Wednesday = Brooklyn Botanical Garden!

For this summer, Wednesday is officially our "picnic night".

So today we grabbed our pasta, packed our chocolate (you can't have a picnic without chocolate, it would be terribly unprofessional!) and caught a spot to listen to some free live music, smell some amazing beautiful roses... and get a pic at some original/silly/weird... hats!

It looked like a party at the Mad Hatter Garden!

 The children created their personal hats, and they held a little parade around the cherry esplanade...

 Some just created some amazing pieces of wearable art.

 Roses and hats... It was like jumping right into a page of Alice in Wonderland...
We loove the Brooklyn Botanical Garden!!

Spring is in the air...

Because nothing screams spring more than a sunny late afternoon in the park!

Sketchbook Project!

Do you like doodling? You usually sketch squiggly and silly faces while talking on the phone? You like to catch your thoughts and dreams on paper?
Then you may consider getting into the Sketchbook Project for the Free Art Library!
It's  a traveling collection of sketchbooks where you can find the drawings and the words of thousand of strangers, normal-average-crazy people like me and you... And if you want you can put your personal one in the collection!

The main home of the sketchbooks, where they rest in shelves between one travel and the other around the country, it's Brooklyn!

We  went there yesterday...

And we spent a big chunk of our rainy afternoon browsing through pages... Some were simple, other were so intricate! Some were funny, other desperate, many were really beautiful and original...  and many were very personal and intimate.
It's amazing how many things can fit in a tiny book, and how much you can personalize it!

Here are some of my favorite ones...

watercolors, treads, paint, pop ups... wow!

 

I loved the sketchbooks with presents and secret messages...

It was like having a glimpse at the life of hundreds strangers... We read thoughts, we found photos, drawings, quotations, pieces of memories...

Simple, sweet and minimal, with photos and quotations...

   

                                                 

A looking-through Sketchbook!

     

     
 
The library card it's free, and many of the books are "digitalized", so you can find them and read them online.
Also, every time you request a sketchbook you get an extra one, a "surprise" randomly selected for you.

The authors are encouraged to personalize the cover and the book as much as they want... they can paint over it, cut it, add more pages... as long as it can fit in the bookshelf.

A 3D Dictionary of simple things.  This was amazin

Although my writing and my drawings always disappoint me, I am thinking of starting a sketchbook and get on board with the project...  wanna join me?!


... Maybe my sketchbook and your sketchbook will keep each other company along the road!

NYC walls

One of the things that I love of this city is that it can be stressful, it can be loud, it can be crazy... but it will never be boring!You can walk on the same street every day, and you will always notice something different...

... Even the walls are always changing!

I LOVE the subway map building!

More than zombies what terrifies me are subway's rats!!

..

WE ARE ONLINE!

Ok, we know it, the journey it's still long and we have a long way ahead, but...
But today we can't stop dancing, and it feels like the whole planet is dancing with us :)


:)

Our DBML Letters

When our package of Dear birth Mother Letters arrived we realized they were missing the signature.

We sat down with a black sharpie, and we had our diva moment signing them all by hand :)The thing is both me and Leo are left handed, and Leo's writing is... Well, particular? Peculiar? Weird?
So he got a little bit worried, and he made some tests on a piece of paper:





... And after this, we discover the importance of a calligraphy class :-P

 

24th of March and we got our home visit done!
We love our sweet home but, honestly, we can get quite messy, here!
So we cleaned, and decorated for one week, and since spring is here we even got some plants.

Our new kitchen plants enjoying the view of Brooklyn... the basil looks great! :)

The studio, with our collection of picture books

Bedroom's plants, enjoying the view of Manhattan

  (I don't know why, but I don't have picture of the dining room!)

We discovered soon that we probably went above and beyond, and many of the precautions we took were not necessary:

Bars and protections at the widows = unnecessary
Smoke detectors and CO2 detectors = necessary
Locker for medicines =  necessary
Baby proofed cabinets (for soaps, detergents and other chemical products)  = unnecessary (she said we didn't need it right now, but only in the future)
The crazy cleaning = waaay unnecessary! (but now the house feels so pretty!).

Next step: the social worker will send us a copy of her home study, then she will file it to the director of the adoption agency... and then all the paper work aspect will be over (for a while, al least!).

The last thing to do before going online are the brochures, the Dear Birthmother Letter.
We are STILL working on our DBL, the text is done and approved by the agency (they had to cut so much, we realized how hard it is to describe honestly yourself, you relationship, your family, your hopes, and dreams...  in only 950 words!). We are still picking pictures and templates... and a part of me feel uncomfortable and  embarrassed, since it really looks like we have to  sell and promote ourselves, the same way you would do it for a car sale or a property (I was and I will never be good at it!). On the other hand the DBL is the only way a Birth Mom can get a glimpse of the prospective adoptive parents...  So we better get through, and try to be as honest as possible...

 We don't want to be overstressed by deadlines, we don't want to run, we are taking our time to go through this process and probably many people will do it way faster than us... but my wish is to be online by the middle of May.

There, I wrote it!
Now let's see what will happen!

Alice