I went bathing suit shopping today.
Need I say more?
Archive for May, 2007
More 2 year-old joys
May 29, 2007Ye olde imac is in our bedroom because we don’t have room in the living room and I can’t afford a laptop. So I flipped on Noggin for Widget while I checked my e-mail, blogs and whatnot after work, sticking my head out into the living room every 5-10 minutes to check on her.
Yeah, and then I found this:
Apparently she figured out how to unzip the back cushions on our couch.
When I asked her what she thought she was doing, she said “I makin’ a sandcastle Mama!” She was throughly pleased with herself 
Memorial Day
May 28, 2007Five years ago, my sister M and I spent Memorial Day in France at the World War I Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, locating our paternal great-grandfather’s grave. We were all awestruck at the number of graves, the overwhelming feeling of respect and gratitude for the lives lost during that war. It was humbling.
My grandma never knew her father. She was only 3 when he died nor did she ever get a chance to visit his grave. Probably one of the most beautiful things I ever saw was the look on her face when we showed her the pictures we took of the cemetery and the actual grave.
God bless all those who serve, have served and those who gave everything by being inthe United States military.
Caught in between
May 28, 2007I have a post about Memorial Day in my head but this has to be spit out first….
We had a visit with L yesterday. We met her mom for the first time (we’ve only met her stepmother before). It made me realize how different our backgrounds are. I feel guilty because one of the things I thought was Widget has an utterly different life and that we are able to give her a more rounded, educated life than she might have had with L. I thought I’m glad that L gave her this life, instead of the other. Not because of a lack of love or even money but because of who we are and our overall lifestyle. It was literally a feeling of being in different social classes and the whole “better opportunities” crap that adoption agencies, facilitators, lawyers spew.
Then today, my sister MK and I were socializing with my brother’s newish girlfriend- they’ve only been dating a couple of months. She is a young (18 with a 10-month-old) amazingly mature, capable, excellent mother. She almost placed her son in an open adoption with an aunt & uncle who have another child they adopted. My sister asked her if she breastfed her son, and she said, “No. I was told not to because I was placing him for adoption. I would get too attached.” I got so angry she was told this by her social worker and, much to MK’s shock, who I’m betting would have agreed with that statement, I told E that it was so incredibly wrong for them to have denied her that if she wanted it and I was very, very glad she went with her instinct to parent. For some reason related to ICPC and, I think, their homestudy, she was going to have to keep M for 6 months before they took placement. I don’t know what was up with that, but in the end, it worked out for the best since she took M home from the hospital. When her aunt and uncle came to visit shortly thereafter, and her aunt held M, E said she knew she couldn’t watch someone else raise him.
So on one hand, I am pissed off that E was fed all that garbage just because she was young and pregnant. Then on the other hand, I’m caught thinking, “Placement was to Widget’s advantage. We can give her more opportunities”, knowing that L was probably told several similar things as E.
Who knew?
May 25, 2007I am rereading a series of British mysteries (actually written by an American author). Now that, in and of itself, not a very interesting thing to write about.
But here’s the thing:
In the second to last of the series to date, a main character dies. When I read that book and came to that part, I literally put the book down and cried. I felt shock, rage, anger as if it were people I really knew going through this. I thought about it for day, “How could she (the author) do this?” “Why?” “It has to be a mistake. This character will be alive in the next book.” The character was, technically, alive in the next book because it ran parallel to the previous story. However, the character will not make a miraculous resurrection in the upcoming book.
Anyway, I am rereading the series for the first time since that book. I keep noting all these things that are said and done which have extremely different meanings knowing what happens. What is odd, though, is the closer I get in the series to the book, the slower I’ve been reading them as if I want to put off getting to that book and that incident. I was talking to T about it last night and I started getting all teary-eyed about what was to come.
Who knew you could get so attached to characters in a book?
I haven’t laughed this hard in ages….
May 24, 2007My mother has a propensity for shopping at thrift stores lately. She is always coming home with random things.
Well, she decided that she was going to replace their living room couch because sitting in it is like sitting in a sinkhole. Apparently she found a couch she liked at “Bibles for Mexico”, requested that it be delivered today and that they take the old couch with them.
She was out when the delivery guys came but my youngest sister was home, let them in and left the room. When she returned, she found they packed up the old couch and in its place, they left this:
Note both my parents on it together! And yes, my mother is wearing white shorts, apparently short shorts 
Needless to say, I laughed so hard I cried.
I am…
May 23, 2007I’ve been tagged by Jen at Going Back to Square One
So here goes:
I am
-a wife
-a mother
-Not really 5 ft tall like my driver’s license says. I’m only 4′11-and-maybe-a-1/4″
-a C! I am a CH! I am a CHRISTIAN! and I have CHRIST in my HEART and I will LIVE ETERNALLY…. Sing it with me
-a bit nutty but not as nutty as my mother!
-an avid reader. Particularly mysteries, British mysteries are my mostest favoritest.
-a blog/forum/e-mail addict.
-a Target junkie
-an utterly unathletic person
-fortunate to have a good metabolism cause I eat whatever I want and I still weigh the same.
-a Monty Python and the Holy Grail fan….I have it memorized. In fact, I am prone to bursting out with quotes and then laughing at my great hilarity
-a former New Kids on the Block Fan and I still know most of the words to their songs.
