Cabin Fever

Dear God. I do not like February. After Chinese New year and Valentine's we could move on- you know? It could get warmer and brighter. The old dirty snow could go away. The skies could show some blue. Let's consider shortening this drab month okay?
I am just saying this because since I have become a Mother this is the hardest month to get through. God have you been paying attention to this little house today? Just in case you have missed anything , I will give you a run down. You have to face it. The kid here has some serious cabin fever. The kid and the cat and probably me too.
But okay here you go:

1. This morning I was shaken awake by a child claiming that her needs for donuts was intense and she may possibly perish if a donut was not forthcoming.
2. Shortly after that, The Cat was summarily dismissed from The Pink Palace for the heinous crime of "chewing a star bead".
3. Thirty minutes later The Kid was in an argument with her beloved penguin and voicing BOTH sides of the argument. I am unsure of the cause of the rift but alot of blame was placed and they are not on speaking terms for "120 minutes".
4. The Quadro of Polly Pockets has turned ugly. These four are going at each other like residents in a Maine Town as penned by Stephen King. Really, nasty things are being said about bunny slippers and stripey pants. It's ugly. (Again most voices done by The Bean.)
5. A short time ago my bedroom was torn apart in the search for a squirt bottle as The Cat was getting truly unruly and The Kid can only control him with forced water streams.
6. 45 seconds after a squirt bottle was located, I heard the following from The Pink Palace - Squirt.   squirt. squirtsquirtsquirt! then The Cat said pppprrrrpppptttt! and The Kid hollered "THAT WILL LEARN YOU!' " YOU Beast!"- then a jingly slam as the be-belled door of TPP was slammed shut.
7. Directly after the slam, a damp and ruffled cat came to my side. He had an air of complete disgust and "I am so telling on her". 
8. When The Kid heard me assuaging the pride of The Cat, she communicated through her furnace vent that "he does not deserve pity. as he was chewing an handmade butterfly book and he needed punished". The Cat turned and looked at me as if to say "see? I told you- she's nuts"
9. I bet that only Jerry Springer could unravel what is currently taking place with the Rabbits that dwell in the Calico Critters Manor, situated in The Pink Palace.

So that's it. I am ready to pull my hair out and it's not even 11 am. I am not talking to either The Kid or The Cat right now as I am starting to feel a bit Stephen King-y myself. Send help if you can. Help in the form of clement weather that allows for hours and hours of outdoor play.

P.S. The Cat is currently parked outside of The Pink Palace with what is either a look of chastisement or the making of cunning plans, it's hard to tell, but he is angling for permission to re-enter. God help me.

Bullets About Bean

I have been going on and on about The Wait and not posting about my Butter Bean and what she is up to these days. Let's fix that.

• We have been working pretty consistently on Home Schooling. I am still trying to get my feet under me on this. Thankfully we have a little room to play with because it is hard for me to make school time a priority when I have so much going on. 
• She can count by 2' and by 10's. She can count from 1 to over 120 and back down in reverse. She knows and can write and sound out all the alphabet now. She can read all of her Bob Books and is starting on Hop on Pop and 10 Apples Up On Top. She does addition and subtraction on numbers from 1-10. She is also able to perform some serious critical thinking. 
• She still loves her Kung Fu time and practices alot with Papa.
• We recently watched a movie called Akeelah and The Bee and she is obsessed with spelling now. We even have little spelling bees in the living room in the evenings.
• She is ecstatic about her brother and talks of him many, many times throughout the day.
• On Saturday, the day we mailed out the Dossier, she got so excited and happy that she went into Chatter Overdrive for about 12 solid hours.
• She has a little cold right now and she wants lots of Mama Time,  this means lap time and cuddle time with me. This means that she just sits there and lets me rub her tummy and play with her hair and I love every single second of it. I just soak it up.
• She wanted her hair to grow, this means that she wanted me to stop having her bangs cut. I have done that and they are pretty long now but I think we are all three ready for her to have the bangs again.
• The other day I sort of had an Atomic Meltdown. I stubbed my toe and that was the straw that broke this camel's back. I sat and cried for a long while and she was right there the whole time, patting my back and encouraging me.She has such a tender and giving heart.

