Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers out there.

Had some seafood with the family last night. Never sure what time with my extended family might be like, but it wasn't too bad. Did come to the realization that my Uncle is really an 'old boys club' kind of guy when he asked where I was working these days and I told him, and then told him that my cousins use the product that my company produces. He thought that product might be good for him, and instead of asking me about how he would go about using it (since, you know, I support people who have technical questions about said product) he started asking my cousin. My cousin is a man. He only asks other men business related questions. He asked T and my brother an opinion about some business venture he has going on. He would never ask me that same question. None of this is much of a surprise, really, but I just had never thought about it that concretely. He really dismisses the opinions of women. He's on his third marriage, and I think this one will last because she's a helpless princess and he can take care of her. That makes him happy.

We meet at my parents at 3 today. I made the applesauce a few days ago and I just finished making some deviled eggs. Next I'm going to make our family's delicious carrot souffle recipe. Yum!

Hope everybody has a good day.

Wonderful.

Wonderful cheese,
wonderful apps,
wonderful wine,
wonderful meal,
wonderful dessert,
wonderful husband.

A little better for now

The fourth grade in my brother and sister-in-law's town has a 'wax museum' night every year where the fourth graders read a biography and then they write about them, memorize their spiel and sit or stand in a dark gym. Parents and family come to the gym and wave a flashlight at the fourth graders and they recite their spiel.

We went to Wax Museum night tonight. Our nice H did a wonderful job as Mia Hamm. It's such a great idea, and the kids made some interesting choices in their biographies.

After the performance we want to brother and SIL's for dinner. Yummy beef stew. Nephew is reading a book we gave him for his birthday and enjoying it. We gossiped about Thanksgiving occurrences and laughed a lot.

Two of the young children will not be coming for Thanksgiving due to a full-on family illness. Of course that's the one young family that knows about our situation and would be appropriately understanding, I think. My extended family is insane.

I'm feeling a little better after the family time. My SIL hadn't been acting like herself and we had been worried, but she has been getting and better and tonight it was just like having the old SIL back. And it was so nice. And the niece and nephew are great. And my family is funny, and we had fun.

And I told my taxi-riders that after January 1st I will be a taxi no more.

Tomorrow is our anniversary. We will go out for a nice dinner, and then we will have one more day of work before the family chaos starts.

An old college friend sent an email and T and I will go visit her and I am excited to see her and catch up.

I'm hopeful that in the morning my spirits will be a little lifted for our anniversary, which is still the best thing that has happened to me. Despite everything I am so lucky to have my wonderful T in my life and I am just so thankful for him.

Down

Feeling down.

Felt down all weekend. Saturday I could barely get off the couch. Sunday was better, but it's Monday morning, and I'm still feeling bad.

Tomorrow is our anniversary. We made reservations at someplace nice. It's supposed to rain hard all day.

There are going to be lots of little kids around for Thanksgiving. I think 5 under 5. Maybe that's why I'm feeling so down. If one of my pregnancies had worked out, we'd have a 1 or 2 year old at this point.

I don't want to skip Thanksgiving because I think that will be worse, but I'm not in a very good place right now.

PMS

I'm a little pre-menstrual. That may have been a part of my rant yesterday about my carpool. That being said, I have still decided to end it.

And I also have to remind myself that it is not a carpool because we do not share driving responsibility. It is more like a taxi service.

But anyway, I remembered that I wanted to write down this story for posterity. The woman who sits in the cube next to me asked me if I was interested in adopting a dog. I love dogs, and I kind of want a dog, but we are not planning on getting a dog right now. So I asked why. Apparently a friend of hers has a dog that attacked their child. And this couple has another child on the way, and they need to get rid of the dog because it attacks children. So apparently I'm a prime candidate for the baby-attacking dog. I might want it. You see, because we don't have any children, we might be interested in taking in a dog that attacks babies. Make sense? It does to her!

Oh! And another story for posterity. One of the recipients of my friendly daily taxi service has two kids. She constantly reads Parents magazine and talks about her kids every morning -- she usually complains about how terrible and difficult her children are, but then will say it's mostly worth it, she guesses. I think I've mentioned that her MIL does most of the parenting for her children, but that's a little beside the point.

