Mason's Sweet Date Appetizer

When I was little my mom and grandmom, Olive, who we called Nanny had us children make these on Thanksgiving day. {probably to keep us busy}

They seem to have origin in a family friend named Mason, who was good pals with my Papa, Chester.

As a tradition I still make them every year.

How wonderful ti will be to continue this with our little daughter next year.

They are very rich and chewy. Usually one is all I can eat. They are delectable.

1. Split the pitted dates (sometimes you can find a split on them already, if not then use a knife to carefully make a slit. Of course, adults should do this for the children before hand)
2. spoon peanut butter into the opening. (This does not have to look neat when children are doing this because the sugar step will hide the mess.) 
3. place a walnut half into the peanut butter bed.
4. roll each piece in granulated sugar.
5. place on a plate or in another container.

•  I used a very small peanut butter jar and it took about half of the jar to finish the dates.
• The bag of dates was an 8 oz. bag.
• While I purchased a 10 oz. bag of shelled walnuts, I used the tiniest handful. 
• a half cup to one cup of sugar in a small bowl is more than enough. This will give room to roll each date individually, and there will be much excess you will be discarding.  

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!

Blessings, Lynette

moving along, in paper land- NJ Certification Process begins!!

The NJ birth records were ordered in the summer...red tape has held up the correction of the form and I just keep praying it will be here any day. It is still not here and we are going on to Thanksgiving time!

Because of this I was very concerned (putting it lightly) about placing my dossier docs in an envelope to send to Trenton for certifications. But the USPS website tracking states that they arrived in Trenton yesterday just before 8am, so I can only hope they are being sorted to the correct people now, and will be in good hands. They supposedly are returned all done about 15 days later. Please pray about this for us. Thanks!

We sent our first batch of these items for certification by NJ to try to get the wheels of progress turning.

For those of you in adoption-dossier land, following 3 items are what were NOT included presently, but will need to go soon, and will (I think) be the last items to go:

1. My birth record.
2. Cert. of financial status (just because I need to type it in correct form, but it is written)
3. and 797 (we have our i800a fingerprint appt. this coming week, the 797 will come as a result of that)

Here is what DID go in the envelope for Certifications a few days ago. These have taken many months of work to compile:

1. application letter
2. k's birth record
3. marriage certificate
4. k's work letter
5. L's work letter job 1
6. L's work letter job 2
7. k's cert of general physical exam
8. L's cert. of general physical exam
9. k police clearance letter
10. L police clearance letter
11. adoption home study (our life compiled to 12 pages....LOL)

Blessings, Lynette