She continues to grow and change. Every day I am in awe of her and who she is. It's very easy to forget what an old soul she is, very easy to assume that she isn't emotionally deep- she is though. She is the kindest, sweetest, bossiest, naggin'-est, talking-est kid that I have ever known. I am so glad that she is in my life. My sweet girl, my Butter Bean.

What's The Difference?

http://nohandscurrentinfo.blogspot.com/2009/11/adopting-sn-step-one.html

http://nohandscurrentinfo.blogspot.com/2010/01/adopting-sn-step-two-paperchase.html


The two links above are great because they give a pretty thorough and succinct run down of the steps to adopting a child from China. Now you may be wondering what the difference between NSN and SN is. Heck you may even be wondering what NSN and SN stands for . NSN stands for Non-Special Needs- a “healthy” child and SN means Special Needs, a child with a known medical condition, sometimes referred to as Waiting Child (WC).
Evelyn’s adoption was NSN. We enetered our first adoption a little timid and feeling like it was an adventure enough without complicating things with medical issues. I do not regret this decision at all. We got Ev. We were meant to have her. I truly feel that if SHE were in the SN Program I would have been led there to find her. Liam’s adoption is SN, he has a cleft lip and palate, though his lip has been repaired (Thank You once again Love Without Boundaries). This time, I was led to the SN Needs Program.
The two programs are essentially the same. You have to complete all of the documentation mentioned in the links above, for both types of adoption. The difference comes in surrounding the matching. With NSN adoption, you get your paperwork done and you send it to China. Once in China your Dossier gets “logged in” and put in line. The current wait is up to a horrible, awful 3-4 years, but when we were waiting for Ev it was 8 months. Eventually your Dossier moves through the rooms at the China Center For Adoption Affairs and lands in The Matching Room. Your match to your child takes place in China then.
With SN adoption the “matching” takes place with your agency. China sends files of waiting children out to agencies. The agencies then take time to sift through what families they have on file and what type of SN needs those families have stated that they are able and willing to handle. Since the matching takes place at the agency level, you do not have to have your Dossier complete and in China. As long as your agency has your Medical Conditions Checklist and Family Info along with signed Service Agreements, you are in line. You can be matched and not have your dossier in China.
As a matter of fact even in the SN program, if your dossier arrives in China with no particular child in mind, your dossier gets in line along with everyone else’s - it’s only with the Pre-Approval of a Waiting Child match does your dossier get pulled and sent into the SN line.
So our Dossier was not done when we got Liam. We still had to wrangle with Immigration and get 3 final documents sealed. NOW our dossier is on it’s way, with little Liam’s name all over it. That’s why I can have a son when China hasn’t seen my paperwork. They have seen enough to issue that Pre-approval, they know that we are sending along the rest. They know we want him, they said okay.
That’s the difference. Clear as mud now?

