What are your thoughts?
Jul 26, 2005 Adoption
Just received this in my inbox and the sender said it was ok to open it up on my blog:
A close friend of ours has a daughter that is now pregnant with #2. My friends are raising her first child, a daughter. She is considering creating an adoption plan for #2. My friends do not want to raise another child. The bio father is in jail for beating up their daughter and breaking her nose. She has a restraining order and will not put his name on baby #2’s birth certificate. All that saga aside…I have a feeling that she may ask us to parent this child. I would be overjoyed to adopt this baby but, BUT, it would be so weird with my friends, don’t you think? Can someone be too close in an open adoption?
I’ll put my response below the cut in case you want to comment and read what I said afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: open adoption
Just some updates
Jul 25, 2005 Parenting
This is the cutest thing Madison is doing lately. If she hits her head on, say, a table she not only wants comfort for the bump on her head, she also wants to discuss the horror of the head bumping itself. She’s not satisfied until we’ve gone to the place where the injury occurred and given her a narration of the event, following her hand gestures.
She puts her hand to her head then points to the table, babbling the whole time.
“You hit your head? On the table? How awful!” we commiserate.
“Boo-boo!” she wails. “Dat!” hitting the table again.
I just love how she already wants to tell her stories even though she doesn’t have the words.
Petrie, the albino leopard gecko, is finally and truly dying. We have been running around trying to figure out what it is and apparently it’s a diagnosed-too-late intestinal blockage (common for geckos) caused by parasites. I’m pretty much over my anger that the professionals we saw first didn’t figure it out but what can you do? We are trying to make him comfortable and shaking the cage now and then to see if he’s truly gone or still barely with us. Noah has pretty much processed his grief (we got the diagnosis some time ago) and now he’s saying he wants a chameleon. I don’t think so. He may be recovered but I’m not. (Neither is Brett — I think Brett has had the most trauma about this; he feels really guilty.)
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Soft markets
Jul 23, 2005 The Story of My Life
We have been granted a reprieve! Our realtor tells us the market is “soft,” especially in our starter-home, locationally-challenged neighborhood. This means that we may be in this house for a good, long time. We’re going to start doing the things we need to do to get it market-ready (weed properly, trim the bushes properly, pack up things, donate other things, etc.) and then put it on the market and see what happens. I know it’s a lousy time to put a house on the market but what the heck. We bought it in November (the first of, actually) and maybe somebody else will, too. Meanwhile we’re going to stop looking since we know what areas we want to consider (the top neighborhood? dropped down to third place last night) but we don’t want to fall in love with a house we can’t have.
I was fretting about this so much (and still will be fretting if I’m honest with you all) and then I thought after reading various blogs, heck, it’s a lot easier to wait for the perfect house than to wait for the perfect baby and I did that so I can do this, too. Plus I like my house so it’s not like I feel trapped here.
Madison has begun to call Noah “Whoa-wa” but not to his face. She still calls him “bru-her” or some semblance thereof but sometimes she’ll refer to him by name to other people.
This morning we were out in the yard and Noah was still inside. She went to her Little Tikes car (the red and yellow one, which one of my old bosses referred to as “the best selling car in America”) and stood next to it calling, “Bru-her! Bru-her!” Because she wanted him to come out and push her.
Oh I forgot something. Today at Noah’s baseball game I sat next to a woman I know from my temple. I met her in La Leche League but now she and her (female) partner and their assortment of children are also at our synagogue. That made me want to live there in that great neighborhood. Then as we pulled out of the park after the game, we passed a car with a bumpersticker that said, “Question Gender” and that made me want to live there, too. Next we drove down a street and saw a house where someone had a clothesline strung across the trees in their front yard next to a sign that read, “Number of American soldiers killed in Iraq” and they had hung numbers on the line so they could pull them off and change them. The sign on the other end of the line read, “Support Our Troops.” And yes, that made us want to live there, too.
Finally on the way home, we drove past a protest at one of the big intersection with many people carrying signs that read, “Impeach Bush” and “Arrest Rove.” So that was kind of the kicker and we were pratically weeping with want to live there. But we still can’t really afford it (or at least we can’t unless we jettison many of the other things we have on our “great house” list) so maybe I should just let it go.
Then again, who knows what might happen?
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My sister needs you
Jul 22, 2005 Family
My sister, as many of you know, is an artist (click the pictures to see her work full-size — especially important for the hat book below). And she’s a hard-working artist as well as a mother to a preschooler and a busy crawling baby. She paints murals, she paints furniture, she makes artist trading cards and reinvented books. She embellishes pyrex bowls, recipe boxes, and shoes. She trims purses with feathers and fur saved from vintage hats turning to dust. She adds rhinestones, glitter and sequins to light switch plates, jean jackets, greeting cards, and anything else that will hold glue. And now, my friends, my sister needs you.
