Favorite Thing

Yesterday we did one of my favorite things. A loud thunderstorm rolled through, and the kids and I piled into the big bed and opened the blinds so we could snuggle under the covers and watch the lightening and rain. Both of them pretend to be scared of thunderstorms still, but I really think it is just an excuse to burrow under the covers and scream "Thunderstorm!!" And I love it. It almost made me wish the storm was in the middle of the night so we could snuggle all night.

In other news...I thought we lost Tigger the other day. Tigger is such an odd and obnoxious cat, that I spend a lot of time telling people how he drives me crazy. Then he didn't come inside one night. I went out with a flashlight and searched every inch of the backyard in vain. I still don't know if he slipped out earlier in the evening when we were outside too, or if he somehow found a way over or under the fence during a panic when the sprinklers came on. I searched all around our house and the neighboring yards with a flashlight until I became worried that our neighbors would think I was a burglar. I couldn't sleep for a while, imagining Tigger becoming a coyote snack. OK, so it wasn't hours I stayed up, but at least 30 minutes... Anyway, the next morning there he was at the door meowing. He stayed inside the entire day and never wanted to go out (very unusual). Jim was right when he predicted that we would "never get rid of him that easy". Since he's been back he nipped at Natalie, who can't read his obvious warning signs. I tried saying in a cheerful voice "Oh, I think he was playing with you!" and Natalie scrunched her face all up and produced big tears and said "NO, he was trying to EAT me!" Yes, he probably was. The Tigger we all love to hate.

Feelin' Hot, Hot, Hot

Summer is definitely in full swing. I am thinking maybe it is a good thing we aren't bringing a new baby home right now. I'm not sure how a tiny body could adjust to the temperature change from Russia.

It hasn't stopped Liam and Natalie from being active, although they both have my skin that flushes like a ripe tomato in the heat.

Liam has been practicing t-ball since Jim recently signed up to be his coach, and golf. He won a putting contest at a mini golf camp last week. Very exciting!

And Natalie has been flitting around pretending to be Tinkerbell (with her fairy wings on) or Peter Pan. We recently watched the movie and it was a big hit with both of them. If I had a dollar for every time she told me this weekend "You play Captain Hook" I'd be very, very rich. Playing Captain Hook generally involves just yelling Aaaaarghhh and waving my hand around like a hook, pretending to grab her as she runs by screaming. It only gets old after about the 100th time. She is very into role playing right now, and constantly prods us to make our "characters" talk. "You be the bad girls (everything is a battle between good and bad). Talk! Talk!!" I never know what "bad girls" are supposed to say, so it is generally something like "Wu-ha-ha! I'm Bad, and I'm coming over there to be mean to you!" She doesn't really care what I say, I think, as long as I "Talk!!!"

The Look Back

To amuse and possibly torment myself, here is a short summary of our adoption pursuit.

Dec 2004 (wow, 3.5 years ago) we sent our Application to our agency.

Some of the time that came next doesn’t really count towards adoption waiting time because it was filled with the arrival of Natalie. It didn’t feel a whole lot like waiting.

April 2006 – our Application was re-activated.

What we’ve done since then:
· Two Homestudies (17 different items to submit for review for China, 23 for Russia)
· Two Country Dossiers (18 different documents, all notarized, county certified, state sealed, and Chinese Embassy authenticated for China. 23 document, all notarized and State Apostilled…in duplicate with two copies, for Russia)
· Two complete physicals for both of us
· Many, many rounds of trying to obtain the right kind of Canadian birth certificate for Jim.
· Two rounds of Customs & Immigration service fingerprinting (including one episode with children in tow, documented in an earlier post)
· Two background and criminal history checks
· Uncounted hours spent at FedEx Kinkos photocopying everything…again and again…and shipping things here, there, and everywhere
· Hep A, Hep B, DTP, and Typhoid vaccinations (for me anyway…Jim keeps “forgetting” his appointments)
· Trips to courthouses, tax offices, police departments, and did I mention FedEx/Kinkos?
· Formal and informal education, reading books on adoption

Not that I am complaining. I’m not. I’m sure it has been far easier than things a lot of families have gone through for pregnancies and adoptions alike. Just trying to summarize the journey thus far, as we look ahead at the uncertainty before us. Surely this is leading somewhere? I have to think so, but sometimes it does seem a bit surreal. I can see it in Jim’s eyes that he doesn’t think it will happen. It’s almost like adoption paperwork and the process itself has become a hobby that fills our spare time and gives us something to talk about, with no end result forthcoming. What a long, strange trip it has been since the first night I went to that first Int’l Adoption orientation meeting in 2004.

