* My husband knows how crazy I am about decorating for Christmas and every year since we got married, he’s added more and more lights to our front yard display. He’s definitely outdone himself this year. He worked outside in the cold for most of the day yesterday and was out there again this morning in the freezing cold wind, adding a few final touches here and there. Last night we raced away from the house just before dark, so we could return a couple of hours later to see the lights in all their glory for the first time. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
*I bought my first pair of reading glasses earlier this week. It’s official. I’m old.
*Also in the “No seriously. I’m old” category, my knee is swollen. It doesn’t really hurt very much – an occasional pain but mostly it’s just swollen. And I have no idea how it happened. None.
*We had snow on Thursday – only an inch or so, but it came down in big fat flakes and stayed on the ground for a long while. If I needed any further prodding to embrace the Christmas spirit, that was it. Of course, I also love that I live in a place where I still have pansies happily blooming on the front porch.
*Since our case was transferred back to the county where we did our foster/adopt classes two weeks ago, I’ve e-mailed back and forth with J (the woman who taught our foster/adopt classes and who is working to get our home study finished) more than I did in the entire nine months we “belonged” to our county’s D*C*F*S. Of course, last I heard, J was still waiting for Nicole (the supervisor) to get our paperwork copied and sent to her. I really like J. I hope she’s not holding her breath waiting for THAT to happen.
*From the “It’s a small world” category, remember the brother and sister we were contacted about adopting last month? Well, I was happily reading one of my favorite blogs earlier this week and there was a post about a SW in the blogger’s area who was purposefully withholding information about a brother/sister pair she was trying to place. Namely that they have been diagnosed with R*A*D. Seems that divulging that information up front had caused several families to walk away from placement. As I kept reading, all of my alarm bells started ringing. A couple of e-mails back and forth with this blogger and sure enough, those kids are the ones we were approached about. We aren’t heartbroken by any means, though the R*A*D diagnosis is a deal breaker for us. We’d already come to the conclusion that we weren’t a good fit for these kids. But what a great lesson for us. From the beginning O felt like there was something wrong about this situation. Two adorable kids, very high IQ’s, TPR’ed years and years ago. WHY hadn’t they been adopted already? Something didn’t add up there. How very important it is to listen to our “guts”, no matter how good the story or how cute the faces. On a positive note, after talking with our SW about the kids for over an hour, and in reviewing our notes, one of the questions I sent back to have answered was specifically about R*A*D. There had been no mention of it – no indication that either one of them had that diagnosis, but I’ve learned to take nothing for granted when dealing with the “system” and the people in it. So that didn’t fly under my radar. That makes me feel a bit more confident that I can hold my own in this arena.
Happy Sunday y’all!*Finally, and if you’re a regular reader, you might want to sit down for this. We’re considering fostering. I know, I know. We’ve both been adamantly against it since the beginning. All the reasons we DON’T want to do it are still valid. It’s just that now we’re starting to look at the reasons why maybe we SHOULD. Of course, until we can come to a very firm decision, we won’t be breathing a word of this to our SW, lest we have a child plunked into our kids’ room by sundown. We want to be more sure of what we’re getting ourselves into. Along those lines, I have made a list of my favorite foster/adopt blogs for O to read over the next couple of weeks. From our D*C*F*S training, he has a good foundation of knowledge but that being said, he has NO IDEA how bad it can be. So this is one topic that is definitely to be continued. And in the meantime, any advice would be appreciated, either here on via e-mail.