She recently had a writer friend of mine pitch her story to a big shot magazine and the magazine said, “We like her stuff but she has no web site.” My sister needs someone to design her a web site as pretty as the stuff she makes and me, I can’t do it. My html skills are basic at best besides which I’m nearly as busy as my sister. (Or she’s nearly as busy as I am — we fight about who’s busier and therefore is more stressed and therefore is more deserving of a Tim Horton’s frozen cappuccino but I digress.)
If you are a talented web designer — professional or not — who can help her figure out a pretty site to showcase her work, she would like to barter with you. She says, “Do your holiday shopping early!” If you might be interested, will you email me your contact info and web site? I’ll forward it to her and then the two of you can talk. And she’s a total newbie — she doesn’t know about hosting fees and all of that so frankly, you’re going to have to go slow with her. (I said today, “Are you picturing something static that works as a showcase or something with a database that will allow you to switch out items to sell?” And I believe her response ran along the lines of, “Huh?”) But she’s really nice and what she lacks in technical knowhow she more than makes up in friendliness and creativity. (She also makes name signs, magnetic paperdolls, and of course her famous embellished, over-the-top phones.)
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Tags: preschool
Why it’s fun to have a tiny bit of power
Jul 21, 2005 Infertility
(My writing group people already know this. Distaffers among you, turn your heads away.)
I get a lot of PR pitches because of my job and a pitch showed up in my inbox yesterday that said this:
I wanted to take a second of your time to tell you about [guy's name] and his book The book presents readers with the ability to pick apart their lives and put them back together in a more nurturing, healthy form. Through yoga, [yoga guy] explains how to love, live and learn.Perhaps most interesting is [yoga guy]’s work with couples. He helps to restore intimacy and re-establish relationships - relationships with oneself, others, and the world around. Sometimes his work is geared very specifically at using yoga as a catalyst for a specific goal. Here is an excerpt from his book that involves a couple, and their desire for a baby:
“S and V were a typical “upwardly mobile†couple. They were very busy with their lives of business and fun. Traveling frequently, they vigorously worked out with popular yoga as it was taught in New York to keep well in their busy routines. When S turned thirty-six, they decided to have a baby, knowing that the passing years would be a critical factor in this desire. With no interruption to their lifestyle, they tried. Years passed with no pregnancy. Finally S did conceive, only to miscarry early on. It had been sad for them. And frankly, they admitted, sex was not much fun.â€
It was at this point that [yoga guy] stepped in and began working with the couple. As you can imagine, things looked up. [yoga guy] goes on to say, “This is what happened. The immediate result was that their sexual desire and pleasure with each other dramatically increased. They were now willing to receive each other and be there for each other. This, they agreed, was a satisfactory outcome in itself and validated yoga for them – and their friends! S immediately became more feminine n character and appearance, more desirable to V, who gave her much more attention! He became a little softer, a little less driven in business pursuit. Their whole life of lovemaking became very interesting to them, where previously it had been almost like a job to be done with the added pressure of trying to conceive. Then they did! What job. And this time in their more realized lifestyle, in the pleasure and health of their intimacy, there seemed to be no question or risk of miscarriage. Her belly grew beautifully.†Page 132
I would love to explain what [yoga guy] did with the couple to help in their transformation, and give you more examples of how Yoga can be a catalyst for great changes.
So I wrote back and said, basically, that as someone whose had like a zillion (ok, six) miscarriages I would never ever ever ever feature that book.
So she wrote back and said she was “deeply sorry” for upsetting me and she just hoped that highlighting the “success of one couple” would inspire people.
I wrote back and said that the “just relax” line (not to mention the “get more feminine”) line was deeply offensive and exploitive. I told her that one of the women I work with at my job has a deformed uterus. Did she really think that yoga would fix my friend’s deformed uterus? I suggested she rethink her pitch.
I never know if I should mention my own infertility history or not when I go off on PR people. On the one hand, I want them to know that the person on the other end of the email line may be someone who knows more about infertility than they do but on the other hand, this PR person apologized for upsetting me and not for being a general idiot. So maybe she thinks, “Oh well, that poor editor, no wonder she was sad,” instead of, “God, what was I thinking?!”
I get “just relax” stories in my email box on a regular basis. How I handle them depends on my mood that day but I always write back and tell them why I’m saying no thank you.
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Tags: Infertility