Today was so disappointing. We had another matching meeting, alas, no match.

Jason and I had been looking forward to this day but he was more pessimistic than I was. I think, that may have been the way to go. I kept on seeing the signs… Last night when I was reading a book to the girls we found a picture of the blue great blue heron and the girls said “Heron is one of the names we are thinking of for a brother!” I thought it was a sign. And on the radio there were songs about babies and boys and children, and I thought it was a sign.

Today we got the news that there was a matching meeting but we were not matched. In fact, three families were matched with children but most of the families are in the same boat that we are. Why so few matches? Well, three orphanages came to the matching meeting. Two of the orphanages had significant issues with their paperwork. So there were lots of children to be referred, but there were not enough completed files. So families did not get matched.

For us, as mentioned meeting was very significant. Our business is starting this summer… In fact, we get our leasehold at that mid summer on July 15. So that means after October 1, we can’t go anywhere. Jason certainly cannot leave the country. So when we were not matched today, that meant to Jason and the girls are not able to go to Lesotho.

When Jason was not able to go with me to pick up our daughters from Ethiopia, it devastated him. It also gave him a distinct disadvantage, as he started parenting three weeks after I did. He says that it was like missing the birth of his children. And to think that that will happen again, breaks my heart.

So on to more waiting. Onto surfing the web and seeing if there’re other options. And onto an (eventual) disappointingly solo trip to Lesotho for myself.

Good vibes, karma, crossed fingies – send them all our way. It’s matching day in Lesotho today!!!

Our dear friends M and H hosted us and a couple of other families over at their house this weekend. We had SO much fun.

Part of the joy is that the kids are all 4-8 years old (yes, ALL of those kids!) so they played wonderfully all together the whole time. But the other ingredient was good people. Adults people, specifically.

You know, you never know where life is going to take you, and what friends you are going to meet. But I got to spend the evening with my two besties in Kelowna, their husbands, and another fabulous couple that I’m liking more and more each time we camp/eat/frolic together. We had such a great night.

Thank goodness for adoption – if we hadn’t adopted our girls from Ethiopia, I never would have met my Ethio-Canadian bestie and my adoptive-mom bestie. Seriously – life is full of these lovely fringe benefits.

I just loaded up some more sleep caps into my on-line store. Thanks to all my customers! as this is our travel fund for Lesotho. We are constantly amazed by how many sleep caps we have sold; I guess it is simply because they are the best hair protection product out there! (Not to toot our own horns or anything, but seriously, they are!)

It’s so nice to get outside and enjoy the spring weather. As Jason said as we crossed the bridge over the lake a couple of days ago – spring reminds us why we live here! Kelowna is so fabulous in the summertime, with the greenery, orchards, beaches, and general vibrancy.

One of our favourite hobbies is to garden, and we’ve been passing our love for mucking in the dirt onto the girls. Jason likes tidying everything and weeding; I like planting and growing.

Our veggie garden is more for pleasure and skills building (post-oil resiliency!) than for financial necessity. We have so many farm markets, urban gardeners and local food here that our lesser-skilled farming probably actually costs us more than it makes. But heck – it’s fun.

This year I have 8 different heritage tomato varieties planted, and my goal is to learn to save seeds for replanting next year. We have green and black tomatoes, peach coloured tomatoes, red and yellow flecks – the varieties are astounding, and I can’t wait to taste them!

It is time Jason and I came out of the closet. For the last three years, we have kept this blog anonymous. Well not exactly. We have said that we live in Kelowna. But we also have kept our names off the Internet. But in the last few weeks, Jason and I, Arnica have decided that it makes no sense to keep our names off the blog anymore. It’s either go private; or go home. Or rather go private, or come out on our blog.

If you search on Google for our names our blog comes up. And if you search on Google for our blog, my name come up. So it makes really no sense to stay anonymous anymore.

That said, we have decided to keep our daughter’s nicknames, Sugar and Spice. The reason is simple: so far we have kept our daughters’ names off the Internet. And we’ll keep it that way until they do something noteworthy enough to hit the media bigtime, lol.

That’s of course not the case with Jason and I. Jason is a veterinarian and he has his name on his locum site as well as his veterinary hospital. I’m a professor by day and a consultant by night, and I have my name everywhere, including on articles I’d published.

And of course, my name is all over Vulnerable Children Society’s website. As I was blogging from Ethiopia, I thought: “how futile is this, that I am blogging from Ethiopia under my true name and reposting my blog onto my family website under my pseudonym.”

There are some advantages to coming out of the professional closet, so to speak. Firstly, we get to talk about things that we are really passionate about that relate to our work. Right now Jason and I are in the midst of opening our veterinary clinic and pet boutique. This of course takes lots of our time, and our hearts are in the project so it will be nice to share with you.

