Adopt a kid for Christmas?!?!

At this point in time, I’m the type of person who will see the phrase “Adopt a Highway” and much rather see “Sponsor a Highway.”  But I realize, hey, the world hasn’t quite caught up yet.  Today, though, I went to the bank to make a deposit, and as I was pulling out and having Lakota sit down (we always go through the drive through because she loves all the attention and cookies she gets!), I noticed this sign:

Help our kids this year!  Adopt a child for the holidays!

Ummm…WHAT???  Sorry, I didn’t realize you could adopt a child just for the holiday season.  What do you do with said child after the holiday season?  Give them back? 

Or are we talking about sponsoring a child during the holidays?  Providing holiday meals and clothes and money and what not?

Or perhaps we’re talking about doing something like pulling a tag from a Giving Tree and fulfilling a wish for a child who might not have otherwise had a really nice present this year?

I think the bank should clarify what exactly is going on here, and I’m thinking about going back tomorrow to ask them to rephrase the sign to specify.  But first I’d like some feedback from you, who will be reading this with much cooler heads than I have right now.  So wherever you’re from, however long you’ve been a parent or waited to be a parent, please let me know what you think.  Thanks!

Roses in November

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a black thumb.  I cannot grow anything.  Instead, I rather have a tendency to kill plants that come within a certain number of feet of me.  Before Gregg and I got married, he had this lovely Christmas cactus.  It didn’t take too long after we were together that that thing bit the dust.  Right now we’re aiming for ground cover outside that I won’t be able to kill just by looking at it.  Anyway, I’m starting to digress.

Before Gregg and I even met, the previous owners of our home planted a very small rosebush in the middle of the front yard.  I don’t know what it looked like back then.  I know that when Gregg bought the house (pre-me) he made attempts at feeding it and pruning it and what have you.  After we got married?  My theory was “Don’t let me anywhere near it.  It’s blooming and if I touch it I will kill it.”  And that’s how we approach the rosebush now.  Totally hands off.  We let nature take care of it and we enjoy it from the window.

Here’s the thing about my rosebush, though.  It does not bloom consistently.  When it blooms, we normally get between one and four blooms at a time.  You never know if it will be pink or red.  Or both.  One day this summer I woke up to a whole bush full of pink blooms – the most I had ever seen.  (More about that later.)

The morning we told our adoption agency we wanted to be Pooh and Tigger’s mom and dad, four beautiful pink roses came into full bloom on our rosebush.  It was amazing.  It was also late September, and I had never seen this rosebush bloom so late in the year.

The afternoon I got a phone call from Pooh and Tigger’s mama telling me ICAB had signed off on the paperwork allowing their adoption to proceed, the whole rosebush was alive with beautiful pink roses. 

Last month, in the middle of October, I was waiting for something good to happen.  There was a red bud waiting to open.  And it never did.  It looked like it died of frost right on the stem – and in the depressed mood I was in, it was one of the saddest things to look at. 

But this morning I came back from paying a utility bill at city hall, and I noticed that the outer layer of frost had peeled away from that rose, and the rose was actually going to be in bloom.  And what do you know?  Pooh and Tigger are meeting their mommy and daddy for the first time today.  I guess sometimes you need to peel away the crap to see the beauty lying under the surface.  Oh, and what do you know.  The rose?  It’s pink.

20 months

Here we are at 20 months today.  I admit, I wrote an entirely different post before and scrapped it because of how extremely depressing it was.  I’m trying harder with this one, but unfortunately I’m not feeling the lift to write a happy post.

I know that I should be happy – thrilled, even? – that we are another month closer to our child.  I was actually doing fairly well with keeping my eye on the prize.  Twenty months now, four months to go until we hit two years, two years is normally the max mark.  Now the rumblings are that wait times are going to be reaching 30 months.  That’s 10 more months!  That’s September!  I am having a very difficult time coming to terms with this right now.

Aside from the interminable wait, Gregg and I are climbing some pretty steep mountains and the stress is really bringing us down in the dumps.  Each day I try to get up and make the day better than the one before, but seem to be having little success.  Honestly, at this point we could use just a little good news to get us through and keep us moving.  Some days I feel like I’m constantly treading water, getting nowhere and just trying to avoid being pulled under. 

So now I’ve done it again and written a bummer post, even though I didn’t want to.  This one I’m going to hit publish on, though, because this is the way it is right now.  We’re all entitled to good days and bad days, I guess, and well – this has been a very bad month.  I’ve had much, much worse, but it sure ranks up there for “wanna go hide in the corner of my closet and cry” kind of month.  But 20 months down.  So how many more to go now???