Sunny afternoon at the playground

Ummm....

...at least he's grasping the concept?  Just trying to put a positive spin on this one...

I got an email from B's kindergarten teacher today.  She wanted to give us warning ahead of time so we wouldn't think she was a terrible teacher.  I guess B's been copying down a lot of words lately, and she wanted to know where he was as far as actually spelling words.  So she asked him to write down some words from out of his head.  In B's defense, he can spell a whole lot of words, but I'm sure it's absolutely true that these were the only words that came to mind:

POOP
FRTE

A note about the second one:  some people spell it FART.  B was logically applying the "magic E" rule to R:  magic E makes the vowel before it say its name.

I laughed until I cried, and did my best to get that out of my system before I had The Talk with B about how the at-home ban on potty words extends to school too.

Z at school

Yeah yeah, I know. Bad blogger. Christmas was busy, and my job has exploded this month. I've got oodles of pictures piled up that I'll try to get edited & posted one of these days. In the meantime, here are some pictures of Z in action at school:

Can you see the band-aid on her forehead in the one above?  She threw herself to the floor in the midst of a hissy fit and hit her head on a door hinge, leaving a large gouge in her forehead.  They called me to come get her, and the pediatrician glued it back together for her.

 
Note the stylin' new specs in this last photo.  We got them a couple of weeks ago, and this time it's going much better than it did when we tried a year and a half ago.  She kept taking them off and breaking them then, making them more of a liability than anything.  This time we got some that are supposed to be unbreakable.  They're also very flexible, so I imagine they're more comfy for her.  She's doing a great job of keeping them on.

Z at the beach

She's less sure of the water than B.  I remember him being afraid of the waves when he was little too, so I bet she'll love it when she's bigger too.

 

 

B loves the beach

I think he inherited this from me.  That's odd, seeing as how M grew up by the beach and loves the mountains beyond all else.  And I grew up with the mountains, but feel more at home at the beach than anywhere else.  B seems to have the beach thing going on:



Yes, it's been a criminally long time since I updated the blog.  While we were on vacation my job somehow exploded, and I found myself cramming for a whole week for a big presentation, then flying off to Pennsylvania to deliver it last week.  But now I'm on Christmas vacation, so I'll be catching up.

Two years ago today

B and I were at home on a gloomy Monday afternoon.  I was feeling pretty down, in spite of the fact that my 40th birthday party two days earlier had been a raging good time.  I was blue because I'd been told back in September by our agency to expect our referral off the next list, yet three months had gone by without that phone call.  I'd finally cracked the Friday before, and asked M to call the agency.  They told him they were sorry to let us down, but we'd have to wait for the next list afterall.  It would probably come in January or February.  So I was at the very bottom of the lowest part of our adoption wait.  I'd ridden the rollercoaster -- the high of turning in our dossier, the gradual descent as the realization of how long we'd really wait began to sink in, a gradual climb that began when we turned in our medical conditions checklist, another descent as the promised six-month wait stretched to a year, then the dizzying height of excitement when I heard we'd be next.  Then crash.  Down to the bottom with that Friday phone call between M and the agency.

So back to Monday, December 3, 2007...the phone rang at 3:55pm.  Coincidentally, this is the same time of day B had been born, three years and 344 days earlier.  I saw "Chinese Children" in caller ID, and before I even picked up, I knew.  In spite of the fact that the Friday before, they'd told us we'd have to wait another few months, I knew this was The Call.  And it was. 

Hello? (playing dumb) 

Hello, is this J? 

Yes. (still playing dumb)

This is D with CCAI.

Oh hi, D.  How are you?  (How dumb can I play?  At this point, I was afraid that any hint of excitement or anticipation in my voice would jinx it, and it would turn out to be just some routine call, asking for another bit of paperwork.)

Well, I'm calling to tell you about your daughter.

From this point on, the conversation is mostly a blur.  I grabbed a scrap of paper and scribbled down a few things.  Her name.  Her birth date.  Her medical condition.  Her province.  D promised to email photos to me at home and M at work in the next few minutes.

I called M's office, and it went to voicemail.  I called his cell phone, and it went to voicemail.  Nearly hysterical, I called the receptionist, cited a "family emergency," and demanded that she page him.  He picked up, and the news just poured out of me.  I'm sure I made very little sense.  We opened the email at the same time, M in his office, B on my lap in front of our home computer.  And this is what we saw:

Leaving on a jet plane

We're off to visit M's mom, aka Nana, aka Banana, bright and early tomorrow morning.  Look out Virginia Beach, here we come!