So what do you eat?

Recently Bryan and I have taken on a vegetarian diet. It's been really interesting trying so many new foods/meals and I don't want to forget any of the good ones. I also want motivation to keep expanding our horizons and trying new things, so a new blog has been started! It's really more for my benefit than anything because it's like my own personal online recipe book, but it's also for anyone who says, "what would I make if I couldn't use meat?" Ahem...Mom :)

Anyway, my meal ideas are your meal ideas and, hopefully, vice versa. If you come across a great one, send it on over! I'll give you props, I promise :) There are only three rules...no meat, no fish and NO PEPPERS!! (Why no peppers? Because everything about them is revolting. Seriously revolting.)

nopeppersplease.blogspot.com

Oh, Glee...

Let me get you up to speed on a little show you may have heard of called "Glee." (Trust me, I have a point.)

In seasons past, a popular gal named Quinn got knocked up by a school bad boy named Puck. Meanwhile, the talented Rachel, an adoptee of two gay men who have yet to appear on the show, felt driven to learn more about her birth mother. Her birth mother, coincidentally, turned out to be the leader of a rival glee club. Keeping up? Her birth mother was not ready to raise a child when Rachel was born, but now 16 or so years later her biological clock was ticking. Welcome back, Quinn and Puck. They gave their baby up for adoption to Rachel's birth mother. Everyone is, for lack of a better term, happy.

Cue up the new season. Everyone is still happy except for the lovely Quinn, who at the end of last night's show vowed to get her baby back and announced that SHE was the baby's mother and no little piece of paper could change that fact.

Who would have thought an adoptive parent's worst nightmare would be a plot line on Glee? I for one, did not. I will continue to watch it all unfold and hope that it shows the strength of that "little piece of paper" and what "mom" really means. Based on how realistic the show has been thus far, though, I'm not sure I see that happening....

Gotta love Fall TV :)

It's not right.

Today I'm feeling sad for many people....two people I knew lost their lives over the weekend. One accident, one unknown cause. Both far too young.

While I didn't know either of these people well, I know they were beloved by many. I feel for those who are now faced with the messy, unpredictable world that is grief.

I wish there was something, anything, anybody could do to make their pain go away. I know that all anyone can do, though, is keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope that one day each step won't feel so much like work.

--

I'm thinking about you.

A Hearty Silver Lining

Now that a good week has passed since we were told the stork wouldn't be landing on our front lawn in the foreseeable future, I am able to look objectively at the situation and see all the good things that came from this whole ordeal. I got my house CLEAN. The nerves helped me lose a few pounds. We got great feedback on our portfolio (namely that we shouldn't change anything). I can now kind-of-sort-of-maybe see this thing actually happening. But all of these reasons combined pale in comparison to the real reason I can't stay upset about it. While it would have been amazing to be picked, the anxiety stopped with the knowledge that we were not picked. Had things gone differently, I would be a freaking mess right now and here's why...

Now we won't have to bring a baby home and wonder for weeks or months if she will really be ours.

We originally said we didn't want to adopt from Wisconsin because all adoptions here are considered "legal risk adoptions." This means that while you get to take the baby home, you are technically a foster parent until the adopting parents and the birth parents can all get to court on the same day at the same time to make it final. But even then it's not really final. Then the birth parents have 30 days to appeal.

So while we were waiting to find out if this baby was ours, it had me thinking about how to deal with a few issues knowing there would be the possibility of having to release this baby to her birth parents at some point. Should we get professional newborn pictures done? Should we wait to get her baptized? Should we tell Simon the baby is his sister? Should we use the name that we really like? Should we announce we have a daughter to our family and friends? Should I really try to bond with her? (It's amazing what I took for granted having a biological child.)

PW wisely advised that if we wound up with a baby from Wisconsin we'd really just have to go about our business as if she is 100% ours until someone tells us otherwise, because that is what the plan would be and it would probably work out just fine. While she was completely right, I'm glad that I don't have to take that advice. Instead we took our opportunity to again take Wisconsin out of the running. While we would have been elated to be picked and would have taken on the challenge of navigating through the legal proceedings with the hope it would all turn out okay, I'm happy that our family doesn't have to deal with that kind of stress.

By adopting out of state, we know that when we bring a baby home she will unquestionably be our daughter and Simon's sister. Now that's a silver lining if I've ever seen one.

Playing it Safe

A couple weeks ago Auntie Al and I took the boy to a safety fair to kill time in between a wedding and the reception. At this fair there were fire trucks galore, a real car fire, an old time fire engine and lots of free giveaways. What kid wouldn't love this?!

Mine.

Don't let these happy pictures fool you. Yes, we all enjoyed a moment of quiet from him when he got to hold the giant hose but let me tell you...it was short lived. That smile up there? Totally fake. I bribed him with something just to get the shot.

I honestly don't even remember what he was so outraged about. It may have had something to do with a balloon? All I know is that I was literally sweating by the time I wrangled him back to the car and strapped him in his car seat.

The best part was seeing that familiar expression on my little sister's face that just kind of screams "OMG I'm never having kids!!" (Our older sister - mom of 3 - is also very familiar with this expression.)

The moral of this story is twofold. Pictures can lie and kids can be annoying..but of course we love them to pieces anyway :)

HelpUsAdopt.Org

I was reading People Magazine the other day and came across their section about everyday heroes. This one definitely caught my eye...it was about a couple who founded an organization called helpusadopt.org.

Because of the severity of their infertility issues, this couple went right to IVF after about a year of trying to conceive naturally. Five cycles, three miscarriages and over $80,000 later they were pursuing adoption.

They admit they were lucky, though. They had the funds to do all of this. Most of us don't have the means to exhaust every last option, plus have enough left over to adopt if the treatments don't work. So they started helpusadopt.org, started fundraising, added some of their own money, and began providing grants to families who would otherwise remain childless due to the lovely combo of infertility and lack of funds.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

Sticker Charts

Many of my friends have made sticker charts for their kids to help improve their behavior, so I decided to try to incorporate one of my own tonight. Simon has gotten much better over the past few months with going to bed at night, but we still hit a few snags every once in a while. So on a whim, I told him he would get a sticker for every night that he went to bed like a good boy. Then after he earned 7 stickers, he would get a prize.

He wanted to know what kind of prize. He wanted to see the prize and where was the prize?

I said it's a surprise (code for "I don't know"), but didn't he want his first sticker tonight?

"No I don't want a sticker. You can have a sticker. I want to go downstairs."