and now we wait!

I think we've all realized by now that blogging is not my gift. But I will try to do my best to update you as we continue on our adoption journey!

Much has happened since my last post. We are finished with our part of the home study process. Here's a timeline:

September 19: preliminary application done
September 21: statements of faith done
September 30: formal application done
October 13: intake interview with our Bethany social worker
October 18: turned in all of our paperwork
October 28 - 29: attended Bethany two-day adoption training in Fredericksburg
November 2: 1st home study interview with our social worker
November 9: actual home study portion at our home as well as individual interviews with social worker
November 17: final home study interview with social worker!

As you just read, yesterday was our final interview - we handed in our profile books (which you can preview here: http://www.mixbook.com/photo-books/interests/adoption-profile-copy-6153592) and finalized our service plan detailing what we're open to for our match.

Our social worker told us that she would hand off our profile books to the expectant parent counselors in a couple of weeks and that our home study should be approved by mid-December.

Now we wait.

This is a weird spot to be in - with the home study process, we constantly had a form to fill out, a profile book to work on, a house to clean, a book to read, or an interview to prepare for. Well, we still have a house to clean, but we had a feeling of control with all of that. Feelings of control have left the building. This is a good thing, I know. We really believe that God has a lot to teach us during this time, and that we need to be open to listening to Him and discovering how he wants us to grow as we prepare to be parents. This process has brought Paul and I even closer together, and we want each day in this in between time a day that we grow in our love for each other and our love for Jesus.

We very much appreciate your continued prayers and words of encouragement! We love that our family and friends are so excited with us and for us. In fact, we shared with our social worker that our support system is amazing! (We were bragging about YOU!)

I hope that you have an amazing Thanksgiving and time with family. Paul and I will be cruising the Southern Caribbean post-Thanksgiving, and it is PERFECT timing. Cannot wait! Thanks for checking in!

(In other news, today was Regis' last show. I may have cried a little.)

a few of the things making me happy this morning.

Well, there's this guy. He planned a really fun night out for us with Amanda last night. He's just wonderful.

So good.

I found this picture of my niece on my camera. And it's almost just as awesome as she is.

Mallie is going collar-less this morning. I always think she looks a little bit wild when she's naked.

What's making you happy this morning?

Adoption Update

Here's the quick version of what's happening on the adoption front. We are moving right along!

We have finished filling out all of our paperwork. It was quite a stack - everything from financials to fingerprints to a fire escape plan for our house (yes, I purposefully incorporated the alliteration there). We were super motivated to get it done  - we got it last Thursday and turned it in on Tuesday. Booyah.

This week, Paul and I both are having physicals done. Next week, we have our two-day adoption training. The following week (1st week of November), we'll have a conjoint interview with the social worker. The week after that (2nd week of November), we'll have our individual interviews and our home study. The 3rd week of November, we'll have our final interview. And then we will be done!! The next week is Thanksgiving and then we'll be off our on cruise. We should be approved by mid-December at the latest if all goes according to plan. Pray that schedules will align, and we can stick to this plan!

Like I said, moving right along! Thanks so much for your questions, support, and prayers! We're excited!

Feeling Domestic

I realize that it has been a long time since I posted. For some reason today, I'm all about posting again. The only common thread I can figure is that it is once again 62 degrees in our house after weeks of a very comfortable 68-72 range.

Anyhoo, moving on. What can make a person feel more like a domestic goddess than making her own apple butter and canning it?! Well, probably lots of things, and this is probably not impressive for most, but as far as I'm concerned, that is just the ticket!!

So I'd thought I'd share the process with you so that you too can feel the joy of doing the same.

Here you go. (I adapted my recipe from reading a bunch of other recipes). BTW, I'd recommend starting this before you go to bed on a Friday night and finishing it Saturday morning. It's hard to be patient. And your house will smell amazing when you wake up!

Domestic Goddess Crockpot Apple Butter

10 - 11 apples (or enough to fill a 4 qt crockpot to the brim when cored and chopped) I used galas.
2 T vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
5 tsp cinnamon*
1/4 tsp nutmeg*
1/4 tsp salt

*adjust these spices as you'd like. I like a lot of cinnamon - I'll probably use more next time, but I'm not a huge fan of nutmeg.

1. Core and slice the apples. Don't worry about peeling. It's annoying and takes way to long. We'll deal with the peels later. Put sliced apples into food processor, and let the machine do all the work to chop them.

2. Fill crockpot to the brim with chopped apples.

3. Pour vanilla over apples.

4. Mix sugar and spices in a medium bowl. Pour mixture over apples and mix until well incorporated.

5. Cook on High for 1 hour. Then continue to cook on low for 11 - 12 more. Stir occasionally to break up the apples.

6. This is the part where you'll have to deal with the peels. Still it will be much quicker than peeling all those apples. Transfer apples to a blender and blend until smooth. Return to crockpot. I had to do 2 batches. Still, faster than peeling!