Anyway, we were listening to Johnny Cash and there's this song about a dog and Johnny Cash sings about this "dirty old egg-sucking dog." B goes on to tell us (me and the other taxi-er) that sometimes she tells her 2-year-old that he's lucky he's so cute because his behavior is so terrible that otherwise she would give him away. Yes, she tells her two year old son that she wants to give him away because he's bad. But she doesn't because he's cute. Isn't that a great message? She says it to him in front of her other son who is 5. Yay! I usually don't say anything to B about her horrible parenting, but I couldn't stop myself with that one. I told her that saying such a thing was horrible. She said she wouldn't say it to him if he understood what she meant! I informed her that kids understand a lot more than she thinks. The 2-year-old J is definitely not an easy kid. I would guess this is true not only because of his parents' poor parenting skills, but because that is just how this kid is. I believe that. But to think that telling a 2-year-old he better behave or else you will give him away might improve his behavior is insane! Why would you not understand that this would probably create more behavior problems, I do not know. After I expressed my horror, she said she guesses she had better stop saying that to J.

Oh. My. God.

Yes, I have PMS, but these are the types of things that drive me crazy. I'm not in the best place right now.

Carpool

I just don't think I can take it any more. I hate my carpool.

They give me $60 per month for gas money. I get way more than $60 worth of grief from this.

I think starting January 1st, this carpool is over.

I'm so bad at telling people stuff like this, though. What do I say? I can't tell them I hate them and they bother me so I don't want to drive them any more. I can't tell them that their annoying behavior isn't worth the money they pay me every month. I'm not like that.

I'm just going to have to say that I need a break and I'm going to be starting a new job pretty soon and it's just not going to work for me any more.

I'll tell them after Thanksgiving.

God, I hate them. I HATE THEM!

Making plans

Our 3rd wedding anniversary is one week from today. We are trying to make plans to do something nice. We want to go out to a nice dinner on the actual day of our anniversary -- but not too nice -- because we are hoping to get a weekend away on the first weekend in December. As a gift to ourselves. We don't go away much and we think it will be good for us to go away. We need to pamper ourselves.

I don't want to use any vacation time because we're hoping to visit my parents in Florida in February or March, but leaving Saturday morning, staying in a hotel, going out to a nice dinner all seems like a good get-away.

We just have to make the damn reservations.

Otherwise, everything is the same. Sometimes I feel like life is just passing us by and I am just standing on the side of the road watching it pass.

Trying to keep on keeping on

While we haven't decided exactly what to do regarding our book, things are slightly better today. I suspect that we'll change it around a bunch, but we most likely will leave in at least one picture of the cats. But this decision is ongoing.

T has been having trouble at work, but after a long week of fretting and freaking out, things have settled down a little in that area. Things were talked out, tentative agreements were made and it seems like his work is going to be moving forward in a reasonable way, at least for now. So that is a good thing.

I'm still totally sick of my current job, but I am living with it. My carpoolies still suck, but I am riding with them. My job is just stuck until after the new year.

I also found, on one of the many social networking sites I use, a birth mother that I was able to have a conversation with. I cannot tell you how much it means to me to be able to talk to birth moms. I feel I approach adoption with concerns, and I like to see the concerns from the 'other side' too. And it makes me feel so good when we view things similar, even while on opposite ends.

What really helped me was having both sides agree that the emptiness that comes from infertility can give us insight into the emptiness that comes from deciding to have your child brought up by another set of parents. I know that the situations are completely different, but it is the shared experience of emptiness that allows T and me to have such empathy for birth moms. And that, in turn, should help us understand how to navigate our adoption and our openness.

This has been such a long week, and I'm just so glad it is over. I hope I can find a little rest and relaxation during the weekend.

Redo

The potential facilitator pretty much wants us to redo our book. Sigh.

I found a lot of her suggestions to be fine. I can rework it much in the way she wants.

But she wants us to take out the pictures of the cats. She says a lot of birth mothers skip over books because of cats. There apparently is some old wives tale about cats sitting on a baby's face and suffocating it.

This bothers me on so many levels. One, I sort of feel like it makes it seem like she sees birth mothers as ignorant and superstitious, which is kind of an insult to them. And I also feel like it will misrepresent us to take them out. They are part of our family.

