A Giant Slice of Midwestern Americana

Well that was a nice blog break. We celebrated July 4th with a road trip to see family, eat some American delicacies, play a surprising amount of backyard ball and watch fireworks. I also learned a little along the way….
Thursday we visited with my family, including my aunt and uncle in from New Jersey. I love when they visit because I love them….but I also LOVE that they always bring Jersey Bagels. Jersey Bagels are nothing like the limp, tasteless mounds of breakfast bread the big chains try to pass off. Jersey Bagels have a firm crust, and chewy deliciousness inside you can’t get in any other bread product, except for maybe Jersey Rye, but that’s a carb for another post. Anyway, my aunt and uncle were there, along with their gift of bagels and life was good.
The car ride up to my parents’ house? Was long. Oh so long. It was a good thing I brought snacks. The backseat enjoyed many a string cheese, some blueberries and granola bars. The front seat enjoyed Turtle Chex Mix Bars, compliments of My Blog Spark. They were a tasty treat–sweet chocolate, salty peanuts, caramel–yum! By looking at the wrapper, I learned *If* you were to eat, say, one bar, you’d have a delicious snack of less than 130 calories and 4 grams of fiber–great deal, eh? BgK and I, well, we were stuck in traffic….so we each ate three. I’m not doing the math on the calories, but hey, we each got 12 g of fiber! Yay us!
Friday, we visited friends whom we haven’t seen since Mam was about 5 months old. They now have twins just younger than Jr. I think they were a little nervous that our visit would turn into blog post….I promised them it wouldn’t. Or least it wouldn’t with pictures and what not. I will share with you what I learned from them though: *If* your are a shopping-cart-cover kind of mom…here is another use for said cover..the baby bucket swings at the park. I’m sure styles of cover and swing vary, but it the planets are aligned, the cover fits over the swing so you get the same sort of protection you do when you use it on a shopping cart. *If* you want such a thing. 🙂
On the way home, we stopped by Rainbow Cone, that southside Chicago institution that the Kahuna family knows and loves. What I learned: they don’t really have public restrooms, but the Kia dealership next door is happy to oblige a 4 yr old doing the potty dance….

Saturday we drove from NW Indiana up the O’Hare vicinity for a family birthday party–many cousins, much fun. On the way up, I remember that we really need to get one of those plastic holders for our I-PASS….my arm got a little tired.

Once the rain let up, the kids went outside and MAM learned to hit off a tee!! Didn’t your daughter learn how to do that in a dress and sparkly shoes? Mine did!
*I* learned though, that three days in a row of long car rides wears on a child. On the way home, we were able to see fireworks all the way from O’Hare to my parents’ house. MAM though, was done with the car business. “I don’t want to watch the fireworks in the car! I want to watch them on a blanket!!!”
Which is what we did Sunday. For whatever reason, the fireworks in Indy were postponed til last night. We tweeted up with a friend, found a great grassy knoll (no, I’m not telling you where, because there was free parking, restroom access and no crowds) and watched the show. On a blanket. Because really, that is the best way to watch them!

Popsicle Days, Poolside Nights


Lake Kahuna Panoramic
Originally uploaded by BgKahuna

When we first moved into this, our “starter” home seven years ago, we often joked it was like we were on vacation. With the nice lake in our backyard (we could never live here with kids, they’d fall right in), and swimming pool down the street, some days it is hard to remember to get up and go to work in the morning.

Fast forward SEVEN summers, and here we are, two kids later, living in our starter-home-before-the-market-tanked townhouse. It IS a little nerve wracking to have that little lake out our back door. But the swimming pool down the street? It rocks. It rolls. It MAKES our summer.

We’ve just come out of a wicked heat wave, one where it was too hot to go swimming in the sweltering sun of high noon. We quickly found a great time to take the kids–swimming in the late afternoon/early evening is perfect. Everything is still toasty warm, but the sun isn’t actually scorching a hole in our inflatable boat.

The evening swims wear the kids out, but even so, bedtime has been pushed to close to 10pm. But I’m not complaining, because Sleeping Beauty will sleep…until….are you ready for this….10 AM, sometimes later.

By the time she gets up, it’s time to play a little, have a little lunch, eat some popsicles, run some errands, eat some more popsicles and then hit the pool.

I think this definitely qualifies as a vacation!

Making the Choice to Adopt

This week I’ve had some visitors from ICLW (click over to the left to learn more about this comment leaving fest).

The very first comment on my “intro” post for this month, has gotten me thinking. Michelle asked about coming to the decision to adopt.

I’ve posted a bit about how it felt at Grown in My Heart.

Here’s the thing: like so many otther things in life, I just knew. I can’t say when exactly we said goodbye to our imaginary bio child, but we did. Here’s the short version of our short stay in IF land. We didn’t really like it there, we found it involved a lot of poking and proding and sometimes surgery.

BgK and I both presented with a few IF factors, and our RE (who was wonderful and I would rec. in a heartbeat if you are in Indpls) sat us down and explained what our best shot was–IVF w/ ICSI. He gave us a lot of reading material, and I’m glad he did. I think it’s one thing to hear a simple explanation, and entirely a different matter to read a somewhat academic explanation of exactly what it happening to your body as you force ovulation, retrieve eggs, retrieve sperm, etc.

Anyway, after reading through about 75% of what he gave us, I put it all away and said no. Couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t. I was overwhelmed by simply reading about all the hormones. Overwhelmed by the possibilty of having multiples, or having an army of frozen potential babies in a freezer somewhere, or going through all of this and having none of it work. Completely overwhelmed and I hadn’t even read through the entire process yet.

So we started looking for an adoption agency. And we went to two different agencies–one for international adoptions from Russia, one for a domestic agency.

And when I heard we would more than likely be able to have an adoption placement of an infant, of newborn only days or weeks old, that was it. We knew then and there that was how we would become parents.

And it was.