7. Cook for another 1.5 - 2 hours with the lid off until apple butter reduces to desired thickness.

See, wasn't that easy? Now the problem is going to be that you'll have all of this delicious apple butter that you cannot possibly eat before it goes bad. You can freeze it or can it. Or give it away immediately. I decided to try my hand at canning. We made 5 half-pint jars of apple butter. I won't outline the process because I am probably a poor example of how to can something considering we rigged up a rack and my pot was no where near big enough. But I will show you the pictures.

Rigged canning pot. Yes, that's the trivet we used as a rack. Yes, that water is only about 1/2 inch from the top of the pot, and yes, that will boil over.

My official canning funnel. Wonderful!

It was super easy to do and look at how pretty those jars of apple butter were! And look how excited Paul was!

I know you're off to try this! Let me know how it turns out!

i must dance.

Came across this on pinterest today and needed to share a laugh with a wider audience. I am working on a longer blog post to get up this weekend! In the meantime, I must dance!

Getting Creative

Today, the air is once again pretty frigid. Especially in the house. Luckily, I am obsessed with the fireplace. Once we do turn on the heat, having fires quickly becomes a waste of money, so I plan to enjoy them as much as possible in the meantime.

I just wanted to share quickly today's baking venture. I decided to make homemade cupcakes, but since Paul and I are cutting back on the sweets, I also decided to pass them off on the neighbors this afternoon. I had a limited amount of baking supplies on hand, but I found some recipes that worked well with what I had. These were actually super easy, so once you know you can make delicious devil's food cakes without a box mix, it's hard to go back. Enjoy!

Little Devil's Food Cakes (recipe from a food network kitchens cookbook)

Ingrediants
1 cup all-purpose flour (I used 1 cup + 2 T cake flour)  
6 tablespoons natural unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 stick of butter, softened
1 cup of sugar
2 large eggs at room temperature (just realized I only used 1 large egg, and it was straight out of the fridge)
1 large egg yolk at room temperature (again, straight from the fridge)
1 teaspoon of pure (Dominican) vanilla extract (just kidding about the Dominican. Unless you have copious amounts of it, as I do.)
1/2 cup water

What to do
1. Preheat oven to 350. Line muffin tin with 12 papers. Whisk flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.
2. Beat butter with an electric mixer until smooth in a large bowl. Increase speed and gradually add the sugar. Beat until light and smooth. Reduce speed to medium low and add the whole eggs and yolk one at a time, incorporating each fully before adding the next. Beat in vanilla. Scrape down sides of bowl.
3. Bring water just to a boil. With mixer at a low speed, beat flour mixture into butter mixture in several additions. Drizzle in hot water and mix until a smooth batter forms. Divide batter among muffin cups - about 2/3 full for each. Bake until cakes spring back when pressed gently. It took mine 23 minutes. Cool in the tin on a rack for 10 minutes then remove and let cool completely.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Icing (adapted from cupcakeproject.com)

makes enough for 12 cupcakes
(also makes a mess if you're not careful)

Ingrediants
a little more than 1/8 cup of butter, room temp
3 ounces of cream cheese, room temp
2 cups of powdered sugar (it will be pretty stiff, so adjust as you please)
1/4 cup cocoa powder

What to do
1. Mix the cream cheese and butter on medium speed until well blended and smooth.
2. Gradually add in powdered sugar.
3. Mix in cocoa powder.
4. Lick the mixer.

After that...Voila! Now, I did eat just one, but only because I had to be sure they were as delicious as they looked before I hand them off to the neighbors.

Again, I really didn't find that these took much longer than using a box mix, and I had all of these little random supplies just waiting to be used. The tops of the cupcakes have a really nice crunch to them but the insides are completely soft and heavenly. Let me know how they turn out for you!

Now, I should probably hang out with Jillian for my daily punishment to account for all of the cupcake batter/icing/actual cupcake that I consumed during this process. I so love/hate her.

Wait...what happened to fall?

It's a cold, cold day in Harrisonburg. Actually I'm not sure what the temperature is outside (hold on...I'll check weather.com...okay, it's 48 degrees at 5 pm...so that classifies as a cold day). The temperature inside? 64. Sixty-four!! But it's far far too early to turn on the heat. And so, Mallie, Paul and I are all sitting very close on the couch and we have our first fire of the season going in the fireplace!

I hatehatehate being cold, so the next few days are going to be a struggle for me. And for Mallie I think. She's been getting cold during the night and then crying to get into our bed around 1 am. I would rather her sleep in bed than deal with her whining, but then she takes up about half of the bed, leaving 1/4 each for Paul and me. It's lose-lose.

Apart from the Gamecocks being not awesome on Saturday, it was a great weekend. We loved hanging out with out of town friends and getting some extended time with Hillary. Hillary, btw, has expanded her jewelry line (see etsy.com/shop/CameraSHYphotography) with some amazing leather pieces (these aren't on the website yet). She also started a blog this weekend, so as soon as she gets it up and running, I'll give you the link.