Curse you, Starbucks

OK, so now I know that my name is lodged in a Teradata database somewhere in Seattle. Every time the marketing guys at Starbucks get a red flag that my caffeine addiction may possibly be waning, they send me free caffeine. First it was the free drink coupon in my Sunday paper (OK, maybe that was sent to everyone, and not just me..). Then Jim got a $10 Starbucks "card" from a co-worker (apparently Starbucks works in indirect channels). We were forced to register online to use the Starbucks card...and now they are sending me direct mail with more free drink coupons. Curse you, Starbucks, and your database!

And by cursing you, please don't assume that I no longer want the free drink coupons....

Adoption Update

A bit down right now on the adoption front. The delays just seem to never end. The latest prediction from our agency is that we might expect a referral in the Sept/Oct timeframe. When we submitted our Russian dossier at the end of February I really thought we would be home from our second trip by then. There are continuous reminders that none of this is really within our control. I had compared the adoption wait to a pregnancy, but a pregnancy does have a pretty definite end date, within a week or two.

On the plus side, I did have concerns about the age difference between Natalie and the new baby being too close. And I know I should be using this extra time to my advantage. It is just a frustrating time, not having any real idea of when it will happen. Planning anything is difficult. We did finally decide to take a vacation (from last post), which we had not planned because I was sure that "any day now we'll be traveling".

I will find the humor in it in a later post. I'm just grumbling in this one.

Aaahhh...vacation

Top 10 Things I Loved About our Recent Family Vacation

10. Breakfast at Starbucks, and Long Island Iced Tea with dinner, S'mores at the hotel every night (OK, I'm combining a few things).

9. Natalie's recent maturity. We only used the stroller once (and didn't need it then), and ditched the diaper bag entirely - getting by with just a spare pull-up in my purse just in case. She's not a baby anymore! (also a little sad...)

8. Liam's new confidence in the pool: Swimming underwater (even without goggles), floating on his back, and having contests with Jim to see who can sit on the bottom the longest.

7. Natalie creating a new Olympic sport. Two year-old pool running! A big part of the pool was so shallow she could stand with her head above water, and she loved it! She wasn't much into putting her face in the water (if she did go under, she popped up saying calmly "I'm done."), but she loved walking or running between me and Jim.

6. Once-cautious Liam jumping like a crazy man in the hotel bounce house - chasing all the older girls, and making friends right and left. I think we would be hard-pressed to describe him as shy these days.

5. Natalie's unabashed squeals of joy at any and all animals, fish, reptiles, or creature of any sort, at the aquarium, etc.

4. Jim's outright disgust at any creature or plant life that lives or swims in the ocean or sea. I was afraid he was going to scare other people's kids at the aquarium, the way he carried on about the "disgusting" octopus.

3. Natalie's vocabulary. Including her way of emphasizing every syllable of a word, and sometimes adding syllables that aren't there. Choc-o-late. Neck-a-lace. Brace-e-let. Ghost-es (plural of ghost). Dwarf-es (as in- you play the 7 Dwarf-es, and I'll be Snow White).

2. Nightly ritual of one bed yelling Go Bengals and the other yelling Go Packers!! It started while Jim was making us watch Sports news before going to sleep, and Natalie happened to comment out of the blue "I love Packers!" She has no idea what that means, of course. But it got such a reaction from Jim that every night she would yell "Go Packers!!" and Liam would yell "Go Bengals!"

And the #1 thing: Serious family bonding without the marathon road trips that we usually attempt. Very nice!

