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Archive for March, 2008
First of all, thanks for the support, you three sweethearts. I needed it today! Thank you so much.
Second of all; Do you know what has high fructos corn syrup in it? I’ll give you a hit: rhymes with “everything”.
Third of all: Do you know what doesn’t have high fructos corn syrup, refined sugars or white flour in it? The box of mini double chocolate chip cookies that MoVo found for me at Whole Foods today. God bless her little pointy chin.
I’ve successfully kept off the white sugar and flour and was able to get to the store today for a major stock-up, but I have to say that my body is absolutely staging a rebellion. It’s pissed. off. The whole experience has been surreal.
There was a point, during the Avon walk last year, when I started to go into heat stroke. We stopped for a snack and I grabbed a few things and one of them were goldfish crackers. After wolfing down a thousand soy nuts and peanuts and stuff with peanut butter on it, I ripped open the goldfish crackers. The second, and I mean the second they it my tongue my body did an instant inventory of nutritional content and my brain sent a message to my mouth that it was not going to waste valuable space on nothing. The crackers went dry and tasteless in my mouth; I threw the rest away and had more peanuts and they tasted like heaven.
I’m having a similar experience now, with the moment after things hit my tongue my brain registering that once again there are no refined sugars in them, and immediately telling me it’s worthless to keep eating whatever I’m eating and to go and get myself a Slurpee or something STAT because we are dying, here!
The cookies were hysterical. I could sense a deep, cellular, junky moment of hope. HOPE! Then, BAH HUMBUG. No refined sugar? What’s the POINT?
On the other hand, I also feel like a popped balloon. I don’t know really how to define what’s going on, but it’s like my body is not being given the building blocks it needs to make me puffy. I feel nearer to my muscles somehow.
It totally sounds bizarre but that’s how I feel. I’m walking around and my brain is yelling at me that we’re missing vital materials to keep up the ever-important swelling.
Yeah, I’m giving my brain the finger.
Today’s important discovery: Whole Wheat Tortillas. No white sugar, no white flour, a little mustard and some turkey and some cheese? Absolutely will do for a sandwich. Thank god, because I was starting to get a little hinkey in the brain when I thought of a life without bread products of any kind. Whole wheat tortillas, at least for now, will do.
Onward and upward and always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom!
xoxo
KP
P.S. - There have been some spectacular photos of Wallace lately. I’m trying to put together a big post about what he’s been up to with some of the new pics. Watch this space.
I’ve been off the white sugar/flour for, what? 24 hours? 36?
I’m going through serious withdrawl. I cannot believe how hard it’s hit me. It’s like having a vague sort of flu and seeing as I haven’t recovered from my infection yet that’s really crappy. At the same time it feels a lot like quitting smoking. It sucks, but I can tell it sucks because I’m craving something that’s a quick fix.
Honestly, I think that I cut my calories today by at least two thirds just getting rid of those two things. Mostly I had fruit and nuts. I just had a snack of melba toast and peanut butter, not because that sounded really good, but because I feel so crappy I’m worried that my blood suger is too far below what my body is accustomed to.
If you’ve got nothing to do tonight, could you shout out some encouragement? I’m dying, here.
Thanks, Peeps. xoxo
A while ago, Peeps, I was off online looking for some good photography places to take photos of Wallace. I wanted the good photos, the real ones. Not the Sears photos but the kind that Grandad Poopyhands takes when he’s around; with the good camera and the excellent timing and the capturing of my little boy’s entire person in one still-frame.
Looking at local photographers I realized that we are lucky to have Grandad P around. Generally speaking we cannot justify the expense of a proper photographer. I found one woman, locally, who takes the kind of photos that make my breath catch in my throat, and a proper album from her runs over $1,000. We dunna got $1,000 for pictures. Even really good ones.
However, this photographer has a blog and I like her work, so I added her to my bloglines and kept reading. Which is why, three days ago, I saw her call for children to act as subjects for a photographer’s workshop she’s holding. She asked that you send a recent pic of your kid and she’d choose a few of them.
I sent one in of Wallace, thinking that this would likely be like the GAP Kids thing and I’d never hear back, well this morning I got the email that she’s chosen Wallace! She’s unphased that he doesn’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing! And the best part is, while we have to sign release forms so that all the photographers who take pictures can use them on the net, or in ads, or sell them to advertisers, we get copies of the good ones all for ourselves!
That’s right, we get professional photos that we cannot afford for free. I’m so friggin excited. I hoping that it’s not just something we get to take home, but a really fun time as well.
