Mama or Not?: November 2008

Friday, November 21, 2008

Cross 'em If You've Got 'em

I got an e-mail today letting us know that the county we want to transfer to will take us if our home county will give permission for that to happen. I’m working on a letter to the county director making the formal request and plan to send it out via e-mail or hard copy on Monday. I am currently crossing everything I’ve got that this happens.

And now, a confession. I am a geek.

There is a commercial for overstockdotcom that’s been running for a few weeks. It brings a halt to anything I’m doing each time it runs. It starts with a gentleman going into a restaurant and having his picture taken. A beautiful girl puts the Polaroid of him up on a bulletin board and then turns to the computer and orders a Christmas gift for him. The next scene is of the restaurant, Marcy Jo’s Meal House in Tennessee, with white lights on the eaves and wreaths on the windows as a few people run inside to get out of the cold winter’s night. Inside the restaurant is just as lovely, with lights sparkling, and friends gathered together to open their gifts – each one labeled with a Polaroid of their beautiful smiling faces. The commercial then cuts to a woman and a man, Joey and Rory, sitting in front of a Christmas tree singing a song to their friends called “If Not For You” as he plays the guitar. Their harmony is lovely. Her voice is sweet and true. It gets me every time – makes me sigh and feel warm and nostalgic. And each time it ends, I think “Damn overstockdotcom, you’re good! Perfect nostalgic scene, homey restaurant, friends gathered, beautiful decorations, extraordinary song and voices that wrap around you like a warm blanket. Wouldn’t it be nice if all that was real instead of the creation of some advertising guy in an office somewhere?”

This is where the (first) geeky part comes in.

I went to youtubedotcom to see if the song “If Not For You” is on there. It is – well, the commercial is. Then I googled “Marcy Jo’s Meal House”. It’s a real place. Owned by the woman singing in the commercial, whose name is really Joey. Who is married to the guy harmonizing with her in the song. Whose name really is Rory. He wrote the song. They live two hours from my house, in Columbia Tennessee.

I watched the tape they sent in to a reality show called “Can You Duet?” talking about their lives and their love, their singing and his song writing. At the end, as she’s talking about him, she says, “I’m his singer” and he then the camera cuts to him and he says, “and I’m her song.” And I started to cry. Geek-o-rama. I’m not the only one, though. There is a clip on youtubedotcom of them singing Freebird on “Can You Duet?” Naomi Judd is bawling up a storm too.

Anyway, it’s real – the warmth and beauty and love in the commercial is real, and that, along with those beautiful voices, makes me cry.

My husband is buying me their CD’s and is taking me to Marcy Jo’s for our anniversary in a couple of weeks. That is, if I think I can go in there without immediately bursting into tears.

I hope you love them too.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Mini Update

Well, I have a little bit more information, but not a lot at this point. This is what I know.

O and I had several long conversations about the kids over the weekend and I e-mailed J this morning letting her know that we were definitely interested, but had some additional questions. She wrote back right away and said the worker trying to place them really wants a home with experienced parents. Except that one of their prerequisites was also that it be a home with no other children. Mmmmkay. Not the first time I've been confused by D*C*F*S.

Anyway, the state worker who has our still-incomplete home study was going to send what paperwork she had to the kids' worker anyway, for her to review and see if we might be suitable even with the lack of parenting experience.

I told one of my close girlfriends about this opportunity on Thursday night and as we were ending the conversation she said, "I'll be praying that you get (boy) and (girl) and that you can adopt them." A very sweet sentiment, but I corrected her and asked instead for her to pray that it becomes very clear to us and to the workers involved whether we are a good fit for them and vice versa. If they are, then fantastic. If they aren't, it wouldn't be a good situation for any of us. So that's what I'm keeping in mind. If they are supposed to be "ours", they will be. If they aren't, then there is a another child (or children) out there somewhere and we are slowly working our way towards each other.

J is also checking with her supervisor about us switching to their county. I'd thought that it wasn't possible for me to loathe our county any more than I currently do, until I found out this morning that the state worker still doesn't have our background checks from the state Bureau of Investigation or the F*B*I. Nicole was supposed to send them back in the early summer. I told her if they didn't have them at the county level and we needed to go be fingerprinted again, to please let me know right away. Never heard another word. I wrongly assumed that at least THAT little piece was taken care of.

Apparently not.

Loathe.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Holy Cow, by the numbers

8 - the number of hours it takes (with pit stops) to drive to Greenville Mississippi from our home

3 - the number of days we were there while O was working

1 - the number of O's wives who were going stir crazy in the hotel room

45 - the cost of getting a rental car on the last day to alleviate said stir craziness

2 - really neat places to buy Christmas decorations

1 - happier wife

30 - approximate number of e-mails received whilst in Mississippi

1 - number of e-mails that made my heart pound

2 - the number of children we were contacted on Thursday about adopting

1 - much, MUCH happier, if stunned, wife

J, the girl who taught our foster/adopt classes wrote asking if we would be interested in adopting a brother/sister pair they are trying to place pretty quickly. I was dialing her number before I even reached the end of the e-mail. We spoke for about 45 minutes and she had all their paperwork in front of her, so she was able to tell me quite a bit as I frantically tried to get some of it down on paper.