Today, Paul and I continued our church hunt. We still haven't landed anywhere, but I think we may be getting close. We'll let you know when we do, but I know we need to give this process a fair amount of time. Once we find the church God is calling us to, we want to be committed, so we aren't making this decision lightly, even though this is a tough journey. I just want it to be six months from now on some days - we'd already be in a church, building community, and making less awkward small talk than we are now (I know that never goes away on some level).

On the adoption front (which I know is why you're here in the first place), things are moving along. We are almost done with our formal application - hopefully we will submit it tomorrow. So thus far, we've done an informational meeting, preliminary application, written statements of faith, and almost finished the formal application. We still have an intake interview (scheduled for next week in Charlottesville), a two-day training (at the end of October), a couple more interviews in Richmond, and an intensive home study. So we aren't anywhere near the end of the tunnel, but we're getting there.

We are really enjoying the process - even if it is a ton of paperwork. It is forcing us to have hard, but really good conversations, and requiring that we trust God through the hard questions.

We are so incredibly blessed by the outpouring of support we've gotten from friends and family. We love seeing you guys as excited as we are. Thank you so much! We know that not every adoptive couple has such an amazing network of family and friends.

This week, I really hope to blog a bit about a book that Paul and I are both reading, Adopted for Life by Russell D. Moore. I'm only in the first chapter, but so far, Moore does a beautiful job of painting a  picture of our very own adoption story through the work of Christ. "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are." (1 John 3:1) I would recommend this book. Paul and I will both share our thoughts on the book on the blog later on!

Alrighty, off we go. Busy week coming up - the corn maze job starts this week, and I'm doing some volunteering administering youth data surveys. All of this is leading up to....Wicked in Richmond on Saturday with the family! I think I'll tryyyyy defyyyyying gravity! Okay, I'm done.

30 Minutes (okay 60 minute) Baguettes

Because of my current (and holding) lack of employment, I feel the need to be an awesome homemaker. This involves doing things like shining the kitchen floor (did it this week) and making awesome dinners. Tonight, the Riner household was super fortunate to have friends in town - the Acrees and my very own Hillbean are hanging out here this weekend. So for the occasion of meeting sweet baby Naomi Acree for the very first time, I decided we needed a killer dinner.

And it shall be chicken and dumplings. I even made my own stock. But the dumplings were bisquick (because you cannot possibly make better dumplings than bisquick dumplings).

But that's not even what this post is about. This post is about my second attempt at making bread...and not of the pumpkin or banana variety (which, if we're honest, is just calling cake "bread" so that we feel better about eating copious amounts of it).

Pinterest has become quite the problem - there are far too many delicious looking recipes that I think I can do. So I came across this pin today for "baguettes made in about 30 minutes using only 5 everyday ingredients."

Anytime something says it will take "about 30 minutes," you should translate that into "this will take you at least an hour if not more."

So I set out to make the 30 minutes baguettes.

Luckily, I had a package of yeast. So I did the whole yeast-in-warm-water-with-sugar-thing that is fairly standard. I have done this before (e.g. my first attempt at making bread several weeks ago), and I noticed this time that the yeast was not as frothy as maybe it should have been after the required resting time. Oh well. Carry on.

The next step is the tricky part. I remembered from my first attempt at bread making that you cannot trust a recipe when it comes to making dough. Oh the recipe may say 4 cups of flour, but it really means 6. Apparently it depends on a lot of factors including the temperature, humidity, the alignment of the stars, and how the Gamecocks are doing in football. Don't ask me how much flour I used for this dough - I stopped keeping track. Apparently it needs to be soft but not sticky. That is fairly subjective.

This is my dough. It was indeed sticky - which makes it very hard to clean off of the counter. I added more flour and let it rise for a about half an hour. It rose maybe .0003 of an inch. Unimpressed. I think this relates back to the whole non-frothy yeast thing.

Mallie was unimpressed.

I chose to move forward with the height-challenged dough, and turns out, I think it might make it. The next step is dividing the dough into four parts, making snakes with smaller sections of dough, and twisting them together. This was super fun. Maybe I should invest in some playdough.



Okay, this is the crazy part. When you put the twisty snakes into the oven, you put a dish of ice underneath of it. Apparently the steam makes the crust...well...crusty. Unfortunately, we have no ice maker and only two ice trays. So basically, we would get to enjoy our crusty bread with lukewarm beverages for the rest of the evening.



18 minutes later...TA-DA! So they don't look exactly like the original picture, but it tastes pretty darn good. I know what I would do differently next time...starting with maybe giving the yeast a talkin' to before we get started, but I think it was a fairly good second attempt at breadmaking. And I really think I could do it much more quickly next time. Should you wish to attempt such feats in 30 minutes or less, here is the link to the recipe: http://blogs.babble.com/family-kitchen/2011/02/21/crusty-baguettes-made-fresh-in-30-minutes/. Best of luck!