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.

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!!

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.

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.

Today we went shopping at the shiromet at the base of Entoto Mountain in Addis. We had lots of fun…But my mom still complained that I was a woman on a mission. I agreed! Not only did I have some shopping for the family to do, I also was buying lots of beautiful scarves, bracelets, hoodies, etc. for our Vulnerable Children fundraiser when we get home. T was also out shopping today, and she scored some roasted coffee beans to sell (to go along with the green beans I purchased in Nakemte. See a preview of our fundraiser sale here.)

The problem with traditional clothes is that they tend to (literally) fall apart at the seams. So today I was shopping with an eye for stitching.

I got two lovely dresses for my girls. Their others are falling apart, and they wear them several times a year. Spice, the white and black one is for you…just like mine! And Sugar, the yellow one is for you, it has the same stitching as your sister’s!

I also got a traditional outfit for a three year old boy… we still haven’t heard any news about our April matching meeting in Lesotho. But I thought it would be good for “the new guy” to have Ethiopian clothes when we go to parties, too.

I got a cool hoodie for myself…it’s a new style and it actually really suits me. I also got some bracelets. For Jrock I got the beginning of our coffee set. He wanted me to buy a traditional pot and these are the cups I chose to go with it. Cute, eh?

Lastly, I got two suits for the girls. They’re the latest traditional clothes style, and I thought they would e good for winter Ethiopian events. You girls can choose which on is for whom. They are the same except that they each have a different pattern on the stitching.

After shopping until we dropped (Thank you, thank you, Sintayehu, who negotiated for us and drove us around.) We tried to find my favourite tibs restaurant near the university. Well, I think we may have ended up in the wrong place, but it turned out that the sheep tibs (and I am NOT a mutton fan) were the second best meal I’ve had so far. Only second to the Nakemte Mate Resort omelettes. Tomorrow we have meetings and then we are off to Dukum to see my friend M’s family, and then on to Adama/Nazret. I can’t wait to see Meseret and the new Faya Orphanage digs!

[Preposted] I posted about the girls’ choices for their new room murals a couple months ago, but was remise in posting the results! After 5 days of visit, Auntie Ena still has two to go… hopefully they will get finished in the early summer. Gorgeous so far, though! The girls picked the cultures for their family and friends. They also wanted Italian and Swazi, but there wasn’t quite enough room on the wall!! lol

YES, Auntie Ena does commissions….

Grandpa enjoys some injera

4 days to go?!?!? Where has the time gone? And I am SO not ready…

It’s the worst season of the whole year at work, I’m single-parenting for a month, we had 4 surprise dentist visits and a surprise $1500 brake job on the truck this week…. etc, etc… and I admit – I’ve been completely overwhelmed. So much that I had a good cry on the phone to my mom on Saturday. Then she saved the day by coming on the bus Sunday morning from Creston (and my dad came from Vancouver where he was working) and they helped me out for the last 2 days. Now I’m only 1 day behind, and not three!! thank goodness!!!

Tonight when I ran over to my friend M’s house to get her to stick me with my Twinrix shot (she’s a nurse) and pick up stuff for her family in Ethiopia, she surprised us with some supper for the night. Yeah! I may be swamped, but I am sure looking forward to the trip!!

Now enough “free time” – I’d better get back to work! Be sure to start visiting the Vulnerable Children Society blog on Sunday, as I’ll be blogging there throughout our trip!

Spice recuperating from the second of four dentist visits this week. That DOES mean 4 milkshakes, on the plus side.

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My permanent post in from of the computer, trying to get everything ready!!!

We spent 3 days at Easter up in Prince George, visiting my best friend S, her husband T and their little daughters. The daughters names are also S and T - which could get confusing. So from here on out, I’ll refer to them as Mac and Cheese.

I was reminiscing during our visit – although only 22 months old, Mac and Cheese are the same size (weight and shoe size, anyway) as our girls were when we brought them home just short of their third birthday. So little! So packable!

Sugar and Spice were apparently reminiscing as well, since they turned from independent 5.5 year olds who can make their won breakfast and get ready for school, into helpless children who needed mommy to put their pants on. But whatever. With Jock gone, I’ve spent a lot of my time at home with them ignoring them and trying to get my work done, so it was a chance to coddle, nurture and lovey-dove them up for a few days.

We went to the local science centre as well as to a friend of S&T’s for an Easter egg hunt, but the highlight was definitely just hanging out and catching up.

Funny, I could tell the girls apart right away, even though I hadn’t seen them since last summer… and didn’t mix them up once! Must be a mom-of-twins thing However, I may have mixed them up in the pictures… the chick pic, I can’t remember who was wearing what, and I can’t see her face! lol

Enjoy the pictures!

Somehow I didn’t get a bunch of random pictures posted.. but they are worth posting!! Enjoy the randomness…