She likes to photograph kids running around in the woods near her house. How much fun is that? “Wallace, run around and play in the woods and be the center of attention.”
It’s gotta be the cheeks.
There are a thousand things on life’s to-do list at the moment, Peeps.
I am spending all day every day trying to check them off.
They are all bumping and grinding along and turning into problem after problem and they stay on my plate meanwhile more and more piles on.
And I am sick. And I want to pretend like I’m not sick, but I. Am. Sick. And exhausted. And wishing that some of this could just get fucking resolved, please.
Here are a list of things that can fuck right off:
- The bank
- The house
- The car
- My job
- My health
- The Taxes
Thanks,
KP
Mr. Wallace went to the dentist today. This is his second trip to the dentist and he was really looking forward to it.
The report is that he sat calmly on TT’s lap while they counted his teeth, then the dentist actually polished his teeth with the polisher and then he sat still through a flouride treatment! He was happy! He thought it was a fun time! And all this during the very tricky napping hour!
I just got off the phone with him and he told me he visited the very nice lady and she counted his “teef” and that he got to pick out a new! red! toothbrush!, “and fiwewman stickews as well, Mommy!”
This kid has clearly inherited absolutely everything from his father, including his stellar teeth and ease with the dentist. Thank the good lord for that. I’m so proud of him!
Other current Wallaceisms:
“The Dentist” is actually “The Entist”. If you say “The Dentist” he hears, “The The Entist” and will correct you accordingly.
Last night he was talking about someone turning into a crocodile and pronounced it “Rocket aisle”. It was awesome.
I have started doing, as I should have done before even posting, proper research on this issue. I find that it’s far, far more complex than I ever could have imagined. The post below reflects complete ignorance. Please read Third Mom and Paragraphein for a tutorial in necessary adoption reform, as I did. Now I do not know if we will ever adopt, but I know that we will not make a terrible, terrible mistake due to lack of insight or selfishness.
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This bit is going to be difficult to write, Peeps. I want to say that it’s hard to talk about, but maybe it’s not hard to talk about so much as I’ve never really expounded on the subject before. It’s difficult because articulating it all at once seems daunting. Families are tricky things, even the best ones, and it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll begin at the beginning:
God made the world
Or so people say. To be honest, as an agnostic, while I’m not ready to discount the existance of a higher being in general, and while I’m a very big believer that there is some undercurrent out there that seems to connect an awful lot of us, I don’t really believe in God as he is described in the Christian scriptures. I lean more toward us being a bunch of really lucky atoms on a particularly fortitous rock.
Growing up Christian there is this expectation that I at least will buy some of what I heard sitting in the pews or arguing in Youth Group, but all church did was confirm to me that some people in this world are awesome people and go to church, and some are truly foul human beings… and go to church. Most of the worst damage I have seen done to people that I know were done by those in organized religion. Some of the cruelest moments I’ve seen were people using God as a reason to be horrid.
I, myself, think that the world is wonderful and cruel and mysterious and the one thing that you can guarantee is that the guy who says he can explain it to you is exactly the one who can’t. I can say with absolute certainty that I have no idea where we are before we begin or where we go, if anywhere, when we die. I know that I’ll be interested to find out and I will try and be as nice to people as I can before I go.
I offer, from that wise old tomb The Ghostbusters:
Winston: Do you believe in God?
Ray: Never met him.
How then, do I reconcile my passive non-belief with what appears to be a calling?
Now, I’m calling it a calling because that is what people call it. I, myself, have never gotten the God memo on the God stationary saying, “Hi! This is from the desk of God…”. There are people on the EL here in Chicago who apparently got that memo stating that they could be as obnoxious, loud and presumptuous as they like, but that’s irritation for another day.
On the other hand, for me things are pretty clear. I’d very, very much like to adopt. I feel (if we MUST) that I have been called to adopt. I cannot tell you why. I cannot tell you why that has always been a truth for me. I could not say at what point for me, if any, biology became irrelevant when it comes to parenting, but I can tell you that I have always, always felt this way. There was not a time when someone said “adoption” and I said, “Heeyyyy! Wait a minute! I could do that!”, rather there was never a time when my response was anything other than, “Oh, yeah. I’m doing that.”
