UPDATE!!!!!

March 3rd:

May 4th (The day after his first birthday):

Oh my goodness, I don’t know where to begin.  We knew that four families from our agency were getting updates and two families got theirs yesterday so I assumed we were out of luck.  I ran to the mailbox today, with the tiniest shred of hope in my heart.  Three business size envelopes lay inside and as I flipped through them I could not believe that one had our agency’s logo!  Tears in my eyes, I ran into the house, found Brendan, and we opened it up to find our little guy’s photos and updates inside.  Hooray!!!!  Our friends, Steph and Jay, also got updated pics of their Sophie (so, so beautiful, that one).  There is much happiness here tonight!
A few notes from our update:

• walks 1-2 steps without help
• says umma, appa, and no
• likes to look at books
• scribbles with a pen
• can drink from a cup
• follows simple errands
• is a good dancer and singer
• a busy, active baby
• is shy of strangers
• has four teeth on top and four on the bottom
• he likes his bath
• he is one year old and weighs 17.4 lbs; he is 28 inches tall

What a peanut! 

Just A Moment

I was having a moment tonight, a moment in which I just needed to stop the world for a second and be still. 
Two cases of strep throat, fevers so high that his little hand seared my leg through my jeans, sad little whimpers in the dead of night that jolted me from my bed.  One case of diverticulitis and an entirely different sort of pain and fear.  A week’s worth of nights without sleep, listening to him hurt beside me while I kept my other ear trained on the doors down the hall, torn.
One kitchen in a state of progress, but looking more like despair.  With everything out of place, piled in the corner: boards full of nails, half of a cupboard, a desk drawer, school papers everywhere.  We move the construction pile to the garage between his pains and there is still an enormous pile of whatnot.  This morning, a slight reprieve from the heat and humidity (can I even complain about this yet?) and I want to mow down the lawn that is now a good 12” deep.  The mower starts, then stalls.  Starts, then stalls.  I wanted to kick it, but turn and walk away instead.
In my email box, happy reports from a couple of families with our adoption agency: they received updated pictures and reports on their children in the mail today.  We did not.  Our pictures and information are now seven months old and our hearts ache just a little more.
This had been our week and tonight I just wanted to cook dinner.  I wanted them all to eat something, to take care of them in the most basic way, but with a fridge being emptied out and dietary needs changed due to new doctor’s orders, there just wasn’t much to work with.  The kitchen was too hot, the kids were overly hungry and tired, each wanted to sit next to the parent they were not next to, and I started to feel myself sink. 
When they all scattered off to various new activities, I grabbed a box fan, climbed over the mound of junk to the banquette, and lay down with the coolest of breezes blasting over me.  Amazing, how a fan can drown out all of the noises in your house, the fears in your head.  I lay there and looked up at the clouds like a little kid on a lazy summer afternoon and I swear to you, every cloud shape was a face, and every face was smiling.  Then a robin, harbinger of spring and late-winter beacon of hope, landed on the wire above my head and turned his plucky head this way and that.
Somehow in the space of what amounted to four minutes, peace was restored to my world; my moment was over.  Calm and patient, I went upstairs, read stories about kindergarten and sea turtles and  tucked my little strep-free sweethearts into their beds.  Tomorrow holds new appliances, an abdominal CT scan, and a lawn mower oil/sparkplug change but tonight, tonight I am ok.  And Brendan will be ok, too.  And someday our littlest boy will come home.

You Look Like A Leg Lamp

My husband, he’s a funny funny guy.

This is the ugly side of progress:

Observe, an island that had to be removed due to poor functionality and because it was built after the placement of the fridge, thus making removal and replacement of said fridge impossible without major demolition.  The holes in the floor lived under our stove, which is being replaced because we were down to two burners and an oven door that had to be propped shut with a stick wedged between the stove and an opposite cupboard.  I cannot fathom why they stopped the sheetrock at a foot and a half in on each side of the fridge hole, leaving an odd exposed gap of brick chimney and plaster and lathe.  Actually, the things I cannot fathom about this kitchen would make a pretty long list, but there is no time for that today.

We are making progress, a small dent in a large kitchen that was poorly planned and pieced together with mismatched parts.  At the end of this phase there will be a new kitchen island with butcher block top, a new refrigerator, and a new stove (sans stick this time, thank goodness).   There will be more storage and less stupid, and stupid in this case is a noun.  We will also saw off a portion of the existing countertop and remove the non-functioning lazy Susan cupboard that lies beneath it.  A new, smaller cupboard will go there and then we’ll move on to the “lipstick on a pig” portion of our program.  With adoption expenses eating a large portion of our current budget, we cannot afford to rip everything out and  start over, but we can make what we have look nicer and so for now that is what we’ll do.  Paint, paint and more paint!  The guys at The Home Depot love me.

And for the fun of it, here is what we started with:



This is from the listing picture, so before we bought the house.  Island is now gone, fridge is out, floor has been thoroughly cleaned beneath the former appliances(Eew!) and desk thing to the left is gone.  We will remove the peninsula (behind the desk).  We already have new windows (fall 2009) and we’ve begun painting.  And we took out the faux Tiffany lights, which were plastic.  And yes, covering up that mustard yellow was soul soothing in a way that is difficult to describe.

Yay, progress!

A Few (Woeful) Things

• We celebrated Joon’s birthday last week.  Without him.  That was hard, but I only cried a little.  You’ve heard of Flat Stanley?  We have Flat Desmond, a picture of our littlest boy that I cut out.  We propped him next to the cake and then we blew out his candle for him.  It was fun in the most bittersweet sort of way.
• Brendan worked nights last week, 6:30pm to 6:30am.  Please, let’s not do that again anytime soon. 
• We all got some horrible fever/head cold/chest congestion thing that has made us miserable.  Or maybe it just made me miserable, working in conjunction with Brendan’s night shift and Joon not being here for his birthday.  I guess I’m just saying that I have been miserable.  And then this happened:
• We found out that our adoption agency’s partner agency in Korea, ESWS, will hit their quota and run out of Emigration Permits (EP) soon, as in any referrals made after December 1, 2010 will not travel until 2012.  This is very bad news.  Long story short, babies must have EP to leave the country.  As So. Korea winds down its international adoption program, they are decreasing by ten percent the amount of EP they give out each year, creating a backlog of babies waiting to go home to the parents they have already been matched with.  The implications of this are kind of huge for us.  When ESWS starts submitting babies for EP early in 2012, the babies from the end of 2010 are all in line before our child (as it should be).  This means ESWS is a full year behind in EP.  Agencies are rumored to be preparing their families for a minimum 15 month wait from referral to travel…if this is true Desmond will be home in July….of next year.  And he will be two. 
• There is a dark side to all of this, which is the possibility that ESWS could run out of EP even earlier next year, in which case our “baby” could possibly not be home until 2013.  (Did you all just feel the miserable meter’s needle screech forward ten thousand notches?)
• I am trying to remain calm.  Keep calm and carry on.  Plant an herb garden, make summer plans, paint a few more rooms.  And update my resume, because I might as well start making a dent in the adoption expenses while both of my big kids are at school all day next year. 
• I’m not really miserable all of the time.  Just when I am alone, or when I think too much, or when I see all of the beautiful babies our friends and acquaintances are pushing around town in their strollers…you know the type, those small babies, the kind that need diapers and aren’t walking and speaking in sentences. 
• At least it stopped raining.