May 2007

The cupcakes went over quite well at our class last night – there were plenty of “Ooooh, someone’s been busy!” comments made through mouthfulls of lemon – but I was left feeling a bit guilty (!) about the boxed-origin. From a mix. Not from scratch.

WHAT KIND OF A MOTHER AM I GOING TO BE?!

(Oh. That’s right. A REALISTIC mother!)

The rest of the class went well, of course, and we’re signed up for the 10th session – the “foster/adopt” class. So it looks like we have one whole month left of training before we can call ourselves “ready”. And that’s not even including the homestudy!

In other developments, we need to select – and soon – guardian(s) for our kid(s). This is proving to be a lot more difficult and perplexing than I had previously imagined it would.

Although I have plenty of good friends – some who adore kids and some who are ‘okay’ with kids – it seems most people’s lives are in transition. Moving, attaching, detaching, changing their lives around. And while one may think they’re okay with taking on our kids if it were needed, who’s to say that their future spouse would be okay with it? Who’s to say they won’t decide to move to Portugal one day and.. okay, you get my point. Transitions.

I have relatives – cousins – who could in theory be considered as guardians. But I don’t stay in close touch with my cousins or extended family – and it doesn’t seem quite fair to ‘dump’ kids on them when Coffee and I cannot be relied on to appear for the annual holiday dinner.

In my dream world, I would have my bestest friend Michelle take our kids – but she lives in California. And California, while a lovely place, is not part of Canada and thus the issues related to taking our kids would just be insane. Not to mention the difficulty of the situation in the event that our adoption is open and the kids are mandated to spend certain amounts of time with their bio parent(s).

And the same goes for Coffee’s sister – she lives in Texas.

Then comes the fact that our kids will, most likely, have special needs. There’s no telling WHAT those needs will be or how severe they’ll be, but the fact is any guardian will need to be prepared for that possibility. The person would need to be open to psychological issues, developmental delays, possible physical issues..

Would it be too greedy to say that I’d also like our kids to be raised by someone who shares a good majority of our values?

And so we’ve got a dilemma. It’s unlikely that we’re going to drop dead in the near future, but that doesn’t mean we can skip over this issue. How do we choose the right person, convince them they’re the right person, not impose, and.. ohgod, see? SEE?

I have absolutely no idea what we’re going to do.

1. Lemon cupcakes, cooling in the kitchen.
2. Sunshine, even when it’s blazingly hot outside.
3. Air conditioning, to help combat #2.
4. Library books stacked up all over the place.
5. Sunglasses that I wear everywhere, all the time.
6. My beloved husband makes me laugh.
7. And he has an endless capacity for snuggling.
8. Email from my dear friend Pant.
9. Having time to myself every single day.
10. Dogs behaving well and being snuggly.
11. A home that I feel “at home” in.
12. Very good friends.
13. Laughter. Inappropriate or otherwise.
14. Ice water with a bendy straw.
15. Ice cream in the summer.
16. Unexpected good things.
17. Being able to watch “Bad Santa” all day, if I choose.
18. Pink toenails.
19. A peaceful life.
20. Love.

I resent all things good for me – and yet, when I embrace them, eventually, I feel wonderful. Why can’t I remember that?

What is it about my inner rebel that feels the need to.. REBEL against EVERYTHING? Yargh.

For example:

I feel better when I sleep well at night, yet I try very hard to resist going to bed most evenings. I’d rather stay up late and play Tetris or watch a movie with Coffee. I hate when the fun has to end – even though there’s a certainty of more fun the next day. I know how exhausted I will be if I don’t sleep and the alarm is set for 8am, but it’s difficult to remember that.

I feel better when I eat healthy foods, mixed with some junk food, rather than subsisting on a steady diet of convenience and cheese-strings. And yet, I have a hard time opening the box of rye pasta or tearing open a bag of salad and find myself reaching, yet again, into the cheese-string package.

I feel better when I drink more water – something easy to do when there’s a water dispenser in the dining room full of ice cold water – and yet I find myself reaching for a can of Dr. Pepper more often than I’d like. Or going around with a dry mouth.

I feel great when I spend time with friends – even just chatting online – but eventually I stop doing it and find myself sinking into the life of a hermit once more. And then, when I’m invited, I’m reluctant to engage again because oh, it seems like so much effort to be sociable. And then I do it and I feel great again. Why can’t I just skip the hermit part?

Y’know, I’ve always been an instant-gratification junkie – tied up with an ADD soul and an addictive personality – but my brain knows better. It knows better and yet, time and time again, I find myself veering off in the opposite direction of where I really want to go. I can almost feel a literally kicking and screaming inside my brain some days, fighting against my OWN CHOICES.

Why can’t I make consistently good choices? Why must half of my brain be childish and stubborn?

By 6pm tonight, I need to have baked two batches of cupcakes and applied a suitable layer of frosting on each. This sounds like a no-brainer, especially once you learn that I bought boxed cake mix with which to make said cuppies, but with the weather sitting around 80,000 degrees I am less than enthused. Even with the A/C on, it’s gonna’ be WARM.

I suspect, however, that there will be leftover lemon cupcakes – and that, my friends, is almost enough motivation to make me dig out the muffin pans.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In her CD *Spiritual Madness: The Necessity of Meeting God in Darkness,* Caroline Myss tells us that wading through messy darkness is an essential part of our search for meaning. She doesn’t recommend that we avoid chaos at all costs, or even just accept it with resignation. Rather, we should welcome it as a gift that can teach us crucial secrets about how to become ourselves. I agree with Myss. That’s why I advise you not to resent the confusion before you. And don’t just mindlessly clean it up as fast as you can, either. Instead, dive into it. Celebrate it. Allow it to change you into a riper, wiser, more beautiful soul.