The very basics are this: The kids are legally available for adoption.

They were briefly on the state website and received up to 20 inquiries per day, most being out of state. Their worker wanted to give it one last shot to keep them in-state and had been calling J over and over to see if she could think of anyone locally who would be interested.

Ironically, we made an inquiry about them way back when, but of course it didn't go anywhere because of our incomplete homestudy. J didn't think the status of our homestudy would be a problem. She said when our interest in these two reached the state worker, either she'd be on the phone telling our county to "Finish it NOW" or J said she's drive over to our county, copy every piece of our paperwork, and do whatever it took to finish the homestudy herself.

The kids come with some challenges, but so far none of them are deal breakers for O and I. Of course, that was just a first conversation and we have lots of questions. In fact, O has been so slammed with work and was so exhausted on our drive home last night that we haven't had to opportunity to really talk about it in depth yet. That's on the agenda for this weekend.

So there you go.

1 - tired husband

1 - tired wife

2 - excited people

Monday, November 10, 2008

Update

As you can probably tell from the silence around here, I haven’t felt very “bloggy” lately. I’ve sat down several times over the past couple of weeks to write a new post, but I end up staring at the blinking cursor for a few minutes and moving on. Nothing’s wrong. Just feeling quiet, I guess.

Our trip was beyond wonderful - a much-needed time away for both of us. We spent each night right on the coast, with the surf pounding outside our windows. Heavenly! And yes, we did visit the Roloff farm, or more specifically, their pumpkin patch. We saw Matt's parents, dressed up as sheriff and cowgirl and even more exciting, the Roloff's dog Rocky, who was tearing across the field to the house. (I didn't even know he could run! On the show he just wanders around looking old.) No sightings of any of the main family, but it was fun just the same.

My mother-in-law’s valve replacement last month went really well. The surgeon had to replace more of her aorta than he’d originally thought, which took longer than we expected, of course. We had our section of the waiting room filled to overflowing as friends and family came to wait for news with us. O’s cousin B (who is very close to my MIL) was her nurse from the moment she came to the CICU, which was a huge comfort. I guess it was very hard to get her stabilized for her first couple of hours in the CICU, which we thankfully didn’t know at the time, but after that she did really well. She was in the cardiac unit for three days, and was then moved to a step-down room for almost a week. She’s been in rehab at a nearby nursing home for a little over a week, where she’s working on regaining her strength. I expect she’ll be there most of November.

In the meantime, her kids decided this was the perfect time to redo her sewing room, hallway, and one of her bathrooms. Hardwoods have gone down, paint has gone up on the walls, and knobs, hinges, and lights have been replaced in the bathroom. It’s been hard to keep it a surprise. One of her friends drove past the house on the way to see my MIL and commented on all the workers at the house. Sigh . . . As I’ve said before, you can’t change underwear in that small town without everyone knowing about it.

Anyway, we spent lots of time at the hospital, and now try to visit rehab every day or two. I’m also doing her laundry and trying to keep my FIL stocked with dinners so he won’t revert to his favorites: Vienna sausages. Bleck! His birthday was this past weekend and we got my MIL from rehab we all went to dinner at a nearby restaurant. It was a lot of fun, but also showed me just how far my MIL still has to go before she’ll be even close to back to normal.

I haven’t talked to/heard from Nikki since we traded those snotty e-mails back in late September. I purposefully took a break to get through our trip and the surgery without having to think much about it. C, our wonderful state contact, spoke with the worker assigned to our case at the state office last week. She did receive some paperwork, but it wasn’t what she needed. C contacted Nikki who said they’d “get on it” but the they were short two abuse/neglect investigators so our SW Mia was having to do some of that work too. (Of course, if Mia had done her job in March, April, May, June, July, August, September, or October, that wouldn’t be an issue.) In short, C said she really didn’t have any idea of when they’d get the paperwork to the state.

So, I have contacted the county where we did our foster/adopt classes requesting a transfer. Even if we have to do our home study over from the very beginning, we are happy to if it means that we can break ties with our worthless county. Of course there is the possibility that they may not have the personnel to take us. And then there’s the fact that our county has to give APPROVAL for another county to handle our case. I’d imagine their funding is based on the number of cases they have, so they may not be too eager to let us go. Should that happen, I will be contacting every member of the state’s D*C*F*S board, the D*C*F*S Commissioner, my senators, my representatives, and the newspapers until I find someone who can help us.

I am through being screwed with.