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A Post with 17 Topics, at least

Long time, no post, I know. It’s been a very busy 7 days, coupled with hot weather, which makes sitting in my upstairs bedroom with skylights really HOT, and not very comfortable for blogging. Add to it the WALKING WONDER that is my daughter, meaning that she is in constant motion, and there’s no time to sit. Enough already. Onto the good stuff.

Right now, at 6pm, the Walking Wonder is fast asleep already. She’s done with taking two naps, so now she’s only sleeping once a day, and at the moment, she’s so jazzed about life in general that one nap has been very short. Like 90 minutes. When you go from sleeping 4 hours during the day down to 90 minutes, you have to make it up somewhere. Since she can’t sleep in, she’s hitting the hay at about 6pm. It makes for a very quiet evening, although very condensed.

Daycare Ramblings
The past two week’s I’ve been the one struggling with this, besides for the obvious reason that I have a very cranky girl on my hands, it also works out that she’s at Rainbow a little longer everyday. She’s transisitioned into the 1’s room, which is all sorts of exciting, but there is more of a schedule there. And the napping shedule is that everyone goes down between 12:00-12:30 and gets up between 2:30-3pm. That’s all well and good, but most days I’d like to pick her up smack dab in the middle of that time. Of course, that’s stupid because I’d be interupting her nap, so I had to accept either I’d have to FLY out of work every day and take her directly home to sleep OR accept that I’d have to delay seeing her until after 2:30 most days. I really wanted to be the mom to fly out of work so that my baby girl can nap her own bed, but I’m not. So after rationalizing this with everyone from Ms. L at Rainbow to my husband to my best friend to my librarian (seriously), the deal is that she’ll go down for nap every day there unless I need to pick her up no later than 12:45, in which case they won’t put her down for a nap. Now if you’re doing the math, you can see that if she goes down at 12 and sleeps for 90minutes, then she’s up by 1:30pm. That happens some days, other days it happens that she goes down later and gets up later. Right now the goal is to get her to go down at a consistent time (in a consistent way), and the idea is that her nap will lengthen as she gets used to it. The other children in the room all sleep just fine, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, right?!?!

The Walking Wonder
As for the walking–it’s what she does now. As of last Wednesday when we went to the pool, she was still bear-crawling around the pool deck, unable to push herself up to stand without a prop, yet smart enough not to scrape her knees on the concrete. Yesterday at the pool she stood up all by herself no problem and had ball just walking laps around the pool. Her actual water fun was a ball too, but I think she liked the walking better–she didn’t have to hold onto me for that! Seven Days. That’s how much she changed in Seven Days.

Stroller Shopping: ML pt 4
I mentioned in a previous post that my mom and I went stroller shopping before she headed back home after our vacation together. On our way to Babies R Us, our mission seemed simple enough–find an infant seat/stroller travel system. I had lots of friends with them, I knew that was what I wanted. I thought we’d pick a size (Metro-Lite or Larger), pick a pattern (plaid or print) and be done. Ha! And double Ha! I think one of the reasons why you are pregnant for 9 months must be so that you can change your mind 20 times and still have everything you need before you actually give birth. With the paper pregnancy we experienced, we really weren’t waiting long enough to get antsy about baby stuff. Seriously, other than tossing around a few names and agreeing not to repaint the baby’s room in our current house, we seriously hadn’t given baby gear a second thought. It seems stupid now, but I think it was a defense mechanism of sorts.

Anyway, my mom and I head over to BRU to get our shop-on, and 3 hours later emerged with a Graco Travel System. 3 hours, you say? Obviously I must have decided to get a few other things that day, right? Wrong. That was all we got that day, except for 3 very gender neutral onesies and 2 sleepers. 3 hours of basically just their infant seats and strollers. All the indecision one might experience in 9 months of preparing for a baby was rolled into 3 hours, in two aisles of a thankfully not-very-busy store.

My mom? She was the best. She humored me, agreed with me, let me take my time. She pointed out that we didn’t have control over much, so that we could take all damn day if we wanted to to pick out the perfect set. L? He was the best. He was in the area that afternoon, so he swung by. He tried a few of the strollers (folding down), made a few comments but let me decide. Me? I couldn’t decide. There was a nice one, moderately priced, very well rated–but it was orange and green plaid. It was awful, but practical. There were other off-brands with cute prints, but some didn’t have 5-pt harnesses. There were the bohemith Eddie Bauer and Laura Ashley editions that had more upholstery than most living rooms. There were your standard blue plaid ones. The sleeker grey and black ones. The strollers that weighed 15lbs, the strollers that weighed 45lbs and everything inbetween. We folded each one down, we tested all the bells and whistles. We tested the ease of the under-carraige basket. We tested the turning radius of each one and steering in general. You named it, we tested it.

In the end, we got the best stroller/carrier combo in the world. It has several compartments, 2 cup holders for me, a snack tray for the babe, under seat basket, TIME/TEMP readings, a snazzy pattern and just to be safe, a “cold weather boot” for the infant carrier. The infant carrier had 2 headrests that coordinated with the pattern-small and smaller. Most only had one. What if our baby had a really small head? Then we’d have to get a headrest for him/her, and it wouldn’t match and more importantly, we wouldn’t have it for the car ride home. Oh and it had matching strap pads for her shoulders, and well, it had EVERYTHING. So we got it. It was rather exhilirating, but also petrifying–we now owned a car seat. What if something happened and we didn’t end up bringing this baby home? Yikes. Then we’d have the perfect baby contraptions and no baby. Thankfully, that fear was unfounded, and 2 short weeks later, Baby Kahuna was home with us to stay.