If anything, reading the adoption stories as they are told on the gloriousness that is the World Wide Web has only made me feel like I’ve taken a correspondance course in what adoption is and firmed up my belief that there’s no deep, dark trick to getting it right. That adoption, like all parenting, is best done with as much prep and information as possible, and you’ll still get a lot of it wrong. Here is what, I believe I have understood, adoption is not:
NOT:
- The same as biological parenting
- Vastly different from biological parenting
- Simple
- Easy
- Prohibitively complex
- Entered into well when one is mistaking oneself for a saviour of some kind
IS:
- Deeply rewarding
- Different than biological parenting
- In most ways, the same as biological parenting
- To be entered into with some knowledge and forthought
- Hopeful
- Joyous
- Born in loss
- Worthwhile
It would be hard to summarize what I have learned reading the accounts of parents and families go through the process. I’ve read blogs of folks who have adopted from all sorts of different countries, adopted all sorts of age groups, through foster care, in open adoptions and closed adoptions. I have developed some sense of what I would be comfortable with and what I would not be comfortable with. One of the things I have truly learned is that lying to yourself about what you’re comfortable with is a BAD, BAD idea.
So when, during the whole ovarian reserve debacle, as I was rending my clothes and hair about my precious, precious eggs, I suddenly remembered adoption it was like one of those pictures where you have to focus on something other than the picture to see it. I was so focused in on the details of fertility and age and the blips and bumps and possibles and not possibles that I didn’t see what was screamingly obvious.
I don’t know if being adopted by me would be the best life event for any child, but I know that, selfishly, it would make me beyond happy. It makes me so happy for the parents when I see them with their new children and it makes my heart ache that maybe someday I will be able to become a mother to a waiting child. I don’t know how it would be for the child but I know that for me it would be a deep, deep blessing.
And normally I’m into luck or fortune, and not blessings.
Wallace was and remains a deep blessing. I will never regret a moment of pregnancy or motherhood of Wallace. He’s gorgeous and and the most important thing in my life. I do, however, feel that I could feel that way about another child, whether or not that child grows in my tummy.
Unfortunately, many of the adoption stories I read are heavily Christian. Following callings is a very big thing in the Christian community, and Christians are big sharers. They like the sharing, preferably with oodles of scripture. It sometimes becomes difficult to read, the heavy religifying of becoming an adoptive parent; as though God is what makes it good, rather than it’s good for its own sake.
I’ve read ”religious” gotcha stories written by people who passed terrible judgement on the societies they travelled to to get their children; I’ve read about people who thought that these children, who had no say in either their abandoment, upbringing, or adoption, should be grateful. I’ve never heard anything more rediculous in my life. It’s like, have these people ever met any children??
If I ever adopt it will be with an open heart and a completely selfish impulse, the same impulse that drove us to have our first child. To want the small hands and the loud yelling and the teensy feet in the teensy shoes. To want the worrying about them and loving over them and first day of school and first date and the sound of quiet sweet breathing over the monitor. To want THAT baby. THAT one is mine and will always be mine. Though they belong fully to themselves, any children we have will be, in my mind forever, MINE. The impulse to be a mother is gloriously selfish.
Of course, I’m not the only parent around here. As I’ve said, TT and I have done little to no talking about the results of the test and what we may do, should they be negative. There would be talks to have. Some people know they could never adopt, some people are driven to it, and some are merely fearful and/or uninterested. I don’t know where we, as a family, fall on that spectrum.
I know that if it is an option for us we could not even begin for years, and until TT sits for his citizenship test. I don’t know that his international status would prohibit international adoption, what with the police reports and other items needed. I don’t know if it’s even possible.
There are, as is the case if our next child is biological, hurdles to overcome.
But I see that little face in my dreams, the face of the baby not born yet somewhere where I am not, and I want to reach out to that child and wrap my arms around her or him, no matter what they do in response, and say “MINE”.
And ovarian reserve is a nothing.
Sorry, I promised section three and I’ll try and get it done this afternoon. Unfortunately I’m back down for the count with AGAIN a cold that has turned into an infection AGAIN and I need bedrest and antibiotics AGAIN.
I’m starting to consider actual life changes at this point. It’s starting to get worrying. Since the dog bite I haven’t had a cold or minor flu that didn’t ramp up into a major infection. All these antibiotics are no good for me.
Seriously. CRAP.
Will write more when I can see without hurting.
KP
It was recently The Troublemaker’s Birthday. Here are some photos!
First, we celebrated at home with our boy:
Then we went out to a schmancy dinner(lookit the handsome jazz god):
We didn’t take photos at the strip club. I didn’t even try. However, I did wear sexy shoes.
I was not the only one. 32? old and busted. 33? the new hotness. Old and busted; the new hotness:
Everyone drank and talked for a while. It was a great hang.
Then Herm got surly and BJ had on his very best Knowing Look.
It’s two AM. Everybody go the fuck home!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TT!
XOXOXO
