more foster training

today was more foster training. we pretty much sat in the same spots as the other two days for training but there were more people in this class because of some new training they are doing. so i sat next to a lady i didn't sit next to the other 2 days. she farted all day. finally i wrote a note to paul to see if he smelled it too. then i asked the guy sitting across from us if he was farting up a storm. we had gotten to know each other at this point. he just laughed and looked shocked. but he didn't blush, so i know it wasn't him. then at the end of the day, to seal the deal and settle any question we had farty-farts-alot ripped a good one when she stood up. paul heard it too so i know i'm not making it up. BUT it was our last all day class. thank GOD. i'm so tired. and we have so much to do! here's our schedule this week:
today-all day foster training.
tomorrow-go look at a crib from craigs list that turns into a bed so that we're prepared for a 0-9 year old. Now we just need one more bed, or maybe a set of bunk beds. then church. then drive down to paul's parents to watch the super bowl. and drive back.
monday-tatum has to get vaccinated over my lunch hour and then it's our anniversary so we are going out for dinner.
tuesday-paul has his physical (which means he can't eat after 8:15pm the night before-our anniversary dinner) and i have to go to the dentist over lunch.
wednesday-nothing...so far...
thursday-tatum gets her hair cut in the morning, then i pick her up over lunch. and i have a home study meeting by myself.
friday-nothing. and i hope it stays that way.
saturday-nothing and i hope it stays that way, unfortunately we have to baby proof the house and move the office to the basement and buy baby furniture that can also convert to little kid furniture so we are ready for 0-9 year olds.
sunday-ditto saturday.
on good news-tatum stayed home from 8:15 until 5:45 with no bathroom breaks and NO accidents!!! isn't that great! that's the longest she's ever made it. and that helps us know that she CAN make it if we had to leave her for a whole day. isn't that great?

your family vs. my family....DING!

We will have been married 7 years on Monday. We don't fight that often but we have a couple fights where I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. This is how one of our usuals goes:
P-My parents called to see if we'd like to come down and _____.
C-Oh man, I'd love to, I just hate making the drive.
(For reference, it's 2 hours down and 2 hours back.)
P-If it was YOUR family we'd go.
C-My family lived 2 miles away.
P-You hate my family.

Ok...how in the world do we get from "it's so far" to "i hate your family"???? Can someone help me connect this?!?
And it's the SAME discussion every time. Do I get ANY points for initiating the birthday lunch for his niece last weekend? no. Do I get ANY points for having the kids over EVERY halloween weekend to do fun stuff-always involving WAY too much sugar? no. Do I get ANY points for always being the one to initiate holidays, gifts, birthdays, easter sundays together? no. I only get demerits for not wanting to drive two hours. *ugh* I could pull my hair out!!!

last day

today was the nice guy's last day. it was all fine until he found out he didn't get another job (that he would have been PERFECT for). then he got real quiet and sad and then boom, it was just about time to go home so he went ahead and left. i cried. m'lady cried. i even think the other guy....i'll call him cool factor, cried. and of course the son (the tool) said "i'm gonna miss you brother." totally inappropriate since he is family and nice guy is not. ugh.
so now it's gonna be me and tool in the office and i'm going to need a lot of help and even more patience from m'lady and cool factor is going to be out running his errands. how am i going to get through this?
in other news. i had my physical today. i love my doctor. i could totally hang out with her if she would just give me her address. hahaha. that sounded so stalkerish. but it's true. whenever i have doctor appointments we talk and talk and talk like we're long lost friends. it's funny. but she found a polyp. hmm...so now i gotta go to the girlie doctor and have it checked out. dang.
last night was another home study. it was interesting. i thought the questions were going to be tougher than they were. tomorrow is our last all day training class. all day. on a saturday. well, i guess i might as well get to bed. paul's already asleep. tatum is already asleep. and i'm barely keeping my eyes open.

day 38 out of nowhere

well...this month my cycle, which should be 28 days, ended at 38. it's not that i've been thinking i was pregnant for the last 10 days. i've been testing. i have to so the docters know if i'm having multiple miscarriages. which i am not. but there are certain signs that i have learned to watch for before my period. signs like my boobs got so sore the 5 days before my period they felt like a tiny midget was breaking in and punching me in the boobs all night. then they'd feel bruised for days after my period finally came. but this time seriously-they didn't hurt AT ALL. i could have been punched in the boobs yesterdsay and not felt a thing. so strange. because the last few months it was like if a bird sang the sound vibes would make them hurt. and they would swell up like pamela anderson, i am not exaggerating. i had to switch out to all turtlenecks for the week because the cajongas got so big i couldn't keep them down! but this time nothing. no signs at all but MAN i was getting the inner bitchy's. you know the kind where you think awful awful mean things to say but you know it's just pms so you stay quiet. oh-my inner bitch was out of control this last week!
on other notes i haven't been blogging because we've been trying to find new housing. it's not working out so great. we aren't able to find anything that we can afford. and then we won't be able to save up to get back into our own house again. so we're still undecided but i think we've decided, almost, to just stay where we are and wait for either 2 kids under 4 years old, or the same gender. not sure what else to do.
cute tatum story-tonight we were both working on our own things and tatum gave up on us playing ball with her so she put it up on the loveseat and then stood back and wagged her tail as if she was playing with the loveseat then she would lunge for it and grab it off the seat. sooo funny.

