150 Steps...In the Present Moment

Last evening... Chris and I arrive home at the same time (late...) We get inside the house dumping bags and keys and coats and other miscellaneous stuff just inside the front door. Check the messages (none. Pet the cat (very whiny and demanding.) Look at the mail (just Newsweek. Put away things from grocery store (shower gel, yogurt, gluten-free bread.) Chat (about our days and our usual frustrations.) As I'm puttering around the kitchen, Chris approaches me with a grin on his face and something obviously being held behind his back. "What did you do?" I ask him. His grin gets a little bigger and he brings forth from around his back a present dressed in lovely floral wrapping paper. A little whisper of spring. Hmmm ...have I forgotten some major milestone? It's not our wedding anniversary or the anniversary of our first e-mail. Not my birthday. Nope, no milestone that I can think. "What's this for?" I ask as I gently start prying...

We're in the kitchen this evening taking care of a little cleaning and prepping of dinner. Chris is washing the few dirty dishes that remain from the weekend. I am holding some lettuce leaves waiting for the sink to become available so that I can wash them for our salad. Our conversation: ME: [looking at the Romaine lettuce leaves in my hands] You know my favorite author - Barbara Pym. CHRIS:  Yyyeeessss ? ME: Well, I love it how in so many of her novels these very proper English women of the 1940s lament the fact that they just can't properly "dress a lettuce." [the sink becomes available and I wash the lettuce leaves] Or how some of her English lady characters whisper nastily about some other English lady, "Well, SHE doesn't even know how to properly dress a lettuce!" CHRIS: [chuckles then pauses] How DO you properly "dress a lettuce"? ME: [making salad and about to answer, but cut off by Chris still musing aloud on the proper way...

My mother called last night as she and my stepfather watched the  Hope for Haiti Now  telethon. "I know it's not really what you were planning on but maybe you should consider adopting a child from Haiti." I'm not quite sure how to respond. "If I was 25 years younger, I think I would do it," she says. "I'll go turn on the telethon, Mom," I reply. ----------------------- The scope of the Haitian tragedy is, quite frankly, beyond my capacity to truly comprehend. I don't think the human mind is designed to wrap itself around death and destruction of this magnitude, even if you're sitting there in the middle of it. I see the photos, the videos, hear and read the stories, and it's overwhelming. Part of you just wants to say "This can't possibly be real." After all, we've all seen death and destruction on a grander scale in the movies and really, no one was actually hurt. But it is real. It's just so ov...

Houston...we have lift-off. Our various adoption profiles are now "live." As my lovely husband said in a recent post about this "going live" business (yes, I'm a little behind in reporting out to you about this latest development in our journey), "Holy cats!" So, basically...now we wait. This process of waiting to be selected could take days, weeks, or months. Or even years. Here's the strange thing: I'm actually OK with the waiting. All of the running around and getting things together and writing like crazy and filling out questionnaires and getting my physical and securing letters of reference and blah blah blah. All of the adoption activities that have so overwhelmed us since May 2009 - that's the stuff that made my head spin and made me feel anxious and exhausted. Waiting...this I can do. Weird, huh? I've visited the blogs of other prospective adoptive parents who actually have tickers that say, "134 days w...

We've received word that our two remaining online profiles went live today AND that the long-delayed final home study report is being sent to our placement agency on Tuesday! Great progress in the last few days. And now we wait...

Holy cats! Our first profile page is now live with photos, a slightly modified version of our "Expectant Mother" letter (shockingly, the agency's edits didn't include changing the greeting to "Dear Birth Mother"), and some profile information. We're now out there in the wide world for expectant mothers to look at, consider, and hopefully choose. Wow, this just got a whole lot more real!