As a business professor and strategic consultant, I specialize in sustainability and environmental conservation. I’ll really enjoy sharing with you cool environmentally friendly products, conservation initiatives and sustainability related stuff.

Of course the downside, is that when we come out of the professional closet and tell you our real names, this decreases our privacy. But since they all these components are on the internet already, I don’t think it’s much of problem.

But, if you are a stalker and have decided that now that we have our real names on the internet you want to hunt us down, realize that I keep a hatchet under the bed and have man-eating dogs. (One of those statements is true.) If you are my student, you probably already found this website long ago.

But as for the rest of you, welcome to our new blog… the Rowan Family Tree, featuring Arnica and Jason (and Sugar and Spice) Rowan.

PS: Hopefully none of our LGBT buds object to the use of our “coming out of the closet” metaphor. If you do, lemme know. AND, we won’t be posting ANYBODY else’s name here… just ours.

For breakfast Mother’s Day Jason and the girls made me a fabulous, very meaty breakfast in bed. Yum! This is a big deal in our house, since it the one day a year that Jason cooks. (No, I don’t know what his mother was thinking either…) The girls are reasonably proficient now, so I think they did as much as her did!

The rest of the day we enjoyed at liesure, starting with a long trip to the garden store to buy a new peach tree (the old one died mysteriously after four years) and a zillion heritage tomato plants.

Then we went out for Indian, hung out with the neighbors, planted my tomatos, and relaxed. Happy Mother’s Day to me! And to the rest of you moms out there too!!

Stayed tuned until May 22nd… which is auspicious because it is the new date of the adoption matching meeting in Lesotho.

Our agency sent out a wry email warning us that not all families would be matched, but let’s hope that there is a profusion of 2-3 year old boys and we happen to be one of the lucky families!!!!

Well, Maggie is looking slim and trim minus her spleen. She’s wiggling and silly and getting about just fine (ignoring the lumpy ruptured ligament in her leg.) We’ll find out in a week if it is hemangiosarcoma or a lesser evil…

Maggie's favorite spot is our bed. She spends 16 hours a day there.

Our poor baby Maggie is not feeling so great.  Last week when Jason picked her up she had a hard fall. She hurt her leg and later we found out she had busted her ligament. When we took her to the vet to get an xray, we learned that her spleen was also enlarged. Today Maggie has to have her spleen taken out.

The thing is that we don’t know if it will be full of cancer or not. Of course I’m worrying sick, but there’s nothing to do but wait. When we lost Hamish three years ago, it hurt so much. Now the possibility of losing Maggie is very scary. I still think about Hamish when now it makes me sad.

She is such a sweet dog. The funny thing is, when we got Maggie it was to have a friend for Hamish. Now we have Maggie and we have Laughlin. Laughlin has been moping around the house all day and I think he knows that Maggie is not well

That’s the hard thing with pets, I suppose. They live such short lives and you missed them so much when they go. I’m not saying this is Maggie’s last week or anything, but I do think about the fleetingness of time and how quickly life goes by

Maybe we should all live life like Maggie and like our pets. She loves everybody unconditionally. She wakes up every morning in a good mood. She has nothing but love for every member of our family and if we hurt her feelings, she forgives. She lives for the simple pleasures in life, like going for a walk. Birds excite her. Playgrounds are the best place in the world. And most of all, she loves snuggling in bed. These are the simple pleasures that we should all enjoy every day

Please cross your  fingers and send some love out to Maggie today.

I’m back in town and open for busienss… get your sleeps! get your sleep caps!

As promised, this is the song my daughter (5.5 years old!) and her friend wrote on the playground the other day. Their teacher heard them singing it and asked if she could transcribe it. I was pretty durn PROUD!!!

Of course, I’m not so whistfully naive to think that my girls just randomly happened along to the values of acceptance, appreciation and openess. We’ve tried really hard as parents to teach them to embrace others’ religions, cultural makeups and family structures. It is a pretty nice bonus that Sugar has found a friend who has the same values too, though! Good friends you can’t plan; they are a gift.

It was wonderful to hear yesterday that President Obama went on record supporting same sex marriage. I am not surprised that his wife and children played a role in encouraging him to evolve his views. My kids are completely cool with different family makeups (actually, Sugar wrote a lovely song the other day about it, and I’ll post it here soon..) and no doubt it’s the same none-issue for his daughters.

For any of our dear readers from the US, we in Canada have had same sex marriage for years. I honestly think “marriage rights for all” only has positive influences on our society. My only misgiving about the US moving forward (hopefully) on gay/lesbian marriage may be that we might lose our valuable tourism market! lol since we have a lot of US citizens coming to Canada to get hitched.

Way to go, Obama!