Foster Failure and the Best Weekend Ever

Our new guard dog

Well, we failed. But first...

Christmas party 2015 was a success! There was too much food, but that's a good problem to have. Unfortunately, I never got around to making the Christmas Tree Cheese Bread that everyone loved last year, but that's ok. Check out some pictures of the amazing food I DID get around to making. There are some links to recipes as well!

Barely scratching the surface of foods

Bacon wrapped water chestnuts

Sausage stuffed mushrooms! Recipe here

Homemade Cranberry Sauce

Italian Pinwheels. Recipe here
Turkey and Cranberry Pinwheels, from
the mind of Sheridan

Healthy snacks!

Corropolese tomato pie and pepper pie
The most amazing tomato pie in the world

Marinated cheese? Delicious! Recipe here:

Famous Oreo Peppermint Popcorn. Recipe here

This actually wasn't even all the food. And this was a week and a half ago and even with eating this stuff every day and bringing countless foods into work, we STILL have some of this sitting around. I gotta portion better next year. You don't even want to see my grocery bill.

After all the hubbub of the party was over, it was time to settle in and prepare Tigger for his trip to Manhattan to meet his potential adopters. I was feeling distraught as the day of our trip neared. I consoled myself with thoughts of future fosters and updates on Tigger as he grew with his new family. It helped a little. But not a lot.

Tom and I discussed a few times whether we were making the right decision. Ultimately, I decided we had to go through with the home visit we had scheduled. The applicants were awesome and they might have a great home that Tigger deserved. Plus, I would have felt like a real d-bag cancelling a home visit after the way I grilled them with every question in the world about how they would treat Tigger! And all the wonderful answers they gave. 

The night before we were to take him, I cried. Then the morning of, I cried. A lot. But, I can be emotional sometimes and I figured I would just be like this any time I placed a foster. Tom offered to turn the car around, but I knew I would never feel right about that. So to New York we went. 

The couple who wanted to adopt Tigger were great. We had a nice time chatting with them and I know that they will find a very lucky dog some day. But, it was not to be Tigger. He didn't care for their cat and with the way he barked at it concerned them since they lived in an apartment and probably none of their neighbors wanted to hear that for the months it might take to acclimate them to one another. They were disappointed, but, I think, relieved that we had taken the time to accompany him on this visit rather than completing the adoption in PA when they wouldn't have known how Tigger and their cat would get along. We called it a day on the home visit. 

I couldn't really contain my excitement on the way to the car. I REALLY do think this couple will be great pup parents, but I knew that Tigger had to stay with us. He chose us a long time ago. I didn't want to be a "foster failure", but this was clearly meant to be. Tigger had found his Home at Last. I was just the last one to know.

Made it legal! 

And when I say I was the last to know, I mean it. EVERYONE knew we were going to ultimately keep him. Maybe that's because we flipflopped for the three months we had him. We weren't even supposed to take a foster when we got Tigger, but his temporary foster mom had large dogs that were stressing him out and we decided to enter the foster world a little sooner than we intended. Seems it was meant to be, since once he made himself a part of our home he also made himself a part of our lives that we are just not able to give up. 

Our best Christmas gift

After a cheerful day of fawning over our new family member, Tom and I headed into Philly for a Christmas date! This was actually scheduled to cheer us up from adopting Tigger out, but instead we just treated ourselves because, well, we had years old gift cards that were burning a hole in our pocket. We spent the evening in Center City, wandering the Christmas Village at Love Park (the spot where Tom proposed to me 3 years ago!) and then ate all the sushi at Morimoto. I could tell you how amazingly delicious (and expensive) it was, but instead, I'll just put some pictures below of our fancy omakase, the tasting menu offered at Morimoto for the meager price of several hundred dollars and your first born child.

 

I would go back to Morimoto in a heart beat. The food was awesome, the service and ambiance were good, but I really could care less about those things. I'm there to eat. And eat we did. For like 3 hours. Six or seven courses later (who's counting?) we were waddling back to our car with a blissful look on our faces from the seriously excellent eats we enjoyed. I probably wouldn't bother spending the money on the omakase again (for real, it was PRICY $$$), but it was a lot of fun to do once if you've got some cash (or gift cards!) to blow. 

I'm going to go ahead and wrap this post up because, as you may have noticed, this is all referring to stuff that happened over a week ago BEFORE Christmas. That's because I started writing this post and then got distracted and now, a full week later, I'm back at it. Less procrastination in the New Year! I'll start that next week... 

Hope you all had a great Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Whatevs! And if you didn't, well, then at least you've got New Years to look forward to. What? You don't like New Years either? Well, you've got a nice lack of holidays coming up in January to look forward to then. 

Sheridan's End of Year To-do List:

- Clean up all the holiday mess at chez RizzEarle

- Figure out a better organizational system for all of Tigger's stuff (which is slowly taking over our house)

- Choose a color to paint our spare bedroom (thanks for all the input from our Christmas party guests!)

- Commit to a New Year's Day yoga class and start 2016 off right!