I've been thumbing through one of the Christmas gifts I received from my wife this year, a humorous yet extremely helpful book called " The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance ". It's a perfect fit for me, catering to my overdeveloped geek side by writing about the care and handling of a newborn as if it could all be summed in a snarky manual for a cool new cell phone. Snark aside, I'm finding it to be far more interesting and helpful than the massive tomes that traditionally pass for parenting guides, like the classic "What to Expect..." series, which I find absolutely overwhelming, not to mention tremendously boring. I'll use "What to Expect..." as a "hmmmm...I'd better look this up" resource but you're not going to find me sitting down and reading it from front to back. My tolerance for dry and dusty and, quite frankly, dull is limited. All th...

I watch the lights flicker past outside the window. I want them to slow down. Too fast means we will reach our destination too quickly. I usually can't just watch the night and the lights go by when in the car. I usually do the driving and it is my wife sitting in the passenger seat, relaxed and able to watch the lights. Tonight, she drives. Forest was always the more curious of my two cats. Originally there were three – Cecilia (Cecil for short), Scott, and Forest – named after my favorite writer. But Scott turned out to be too young to separate from his mother so I brought him back to the farm. I was left with Cecil, the grumpy, lazy one, and Forest, the cross-eyed neurotic one who eventually discovered a new side of herself as the house badass when my my wife brought Annabel into the family. Together they were a striking pair, a mix of Siamese and farm cat. My original vet joked that they were so distinctive that they should be a breed of their own. So I dubbed them ...

Shortly after returning home from the vet where I received the news that our cat, Forest, like her late step-sister Annabel, is ill with inoperable cancer, I found the following message awaiting me in my e-mail InBox: Congratulations! We have enough marketing material to build your three web profiles! This will take approximately 2-3 weeks and you will be notified by email when your webpage is LIVE. Thank you for your hard work, dedication and never losing momentum during this portion of the process. Good luck in your adoption journey. At least there's one bright spot in an otherwise awful day.

With the start of the new year, hopefully we've started to get back on track when it comes to the adoption process after two months of frustration and bureaucratic delays. First, we  finally  received the draft of our home study report about two months after we expected it. Thankfully, upon review, there were only minor factual corrections from our end. Of course, what would the adoption process be without previously unknown paperwork requirements cropping up at the last minute. Well, they weren't really unknown...they were simply requirements that our home study agency assured us in June that they would be taking of on our behalf. Not so fast, little buckaroo! It turns out that: they hadn't gotten around to submitting the child abuse background checks to two states this summer or fall, and  not only did we have to fill out the forms but there were additional administrative charges to go along with them All this came to light in the days immediately before Chri...

It would seem that I haven't been blogging nearly as much as I had been in the recent past. Apparently my plan to live life in the present moment has cut into my computer time. Is this such a bad thing? Nope. I've been busy with being busy - especially with the "getting healthier" part of being busy. My commitment to be a good example for our Little One seems to be getting stronger everyday. Spent quality time at the gym everyday this last week - even when I had two 8:00 a.m. meetings. I hauled my butt (all of it!  although  there is a little less of it now...) out of bed at 4:45 a.m. to get myself to the gym. Not that I'm bragging. Oh hell yeah, I'm bragging! But seriously, it's all been good and surely as I get more efficient at the gym I'll be able to get back to blogging a bit more regularly, although not too much because I want to keep moving more than I'm sitting still. (Even the New York Times, bastion of all knowledge and al...

It's taken me a while to get back to posting on this subject. Between preparing for the holidays, dealing with a sick kitty (no new news on that front just yet), experiencing the holidays, and then recovering from the holidays...well, I think you get the idea. First - I want to take a moment to thank Susie, Cassi,  Susiebook , Campbell, Mei Ling and Amanda for taking the time to comment on the original "Worthy..." post. It meant a lot to me that you folks commented and especially that you were all respectful of me and of each other. Thank you. I've been reading a few blogs lately where the  commentors  have been so very full of anger and vitriol for each other and for the blogger. Just horrible. So thank you for not making me afraid to read my own blog! I had an entirely different blog post laid out yesterday, but I received an e-mail from a good friend of mine (T) today and so changed my mind about what I am going to post. Here's what T had to say: I un...