-quiet unless I’m in a group of people I know really well, then I can be social.
-hyperactive and talkative when I drink more than a small quantity of alcohol, then I generally fall asleep after my burst of energy.
-am able to recite my driver’s license number from memory. I am also able to remember phone numbers, addresses and so on after reading/hearing them once or twice. My mind remembers numbers far too easily.
-a flute player (ok… that is more of a “was” since I don’t haul the thing out very often anymore but I can still play our high school fight saw)
-a huge fan of the original CSI and Grey’s Anatomy. My ultimate favorite show still is/was West Wing particularly the first 3 seasons.
-compassionate
-a cancer survivor
-stubborn
-often sarcastic & snarky
-running out of things people might remotely want to know….
There.
Now you know a few things you might not have otherwise known.
I’m not sure who to tag….
I’ve been ordered
May 22, 2007Okay, well, maybe not ordered but told by #5 during my appointment today to seriously think about taking myself out of the adoption-related internet world.
He also suggested backing away from visits with L and her family until Widget is older but I’m not so sure about that. Note: I still have not called her about this weekend.
In talking with #5 about the fact that I feel guilty for not having myself in order financially, emotionally and what not prior to adopting Widget and that moving into an apartment feels like this huge backstep in what we said we were in meeting her, out came the underlying issue: I am struggling with this idea in my head that I was wrong for wanting to adopt a baby. That this made adopting about me and my “baby itch” and not just about wanting to parent a child because I/we didn’t choose foster-adopt or adoption from an orphanage. And that I want to adopt an infant again.
All the reading I have done about loss for the first parents and the child, all the subtle coercion in adoption, the heated discussions where adoptive parents are called “baby snatchers”, the idea of returning custody when an adoption was unethical, even just the open unheated dialog that is going on about ethical adoption is feeding this idea.
Every time I read a post about a first parent’s grief, I’m consumed with this fear that L is hiding her grief from us and she regrets the adoption but doesn’t know how to tell us.
I can’t stop thinking about it. About how to change things. About how to know if an adoption is ethical. About what God would really want us to do in regards to adoption, particularly domestic infant adoption. About whether I’m just thinking about myself and not about what is right.
Anything that happens with Widget that is probably just age-related or temperament-related, I wonder if it has to do with adoption loss. If her tantrums have more to do with the loss of L than with whatever provoked them.
It is doing me in.
Miscellaney (is that a word?)
May 21, 20071. I’m thinking about going back to wordpress.com when my $1.00 for a year of hosting is up at surpasshosting.com. But I’m going to keep my domain name and point it to my wordpress.com blog, so you won’t have to change links again. I’ve determined that the advantages aren’t worth the monthly fees for hosting. When that happens, I’ll probably be down for a little while while the DNS changes over. I am going to be double posting (I think) between the two….I’m still getting hits and comments at the old site.
2. I still feel unsettled in our apartment. I also feel somewhat guilty because any time someone asks us about where we moved, I fudge and say we ended up getting an apartment as we ran out of time to find a house. I’m struggling with feeling like I’ve taken a step backwards in terms of how life is supposed to go. Plus I obviously don’t want to share with all the people that ask about all our money crap. Of course, I have blathered about it on here my partially anonymous open to the world blog. Heh. How’s that for keeping it on the down low?
3. I’ve had some really vivid dreams ever since we moved, all of them distressing. One full of arguing between myself and my mom over her relationship with my dad and her notion that he is an alcoholic. Another with some really intense conversations with Widget’s firstmom’s dad about how devastated L is over having placed Widget with us and how it is all our fault for wanting to raise a child from babyhood; and that they wanted us to turn custody back over to L. Guess I have some things to sort out here.
4. Speaking of L, we are supposed to get together with them this weekend. I have been completely procrastinating about calling and confirming the visit and determining where we are going to meet, since we are no longer in Grand Rapids. I know I’m dealing with some issues regarding feeling like we failed L by not being as financially stable as we should have been before adopting. They don’t know about any of it and I don’t really want to talk about it with them, even though there is a part of me that knows “honesty is the best policy” with open adoption.
5. We are having some discipline issues with Widget. She has really gotten into pinching, hitting and jumping on me, sometimes because I’m doing something she doesn’t like- like her hair; other times for absolutely no reason at all. I’ll sit down on the couch to be near her and she starts kicking me. I have purchased two books: 1-2-3 Magic and The No Cry Discipline Solution. I’m hoping one of these or a combination of these will help us with her because I’m feeling like a pretty shitty parent lately, when my interaction with her is primarily, “No” “Stop” “If you do that again, you are going in time out” “I will spank you if you keep this up”. Blech. Along with her lovely trend of putting too much food in her mouth and gagging/throwing up. She’s done this a few times now, last night of course when we were meeting with our new small group from church (I’m so excited about this, all couples around our age with kids Widget’s age and younger)- fortunately we met at a park for dinner and were outside when she did it, even after we told her she needed to take smaller bites.
6. And tomorrow I turn 30. No more 20s. I’m trying to determine if this year was better than the last couple. It has had some pretty rough spots but I think the overall trend has been up instead of down. I don’t feel like I should be 30 or married 10 years (on Flag day!).