Entering The Big Wait

At 1:30 pm yesterday we packaged up 15 documents, 12 pictures and a whole lotta money in a box. Then we turned that box over to Fed Ex so they could send it to our agency in Colorado. That box was our dossier. That box held all of our hopes and dreams for a little boy known as Dang Ao Zhuang. A little boy that we will call Liam.
The 2 pounds of papers in that box represented nearly an entire year's worth of effort on our part, it represented meetings and inspections, documentation of every aspect of our life, heartfelt requests, it represents the love that we already have for that little boy.
I can not believe how I feel. It feels like when you are running and you stop for just a moment or two to hopefully help that stitch in your side let up. Your standing there, all sweaty and in pain and your heart is pounding and you have this moment of just breathing and feeling yourself standing there, calm. You know that in a moment you will be back running with your legs pumping and your heart pounding just as fast as ever, but for now, you are just there. In the quiet, breathing. That’s me right now. I am standing and I am hunched over and I am catching my breath for the next thing to come.
The Big Wait.
The Final Push.
Umm, errr,... well okay. The next to last wait.
The last wait will be of course, those excruciating days between our Travel Approval(TA) and the actual travel.
This next thing coming up? I call it The Big Bear. We will wait for China to receive our Dossier and send us a Letter of Acceptance (LOA), then we will send THAT back to China and await that TA mentioned above.
I expect that this section of The Wait will be the one that almost does me in. I mean, I am completely out of it. There is nothing that I can do to speed things up, there is nothing that I can do to stop my son from growing anymore. I will have to trudge through daily life and pretend that I am actually thinking about what everyone is talking to me about. I will have to spend my days just lingering here. Waiting for word. Waiting for permission to hold my child. Not easy folks. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Right now though I am happy. I am triumphant. I have succeeded. I managed somehow to compress all of our love and desire for that one little person into two pounds of paper. Right now I will breathe. Because The Big Bear will descend Monday at 10:30 am, when I know that our agency has that box.

New Button

You will see a new button over there on the right. It's for Love Without Boundaries, these are the folks that are relentless in their quest to help children in China. These are the folks that sponsored Liam's cleft lip surgery. These are the folks that tucked him into a warm and secure foster home. I can not say enough about LWB. I can not ever begin to show them my gratitude. I can only tell the world what they have done for me and for my family. I can only spread the word.
I know that times are tight for everyone but if any of you out there have any extra money for charity. Please consider Love Without Boundaries. Check out their website, you can donate for individual children who need surgeries, you can donate to individual orphanages for food, you can donate to general funds for medical care, education or foster care. You can make a difference when you pair up with these folks. They truly save lives. Every day.

Meat Stick Mechanic

My husband is a sort of genius when it comes to car repairs. Minor car repairs. It's sort of like watching one of those monkeys find a stick that is just the right one for thrusting into an anthill to pull ants out and eat them. This is not an insult. When we were first married Les was pretty much ummm... let's say that he has learned alot.

So the door, okay. What happens is that the little pluggy thing that is supposed to get pressed in when the door closes, it doesn't. Press in, I mean, so then the light stays on.
What's a couple to do? Well when it is cold as all get out, you are out without tools and you have to try and fix it with what's on hand? You scour the trash left on the floor by your 5 year old and you thank God that you come across a slim-jim, half eaten and tucked into a Ziplock baggie. Because if you are cool enough you figure out how to wedge the baggie in the seat/door groove with the meat stick positioned enough to facilitate that whole pressy in action and viola! No more dome light issues. See Dad? We have no worries until that meat stick starts to mold and in this weather? Shoot, we have until Spring!
Also the other door? We fixed that whole pressy knobby thing with old receipts and medical tape. In 1999.
We do have a more permanent and visually appealing fix in mind. Those stick on pads for the bottom of chairs and such.
Aren't we smart?

Overheard At Smokewood

I love my family. They have a particular verbal style that can not be beat.
This is a conversation between my Mom and my sister while driving around the other day:
Gma: Oh Lissa see that restaurant?
Lissa: yeah
Gma: They do Teriyaki there!
Lissa: Oh? You mean like teriyaki food?
Gma: No like teriyaki, when you sing along!
Lissa: (choking gasping) OH you mean Karaoke

See what I mean?

Then at the party today we had Nonnie, The Queen Absolute of Effed Up Grammar ( God bless her).

Me: hey I just went to Chipotle for the first time and I loved it!
Nonnie: Oh I love to go there it's so good, especially if you get sour cream and Gua... gaca...Guatemala on your burrito!


Brev: May I be excused? (may hi bee astoozed?)
Nonnie: Beetlejuice is playing tonight?!?!?!


Fun fun fun.