Long Time in Between

It’s been months since I’ve posted, and so much has happened in that time.  We were matched to adopt a baby girl due in June, but that match fell through at the last-minute.  We’ve been traveling (Colorado most recently) and trying to live our lives as a family of two, but it’s hard at times.

We’re back on the adoption wait, hoping for a match soon.  I have a couple of trips planned coming up (FL to visit a friend and KY with my bestie), so that helps pass the time!  I’ll try to get back on here and post more often, especially with all my crafts and home remodel stuff!

Oh!  And also training for triathlons now!  I completed my first one in early June and I have two more that I’m already registered for!  It’s hard work, but helps me focus my energy, so that’s good!  I’ll post more on those at a later date!

Missed you all, hope you’re well,
K.

Quilting Along!

In my last post, I talked about how I was planning on making a few baby quilts for when we’re finally matched and bring home our baby.  I decided to make a “girl” and a “boy” quilt, and then I can donate whichever one we don’t end up needing.  Since this was my first quilt, I really wanted something simple and easy to do, and I found a really neat pattern from Fat Quarter Shop, called Jelly Roll Jam.  There’s even a YouTube tutorial!

So, over the past 10 days, I’ve been frantically waiting for my second jelly roll of fabric to arrive (I wanted to mix and match from two different rolls, but didn’t realize this until after getting my first jelly roll in the mail).  Once it showed up, it was time to get quilting!  All in all, I probably put in around 10 hours, from start to finish, and I am really happy with how this first quilt turned out!  I machine quilted it and used my sewing machine to bind it as well (who has time for hand sewing?!), and I can’t wait to throw it in the wash a few times to really soften it up!

The “Boy” quilt is next…I’m excited to see how it turns out as well!

Much love,
K.

More Nursery Schenanigans

Ok…not really schenanigans, more so that it’s just another opportunity for me to take on another hobby that I will inevitably spend too much money buying supplies on.

A month or so ago, I decided that I wanted to make another blanket for the nursery.  Crochet will always be my first love, but I didn’t want everything to be crocheted in the room, and I’ve been wanting to do more sewing for quite some time, so I thought now was a good time to get started.  So…I started YouTubing for some easy quilt tutorials and came across one from Fat Quarter Shop called Jelly Roll Jam.  It looked fairly easy (because, well, everything on YouTube looks easy!), and I really liked the finished product, plus all the fabric was precut, so I was hoping this was a safe bet for a first quilt.  I asked a few of my quilting friends and they all told me it was a good starter quilt, so I felt better about my plan.  I stalked some fabric websites, picked out some fabric, bought the “necessary” supplies, and am now getting ready to go!

My fabric came in last night.  I ended up buying two Jelly Rolls so that I could mix and match the fabric lines.  I plan on making TWO quilts, a “boy” quilt and a “girl” quilt.  We have no idea what sex we’ll end up being matched with, so I figure I can put them both up in the closet and then pull out the right quilt when the time comes.  I can either just put up the other quilt (in the hopes that we adopt a second child), or I can pass it on to a friend with a child…or the cats will just “liberate” it for their use.  We’ll see…or maybe we’ll adopt twins!  If I sew it, they will come, right??

I plan on getting started later today, and I’ll do another post on my progress.  Of course, the lady on YouTube sews the entire top of the quilt in 20 minutes, but I have a feeling it’ll take quite a bit longer for me.  I’ll post photos once it’s something more than a pile of fabric strips though!  Wish me luck on my newest hobby!

Much love,
K.

Long Time with No Posts…

I realized this morning, as I was washing my hair (seriously, some of my best laid plans are hatched while I’m washing my hair…there’s something so soothing about the hot water, the smell of the shampoo, the peaceful quiet of the morning where anything is possible…but I digress) that it had been quite some time since I had posted on my blog.  I had told myself at the beginning of the year, that I would try harder to not neglect my blog…that I’d post at least once a week, even if it was just a mindless dump of the random happenstances in life.  Sure enough…didn’t happen…obviously.  Which is why I’m now apologizing (somewhat verbosely) to all you readers for my slacking.

Let’s see…what’s been going on?  Not a whole lot, to be honest.  We’ve been keeping ourselves busy throughout the adoption wait, even though it feels like it’s been forever.  It’s been nearly 3 months since we went “live” with our agency, and nothing so far.  I thought I’d be ok with the wait once the home study was signed off on, because everything would be out of my hands.  Wow…was I wrong.  This wait is HARD.  Some days I don’t think about it a lot, other days it’s all that is on my mind.  But, overall, it’s moving along!

