Time for some serious purging

...and, no, this is not part of my diet. Although I have reached my first weight loss goal!!

Purging here refers to some of our recent activities as well as the unloading of info you're going to get from me in this post. :)

Thursday I had planned to take Mark to dinner at a local Nicaraguan restaurant that opened up a few months ago not far from our house. It's supposed to be absolutely delicious and they have fried plantains which Mark loves. But we received an invitation from some friends to visit an Afghan restaurant a few blocks away so we went there instead. Absolutely yummy sambosas and an eggplant appetizer (which Mark refused to even taste!) and my afghani muntoo, which are steamed pockets with ground beef and onions in a cream sauce. Mmmm... Mark had beriani chicken which is a little bit spicy and gets spicier as you go!

Friday was "Hello, Dolly!" at the Muny which is always a fun show. Saturday we went to pick blackberries at Eckerts Farm right across the river in IL. We picked about 5 lbs worth and they are huge!! I froze about half of them to use later, and we've been munching periodically on the others. We came home from the farm, picked up the dogs, and went back to IL for our vet appointment. Mark had a base ball game in New Baden, IL, so I dropped him off after the vet appointment and then brought the dogs home. Here's where the purging started. :) :) While I was eating lunch, I turned on the TV (I actually do that every once in a while) and chanced across a show called "Mission: Organization". Oh, man. Wonderful, wonderful show--and I've only seen it once. After it was over I was highly motivated, so I turned off the TV and put some FlyLady methods into practice. I got the living room and the kitchen cleaned and organized (and purged!) and it was wonderful! Saturday night we had dinner with some of Mark's former classmates which is always fun, and then we continued the purging after church on Sunday. That mainly consisted of cleaning out the basement. We (I could say "I" here, but it's really both of us--don't let Mark tell you otherwise) have a habit of collecting unwated furniture (usually picked up in an alley somewhere) to fix and sell it. Lots of fun, but we've managed to collect quite a bit that hasn't been fixed up yet. So we sorted into priority piles and made Home Depot and Lowe's runs to get necessary items for repair. The basement looks better already and it's good to know we're finally making headway on some of these projects.

In other news, I wanted to thank all of you for the prayers in regards to a situation a few months ago. The situation is now resolved enough that I feel comfortable updating you. A few months ago, we were presented with the potential opportunity to adopt two little boys here in St Louis. We pursued this to the best of our abilities, but the boys have now been matched with another family. I'm not going to go into any details, but suffice it to say that this pretty much confirmed our desire to never do an adoption through state foster/adopt agencies. It is a long, painful story, but we are hopeful that this family will work out well for the boys. I would ask that you continue to pray for them, their new family, and their remaining biological family.

We were number 30 in the list to submit at the SDA before today. They are currently accepting about 7 dossiers per day, which puts us tentatively submitting around Aug 13. Our medicals expire Aug 19, so since it will be so close we are going to go ahead and redo them. However, I have learned an important lesson through all of this--do NOT ask for more than you need. We do not need a physical, we need labwork. I called today and got both of us in for NEXT TUESDAY!! Mark is even a new patient and we are both able to go. If I had had to schedule an actual appointment, it probably would have been a month or two to get in--maybe longer since he's a new patient. This is an incredible and unexpected blessing, although I'm still hoping we get our dossier in early!