Busy...

I am sorry that I haven't posted in a long time. This is mainly an apology to the many Lisa's that read this blog. I do appreciate their comments. After writing the last blog post my grandmother passed away prompting a flurry of activity. Ravenna and I flew to California for two weeks to be there for her funeral and our foster-baby stayed with another foster family.

Ravenna at "The Old Spaghetti Factory" in California

During that trip a number of things occurred that pushed our family to decide that we could no longer work as foster parents within a system that cared so little about the health and safety of both our family and the foster child in our home. Needless to say, it was very difficult to say goodbye to the little one. On the last day of March I passed the baby who we had raised since birth and had been with us for 10 months to his new foster family. I hope they are stronger than we were. With that parting I think I lost a part of my heart.

This is the only photo I can post since it doesn't show his face.

April was spent in recovery and preparation. The first three weeks of the month I was in shock and I can't recall doing a whole lot (plus I had totally changed my diet so I was in a daze trying to figure out how to eat FOOD again)*. So much of our time had been spent with dealing with foster care drama and suddenly I had only one child and, amazingly, TIME. I got back on the German learning wagon (slowly), worked in our gardens to get them ready and planted, and was inundated with landscape approval requests for the committee I am on in our HOA (Home Owners Association). Andrew was deeply immersed in a translation project for a German textbook company so he was basically absent from the time we returned from California until he finished the project on April 20th.

Ravenna turned four and then May came: the strawberries appeared in an early abundance and the garden harvest started in earnest with lettuce, radishes, chard, green onions, bok choi and the lovely strawberries. One day early in the month I opened the freezer and realized that I had a whole lot of meat to eat before our 1/4 beef arrived in July. Therefore we began to invite people to eat with us in earnest, sometime having three couples per week. We have become fairly adventurous eaters, even making Pennsylvania Scrapple to use up the odd pork bits we had lying about. We have also eaten beef heart, tongue and ox-tail in the last few months. Hurray for offal!

Then I got the genealogy and feverishly started seeking out my ancestors and filling in my family tree. Yesterday I had a birthday and now we are readying ourselves for our BIG trip. And that has been our life for the past few months.

*I quit the GAPS diet on March 12th and I will get to that in a future post.