The house is coming together, somewhat slowly, but surely.  We’re working on the basement…the pool table room is finally painted (first time it’s been all one color in over 2 years), and we’re ordering the ceiling shortly.  Thankfully, not a TON needs done in that room after the ceiling…a few tiles need replaced, then do all the trim work, but that’s about it!  Then we can mount the TV, pull back in the exercise equipment, and call it a day!  Then, we can focus more on the nursery stuff, which has taken a backseat to other home remodels.

Otherwise, work is going well.  Same stuff, different day.  J and I have been trying to make more of an effort to exercise and get outside while the weather is nice, so that’s been really good.  We both bought kayaks, so we try to get out on the lake or the river at least once or twice a week…it’s something we can do together that we really enjoy, plus it’s super relaxing!  We don’t really have any major trips lined up, at least not this summer.  We’ll be doing a roadtrip in the fall to visit a friend in Connecticut, so that’ll be really fun!  All things to look forward to, which is nice.

And that’s about it!  Life has been moving on, steadily, this past month.  I haven’t been crocheting much (too hot outside and I haven’t really felt the impulse to create anything), so that’s been put on hold.  I’m sure once the weather cools off, I’ll start in again, probably another baby blanket for the adoption.  We keep hanging on and hanging out, and hopefully soon you’ll be seeing an update that we’ve been matched!

Much love,
K.

Baby Blankets

When we lived overseas, I would often times run out of things to do in order to pass the time.   We traveled quite a bit (we were there 3.5 years), but during the week, after work, I needed hobbies.  So, I decided to teach myself to crochet.  I had learned a long time ago, when I was in elementary school, but I had forgotten pretty much all of it except how to make a chain, so I needed to relearn from scratch.  Luckily, all things can be taught via YouTube, so it wasn’t too bad!

With my newly acquired skills, I decided that I wanted to make my pregnant friends  a baby blanket for a present.  I liked to crochet, and I wanted my friends to have something handmade to give to their children.  While overseas, I made 3-4 blankets for friends, and after repatriating back to the US, I made several more.  But, I’d never made any for myself (and after three years of infertility, I was worried I never would).  However, now that we’re officially “on the shelf” with our adoption profile, I decided I could go ahead and make a blanket for our baby, whenever that baby decides to show up!  Last night, I finished it up, so it’s ready go to!  I plan on backing it with soft jersey knit material (or flannel), in a boy/girl specific color once we have the baby home, but for now, it’s as complete as it can get.  I’m completely in love with it, and can’t wait to wrap our baby up in it!

Much love,
K.

Crochet Blanket, finally finished!

Oy, have I been remiss in posting.  Many of you probably remember that I was doing a Crochet Challenge in 2015.  The idea was to do two granny squares a week, and then piece together as I go, and the finished product would be a queen size afghan to go on our spare bedroom bed.  Well, much like most things in life, it didn’t exactly go to plan.  I took a few months off during the summer last year, and then slacked every now and then.  But, last month, I finished it up and added the border!   It’s very colorful and it turned out a little smaller than I anticipated, but I’m still really happy with how it looks.  It’ll be perfect for a twin size bed, when we have a little one!  So, here it is!  Ready to go on the bed! (the cats seem to love it too)

Much love,
K.

 

 

 

Through the Process

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated, but we’ve been anything but quiet!  Over the past few months, we’ve been going through the process of a domestic infant adoption, and today was our home visit!  As of now, we are in the waiting process for a placement, and it could happen any time!

Read more about it on my other site: Chancing a Dream!

Much love,
K.

Whirlwind

It’s been a month, but what a month it has been.  J and I have been planning out our cruise, and getting stuff done with work.  I’ve been traveling for work a bit, and right now I’m sitting at our offices in Wisconsin.  It’s been insanely busy, but not too stressful (which is good…normally busy = stressed in my life), and overall I’m just plugging along.

However, there have been some major changes going on!  After our failed IVF last year, we had intended on doing another cycle in February.  Then, we booked a cruise, that had us going to the Caribbean, and with the Zika virus outbreak and scare going on, we weren’t comfortable trying to get pregnant prior to going into a potential hot bed for the virus.  So, we decided to push off IVF until after we returned from the cruise, since my meds weren’t going to expire any time soon.

