooling around town on our sweet ride. Geoff and I look totally dorky in our helmets - how does he look so dang cute?

*** And finally our adoption: It's hard to know what to say. If you think it's been a long time then we feel like its been eternity (ok, i know that is totally blowing it out of proportion). Here's the deal, every day all day we think about all three of our kids and our hearts long to be together - the five of us. If we could, we'd pack up and head to Burundi for the duration of this process. Our hearts hurt every time we hear "mama, papa, how are you? I love you" from the other side of the world as we talk to Justin and Emelyne on the phone. Our patience is tested every time we are told that we will hear word soon and it never comes. We are approaching two years in this Burundi process and the only certain thing is that it is not over yet. The sweet faces that we saw at 6 and 9 months old are 2 1/2 years old now. We can't really explain why our process has taken so long, it just has. There are probably explanations - some we know, most we don't. The thing is - it's not in our hands. As much as our hearts long for the day when we will be together - we can't do a thing to make it be that way. We just keep trusting and hoping and longing and trying not to let our hearts hurt so much . . .

The two sweet ones! Feb. '09

For the most part we're loving life, enjoying summer and looking with great anticipation to the future!