As you can see from the picture, the “smaller” head rest turned out not to be needed! This was M’s maiden voyage in the infant carrier I had so seriously stressed over. As it turned out, she only used it for 5 months, and then she was too tall. And that cold weather boot? Never needed it. But those little shoulder strap pads? Awesome!

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5 years and counting…

Today is our 5th wedding anniversary! Last year, we were so caught up with the impending arrival, we didn’t go too overboard. I returned home from vacation on the 19th, and for our annivarsary we grilled out, sat by our lake (retention pond, if you must know) and chatted about the baby who was to be coming our way. We were meeting J & G the following morning.

So tonight I’m not posting about last year. L has class tonight, so we are celebrating on Saturday. We’re not sure how yet, but the picnic basket fairy left a basket in my car this morning, so I think we’ll fill it with some tasty treats and find a place to picnic. We’re going to get some time away from Baby Kahuna, while she plays with her godfamily. She MIGHT even get to sleep over. (I’m not sure if I’m ready for that!)

A few weeks ago I was talking with an old friend, and we were chatting about the idea of “getting married” and how, before you are married, “getting married” somehow feels like the end. Like you’ve found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, but somehow haven’t given too much thought as to what that will contain or how you’ll go about doing it. You fall in love, you get married. That’s what you do. Then the stress is off–hooray, you’re married! Life’s a cake walk once you walk down the aisle.

You don’t realize that while you generally know the person you are marrying fairly well, you don’t know everything about them. You don’t know how they’ll mature, how they’ll age, what path they will choose to walk. You don’t know how much hair they might lose (or start growing in odd places), you don’t if they will be healthy as they age or not, or if they will fit into their wedding clothes 5, 10 or 30 years down the line. You may have an idea you’d like to parent together, but you don’t know exactly how that will all come about, or how the person will be, day in or day out as a parent.

Take all of the above into consideration, and it’s amazing that the institution of marraige wasn’t thrown out the window long ago. I guess a little love sickness makes people do crazy things, including pledging to be there in sickness and in health, so on and so forth. So I count myself lucky, given all the variables that can happen, that L and I are celebrating our 5th anniversary. Not that it’s always been easy, rosy and all things “perfect”, but it’s been good overall. Our joys have outweighed our sorrows.

The past 5 years have been amazing, and I am looking forward to many, many more!

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Open to Open: ML pt 3

One key thing I forgot to write in Memory Lane part 1 is that we learned in the phone call from our social worker that our potential match was “open to an open adoption”–meaning, they’d like for us to meet, and then decide how to proceed.

The conversation I had with many people between the day we got the first phone call (July 12, 2005) and the day we met J and G (July 21, 2005) went something like this:

“We’ve been matched!”

“OMG! That’s so great. When’s the baby due? Is it a boy or a girl? Do you have any names picked out? Will you get to be there?”

“Well, we know the baby’s due August 8th. We’ll know more after we meet the couple who’ve picked us next week.”

“You’re meeting them?”

“Yes–we’re meeting them, with our social workers, at the adoption agency next week.”

“Won’t that be weird? Can they change their minds?”

“Well, they wanted to meet us before the baby is born. This way we can decide how we want things to go. And yes, they can change their mind. Acutally, they can change their mind until they sign the papers, which can’t be any earlier than 48hrs after the baby’s born.”

People thought it was very strange that we would meet the baby’s parents before she was born, that we could possibly be at the hospital during the whole thing, that we could do all that and NOT end up taking a baby home with us at the end. For us, at that time, it just seemed like that was what we signed up for. Not having had the thrill of newborn being placed in our arms yet, or really knowing what love we would instantly feel for the baby girl, it seemed like a very reasonable thing. I think the 2nd time around, it will be much harder to keep our feelings in check.

The concept of an “open” adoption was completely new to most people we shared our news with, and to this day, we don’t know any other families in our circle of friends who have an open adoption. Having no model to really go on, we just did (and still) what feels right, what we think is in the best interest of the Monkey, and for everyone involved.

One of the reasons J & G liked our profile was because we would consider an open adoption–not that we were demanding one, but that we’d take it one step at a time. They felt the same way–that they wanted the option, but they didn’t want to be locked into something if they decided they didn’t want a lot of involvement.

So we met, using only first names, not disclosing where we lived or worked, exactly, and chatted. And after the first few akward minutes, the conversation started flowing…..and flowing……..and flowing. We learned the J was excpecting a girl, and she was delivering on August 3rd. We learned that she had a little boy from a previous relationship, and that she’d “been there, done that” with a newborn, and didn’t really want to do it all again. Z was almost potty-trained, and she was done with diapers. We learned about how J & G met, what they do for fun, and what they wanted for this baby. L asked the question, “If you had to make a profile, what would it look like?” and that really got the ball rolling. I did my best to remember everything, so that I’d have things to tell the baby in the future.

After that initial meeting, we were invited to the hospital while J delivered. We correpsonded via email through the social worker to pick a name. We were laying the ground work for a very open adoption, the likes of which will be explored in a post soon to come.