And that was all good and well.  I mean, it wasn’t ideal or anything, but we would have handled it.  But honestly, ever since our failed IVF, I haven’t really felt very confident in this next round working.  And, while my IVF cycle was VERY easy (I didn’t have a lot of problems with the meds or the procedure), I wasn’t really keen on putting my body through all that again for little to no payout.  J and I started talking about options, and he opened up that he wasn’t overly confident in the next IVF round working as well, so we decided to just not go forward with it.  With both of us feeling defeated before we even began, it didn’t make much sense to throw so much time and money at the issue, not to mention medical procedures that have a level of risk involved.

Which left us with a few different options.  We considered embryo adoption for a short while, but decided that we weren’t really interested in going down that path.  I am not really tied to the idea of being pregnant, only in being a mother, so at the end of the day I’d be fine skipping pregnancy altogether.  Once we discussed that, the decision was pretty clear…we were moving on to adoption!

And, with that…here we are.  We’ve started the home study process with our chosen adoption agency, and are in the midst of gathering mountains of paperwork.  Luckily, it’s all pretty easy to compile, except for our background checks from when we lived in the Netherlands.  That’s requiring a bit more finagling than I initially realized, but thankfully we have good friends who are Dutch and have been helping us out.  We’re very excited to be moving forward down this path, and can’t wait to bring home a baby!!  It feels right, which only adds to the excitement of it all.  Hopefully, the process will move smoothly and we’ll be growing our family shortly!

Much love,
K.

The Lone Star State

I haven’t really been talking much about work lately.  Last year, I moved out of a role in Program Management, and into a role in Sales and Marketing, as an Account Executive working with our Off-Highway customers.  While living in Europe, I worked as an Account Manager in On-Highway, so I was familiar with the work and was really excited to advance my customer interactions and commercial knowledge.

However, in mid-November, my company announced that we’d be doing workforce reductions (a.k.a. “layoffs”).  This was the third layoff that I’d experienced with this company, so I knew that things were going to be in flux for awhile.  I wasn’t too worried about my position (though, anything can happen), but I knew that my group would probably take a hit.

So…imagine my surprise (and actually, I was shocked as hell), when I got pulled into a meeting with my boss and the General Manager to be told that, due to the layoffs, I was being moved into a new position, BACK into Program Management.  So…here I am, 1 week before Christmas, and I’m being told that I’m leaving the role that I just moved into a few months prior, to go back to a role that I’d left.

I won’t lie…it took a day or so for me to wrap my mind around it and to get into a positive mindset.  I was worried that I’d be overloaded like I was in my previous role, and the customer that I was going to be working with was notorious for being highly demanding.  Frankly, I was terrified my life was going to suck.

I’m happy to say, after a full month, things are going fairly decently!  I’m currently in Texas at a face-to-face meeting with the customer, and I’m feeling fairly settled.  It’s a lot more firefighting than I did in Account work, but it’s exciting.  The program launches in 2017, so I will be on this team for a year or so…and after that, I’m not quite sure.

That’s a little bit about what’s going on in my life currently!  I’m super excited because, on Friday, I get to spend the weekend with my BFF, L!  We’re going to drive to Waco and go to Magnolia Market (from the HGTV show “Fixer Upper”) and I can’t wait!  Plus, I will say, Texas has some AMAZING food!  Plenty to enjoy in this great state, for sure

Much love,
K.

Infinity Scarf

As I was going through my older posts, I realized that my slacker ways conspired to ruin me.  In a post from September, where I was gushing over some fabulous yarn, I promised you all an update on the infinity scarf that I crocheted with the yarn.  And then…*poof* I scampered off and left you all hanging.  My mistake.

I did finish the scarf…and it is glorious.  I wear it nearly every day, and it’s part of my winter style.  I used a simple Tunisian crochet stitch, and just made a super long scarf, then stitched the two ends together so that I could wrap it around my neck.  I’m seriously considering making a few more of these, in different colors, because I love wearing them all winter long…so soft and cozy!

Please forgive my cheesy grin and bad lighting.  Again, another iPhone photo, and one that I was snapping to send a friend for a quick “do you want one of these” question…so it’s not exactly Vogue.  Oh well…you get the idea.

Much love,
K.