We love sharks!

S'mores, yess!!!!

Aaaaah...the beach

Natalie fell and skinned her knee and is NOT happy about the picture taking. An expression we know we'll see a lot in about 11 more years...

History lessons

Liam's interest in death continues. He likes to ask me questions about pictures in the newspaper (I don't always answer honestly), and the other day there were some cartoon drawings of various historical figures. It didn't seem like a morbid article - it was about health & exercise habits of great people. He pointed to a picture of George Washington.

L: Who is that?

Me: George Washington. He was the first President of the United States. He also liked to play ball with his soldiers, according to this.

L: So. Is he alive?

Me: Well, he lived a long, long, long time ago.

L: So. He's dead. Why did he die?

Me: Yeah....ummm..I'm not sure.

L: Who is this?

Me: That's Abraham Lincoln. He was also a President a long time ago. It says here he used to be a wrestler. Isn't that interesting?

L: He's dead too?

Me: Uh...yeah.

L: Who is this? (Pointing to Susan B Anthony)

Me: Do you want me to read you the cartoons? (He loves those, even though he doesn't get the jokes).

It's funny, it never occurred to me before to think that History was a morbid subject. It seems so right at the moment though.

Happy 4th of July Weekend!

Oh-oh say, can you see....

Happy 4th of July! The kids have enjoyed it so far. The neighborhood had a kid parade, with bikes and wagons decorated with flags, and then popsicles at the end when we were all in the final stages of heat stroke.

We also had a cookout and watched a very nice local fireworks display. Liam shows no signs of his previous fireworks phobia, and Natalie enjoyed them a lot. Before we left to see them, she kept saying "Fireworks? In the sky? Oh yes!"

As an update on my caffeine addiction, I have decided not to fight it for the time being. Jim didn't help by bringing me home a Red Bull, saying "sometimes you just have to ride the Bull, honey." (That is a line from The Office...said by Creed when he was trying to act young so he wouldn't get fired for being too old. I think maybe I'm trying to be young again too, when I drink caffeine.) Jim also kindly offered me his beloved Excedrin to combat the headaches, and then I read the bottle and realized each one has about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. No wonder I felt better! So I'm giving up for now. I'll fight that battle another day. The fireworks were very lovely without a headache.

Those gymnastics classes sure are paying off - look at that perfect hand stand!! :-)

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day! I hope you can all sit your bums down on your chesterfield for a while, have a spot of tea (OK that may actually be British) or some homo milk and some Timbits, and dab your face with a serviette before having to run off to the washroom.

Just a little Canadian translation humour at the expense of our friends up North...but I do hope everyone enjoys the day. We would usually put our flag out, but on Memorial Day a strong wind ripped our flag post right out of the bricks. Liam and I did do an online jigsaw puzzle of a Canadian flag though. Did you know there are a ton of online jigsaw puzzles out there? I don't know why, but I was suprised by that.

I'm down South struggling with my caffeine addiction this week. For those who don't know, I drank NO caffeine for years. Probably 4 or 5 years. Then while I was pregnant with Natalie I started to crave it again, and after she was born I had a caffeinated drink...occasionally. Then after our move last year I had a Starbucks or two...and it turned into an every morning thing to have one of those sugary, refrigerated, buy from the grocery, Starbucks frappucino drinks. And sometimes a soda with caffeine in the afternoon. I know, this sounds like small potatoes to most people who drink coffee and soda. But for whatever reason, caffeine has a very strong effect on me. It contributed to my bizarre sleeping issues (won't go there here), and even if I am drinking only one a day, if I skip a morning I get a ferocious headache and become extremely irritable. So I decided to quit again, about a week ago. But then on Sunday, there was a coupon for a Free iced coffee at Starbucks. Curse you Starbucks! I asked them to make it decaf...but they said it wasn't really meant to be that way...so I ordered it the regular way. And now I am on-again and off-again, and have constant head aches. I think I have to decide if I'm for it or against it, as Bush might say... Oh caffeine, why do you torment me so...