(Freewill Astrology)

Tomorrow night is adoption class #7 – out of 9. That means we’re very close to being finished with the training and even closer to the part where they trust us to get near an actual, living-breathing-screaming child. Assuming all goes according to plan.

And, finally, the plan is for us to go the foster-adopt route. I managed to put aside my emotional hysteria about the idea and now, after much consideration, it’s feeling more and more like something appropriate for us.

Foster-adopt is different from regular fostering or adoption, in a lot of ways. Our preferences (for a sibling pair, young but not infants) will be honoured, but the children who are placed with us will still be legally attached to their parents. We’ll foster them – with all the rules and guidelines that apply to fostering – until such time as their parent(s) legal rights are terminated by the courts.

Then we adopt them.

Now, there are concerns of course. The parental rights may not be terminated; sometimes judges disregard the evidence and stick with the reunification goals. And that’s a pretty big concern – but one that we’re willing to accept. It will mean our kids will not be bounced around in foster homes, and it will allow us to bond with them sooner. Attachments and all the rest.

And yes, that concern about the children being removed from us and returned to their parents still worries me. It does.

We’ll have to live by the foster rules – which means no homeschooling initially and specific requirements for other activities in the home. I’m okay with that. There will be time for the rest, later.

We’ll be paid a (very) modest stipend, to cover things like clothes and food and sports and whatever, and all dental/medical stuff will be covered by the agency. This will be helpful initially in getting them settled.

There is still a chance that we’ll go through the straight-adoption route, of course. When all is said and done, it’s quite possible that we’ll have two kids placed with us for adoption – not fostering. Everything depends on the right match.

I am SO ready to get ON WITH THIS!

Do you know what I found today?

T-shirts. WITH REAL T-SHIRT SLEEVES!

Not cap sleeves or puffy sleeves or long-sleeves or tank-top straps.

No sirree!

Genuine, full-t-shirt sleeved t-shirts.

And NOW summer may begin.

This morning I woke up a few minutes before the 8:02am alarm – talk about a relief! Every morning for the past week I’ve found myself wide awake at 4am, 6am or, worst of all, 7am. Nothing makes me twitchier than waking up far in advance of the alarm and knowing that when I next wake up I’ll feel groggy.

And yo, it’s Friday! That means in a few long hours, it’ll be the weekend. And you already know how I feel about THAT.

[insert bum-shakin' dance here]

We’re in the process, still, of figuring out the appropriate layout for our house + kids. If we do adopt 2 children, we’ll be giving up the entire top floor to them so they can each have their own room and personal space.

The question then becomes – where do WE sleep?

There’s a big room in the basement that currently houses boxes and stuffs that we’re storing – but after this weekend it will contain the treadmill setup (including TV and stereo and weights and the usual stuff). And the other half of that room is our so-called craft room which requires some work to pull together.

Could we shift things slightly and make that our bedroom and exercise room? The basement is cool and dark and not appropriate for kids – but ideal for adults. At the very least, we could have energetic sex without disturbing the children with springing floorboard noises.. Plus, there’s plenty of room in there.

But then, where do we put the crafts?

Or maybe we should take our office – the room on the first floor near the kitchen and bathroom – and make that our bedroom? It’s closer to the action, of course, but that would mean moving our office into the basement where, when using it, we’d be out of view of the kids. Great for porn surfing, I suppose, but not so great for keeping an eye on playing children.

I’m not sure if Kelly is still planning to occupy a corner of our basement when her house sells (which reminds me to check up on that!) but the room she was going to take is small and cosey. If she’s not taking it, perhaps that would be our bedroom? Or would it be our craft room? Storage room?

And let’s not even get me started on our “dining room” which I’d like to get set up before the kids arrive – it would be good to have a place for family meals that was NOT the sofa or standing in the kitchen or on the floor in the living room. But in order to get THAT set up I need to help Coffee heft some 80 kabillion pound furniture down to the basement.

Plus we’ll need to find a PLACE for said furniture in the basement. Uh huh.

And then we’ll need to haul the dining room furniture upstairs and try to arrange it so it doesn’t take up all the available space.

The bathroom upstairs has been ripped apart as much as I can – but now I need help to rip out the baseboards behind the toilet (it will require a ‘wrenching’ motion to not pop all the pipes out of the wall) and if we’re putting an exhaust fan up there, we need to cut that hole before I paint and pretty things up.

I am feeling less and less relaxed about the house lately.

In fact, I am now going to LEAVE the house for a few hours to prevent hyperventilation on my part. Yeeep.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Near the end of World War II, a soldier named Shoichi Yokoi was serving in the Japanese army on the island of Guam. As American troops invaded, he fled into the dense jungle and hid in an underground cave. There he stayed for the next 28 years. When he finally returned to civilization, his first words were, “It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive.” In comparing you to Yokoi, Cancerian, I am of course exaggerating. You have not been concealing yourself so literally or so thoroughly. And yet I feel a similar poignancy about the way you have kept yourself from revealing your full beauty. Please come in from out of the dark and shine the full blast of your iridescent light.

(Freewill Astrology)

Daisy is.. a heat magnet. Five minutes outside in the sun and her dark black fur is twenty-five-thousand degrees. Celsius, of course. And she is panting and staggering and unimpressed.

We made it around 2 city blocks and.. she was DONE. Ready to come home and lie on the cool floor and pant and stare at me with great amounts of hostility.

I’m dripping sweat all over the place after the walk. I assure you, I was not ENJOYING IT, dog. Jeeeez.

I have some errands to run today – library, post office and I may try to find a CG store somewhere around that has cooler clothing than the jeans that, as a result of said heat, are sticking to me. *shudder*

The weather network says to expect 33C heat that “feels like 36″ later this afternoon. I weep.