She told us all her suggestions were optional and we didn't have to take them.

But talking to her about it made me, for the first time, feel pressure. I felt like I was talking to a high pressure marketing person. I didn't like it.

Part of me thinks we should just do what she says, for the most part. Looking for another outreach person -- an agency or attorney or another facilitator -- just seems like too much at this point. I enjoyed talking to her.

I just don't like high pressure and I felt a little pressure.

I'm not sure what to do. Sleeping on things is always good, so that is what I'm going to do.

Photo Book

We sent the photo book with dear birth mother letter to our potential facilitator. She has some suggestions.

Sigh.

I hope they're minor.

Moving along

Nothing new here.

Talked to the facilitator again last night. I like her. We're continuing to move forward with her. She said that due to the tough economic times, the domestic adoption arena has changed a little. It has really ramped up lately, but with these times a slightly higher number of women are looking to make adoption plans, and a slightly lower number of potential adoptive parents are able to afford all of the fees, so there is a slight increase in placements for her lately.

Which makes me a little nervous. But in a good way.

We still want an attorney to review her contract before we send it in, but once that is reviewed, I think we'll be moving forward.

It's just so difficult for me to accept that this may happen. I can't explain it, but my nervousness comes from being in a place where I was convinced that we just couldn't be parents. Maybe that's not the right way to explain it.

While we were going through fertility treatments, I had a lot of hope at the beginning. Hoping to be pregnant was easy for me, I guess. Once I was pregnant for a while, I might be able to start planning a little. Yes, of course I know that terrible things happen with some pregnancies and sometimes, and nothing is a guarantee. That being said, barring horrible and unforeseen circumstances, you do have a time line. I like time lines. I like to plan.

But you just never know when a match will happen. You never know how far along the expectant mother will be. Sometimes they're a week from their due date. Sometimes they're more like 20 weeks. I'm not sure which scenario would be easier, though. Knowing about a match for 20 weeks before the baby arrives seems nice in some ways -- it can give me that 'planning time' I seem to be longing for. But it also seems to me that the earlier the match, the higher of the likeliness that a match will fall through. Maybe I'm making that up in my head and what will really happen is I will just have more time to image how things might not work out. As a worrier, that's a distinct possibility as well.

Anyway, I guess I'm in another transition period. I have to bring myself into a place that can accept that at any time we might be matched and we might bring home a baby.

I find it difficult to even type that.

Maybe I need to start therapy again.

Voted already

The polls open at 7am in Massachusetts and T and I decided to get there right when they open to avoid long lines. The line was long-ish, but the poll workers were efficient and we were out of there by 7:15. I voted already! Yay for me!

Now we just have to watch election coverage tonight with election night pizza. This is our tradition.

I just have to say, I am so glad for this campaign to be over. I was so sick of all the talk and the TV ads and everything. I am so happy I don't have to watch any of this crap any more. I am ready to just move on. And hopefully things will move on in the way I hope they will. It's going to be a long night.

Not much new here. We have the Expand Your Search meeting tomorrow night, and hopefully we will begin to truly move forward with our facilitator. I have looked at her forms many time, but have yet to fill them out. I finished putting our photo booklets together and will drop them off at the agency tomorrow evening, since we're going to be there anyway.

Every week I'm going to the meeting in my new department. It really makes me salivate about starting my new job. I really can't wait. Time seems to be creeping, though, and it's unclear when I will actually start. It makes my current job really painful. I'm not enjoying it any more, and my carpoolers make it even worse. In just a few months a lot of these problems will be behind me, but I'm not good at being patient.

Plus, now that so much stuff is kind of 'settled' I have found my new ridiculous worry. I worry that (ok, don't laugh) we will get a placement somewhat quickly and I won't have time to settle in my new job. More realistically, I have been hoping to stay home with our kids for a while, but if I really like my new job and that career path (which it truly could be) I'm not sure I'm really going to want to stay home full time. I need time to become 'essential' in my position so that I could possibly switch to part time, which I think would be fine with me. But I am worrying about these issues. And I know it's stupid because it is so far away and I can't possibly predict what is going to happen, but this is how I function. I have to have something to worry about.

But, at least at this time this is worrying about positive things?

Anyway, I'm going to relax now until it is time to leave for work.