moving on up (sing it in the george jefferson voice)

yesterday our landlord came by to take pictures of the place and show it to a couple that had already contacted her. cross your fingers, i really want her to get this place rented quick. she's a nice girl but can NOT afford the mortgage.
anyhow she was taking pictures and i ran upstairs to brush my teeth since i had crawled out of bed and started cleaning. paul came up stairs to fix his hair. and we just sort of didn't notice that tatum stayed downstairs with jamie...but pretty soon jamie called up and said "you mind if i come up?" she came up stairs and showed us the pictures she had taken of the family room. every single one with tatum sitting in the corner as if she had been perched there on purpose. she then proceeded to sit pretty in our bedroom and we looked up and jamie was trying, yet again, to get a good shot with tatum in the corner. i'm sure she thinks she's the selling point of the townhouse. goofy dog.

me and my big mouth

tonight was another home study meeting and ugh. i'm not sure how it went. she smokes so i don't think she's a homeschooler and here's why i'm concerned. she asked us how we felt about socializing children and i said "well, i've known some homeschoolers and....." and then Paul said, "Cheri', you don't know if she's a homeschooler." and now i think-oh crap. what if she is! but she smokes...i've never known a smoking home school mom...have you? so i called my friend gina to talk me off this cliff because i'm feeling pretty hopeless and big mouthed. and i told her what i said and she was talking about how i just talk openly and i said "ya, because i'm an open book!" and she agreed with me way too quickly which made me laugh because of the way she said it. can't remember now her exact words but it made me feel better.
ugh ugh ugh! it's just so nerve wracking because you know she's judging every word you say and then she's going to write a report about it and show people what she thinks! but we learned that we have to read about child development. even if we wanted teenagers they probably wouldn't give us the bad one because "we don't have alot of experience with kids." ok. i knew that we don't have ALOT of experience....but still...it just kinda sucks. it makes me feel like we are hopeless. ok-i'm gonna go cry and curl up to paul.

i have the cutest dog in the world

this morning i was running late. so instead of doing our normal quick walk and then i come inside and get ready, we did it the other way around. for some reason i think this is faster. so i got ready and ran downstairs and out the door with tatum. then we came back inside and i started making my breakfast. tatum stood by the door and whined. finally i realized she thought she was going to get to go today and i was holding her up. i finally said "no, honey bunny..." that's another one of her nicknames, "...today is a stay day." she huffed and went and sat on her loveseat and scowled at me from there until i was done making my breakfast. she wouldn't even see me to the door because she was holding such a grudge.
then tonight we were petting her and found a lump under her chin. so we flipped her over and dug through her beard and found an ingrown hair of some sort. but it seemed like a whisker hair was coming out of it but it was UNDER her chin. i don't know what it was. i went and got the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls and came back in. paul tried to coax her out from under the desk and she slowly eeked out from under there with her head ducked and put up her paw to "give us five". she's so dang cute! she knows JUST how to work it to use her best tricks. AAAAAHHH i love this puppy dog!

AAAGGHHH!!!

I can't wait. 12 DAYS LEFT! That's why I put up this background. Our anniversary also happens to be Ground Hog's Day. Ugh! Can't wait can't wait can't wait! You'd think I'd never been out to dinner before.
I also went and got my eyebrows waxed tonight. It was a spur of the moment decision but MAN was it needed. I always feel so glamorous after I get my eyebrows waxed. I do it about once every 8 months. Pathetic I know, but it's expensive!!

Inauguration

Ok-I can't help it. I have to share this. Today my co-workers and I were looking at the inaugural newscasts and the boss's son says "Huh, how ironic. Exactly 8 years ago today George Bush was inaugurated."
A hush fell through the office. I piped up from my end of the office "It's on January 20th every inauguration." from his end of the office, "oh....are you sure?!" I wonder why he thought the media hadn't picked up on that little element of irony. Jeesh.

18 days and counting

i only have 18 days to go until my favorite day of the year. it's our anniversary on 2/2/9. and not only that, but it will be our 7th anniversary because we got married on 2/2/2. cross your fingers, everyone says the 7th is the bad year. but we're hoping since our first year was on the trail and we spent enough quality time for 6 years we're hoping our 2nd year of marriage was equivalent to everyone else's 7th. but it's not just my favorite day of the year because it's our anniversary. it's also the ONE day of the year that no matter what we go out to eat somewhere really nice. our first anniversary we were broke. but we had gotten a dinner gift certificate for christmas, so we saved it and used it for our anniversary. we went to josephina's in larimer square. it was so fun. and it snowed that night. and we dressed up really nice to go. and they have lights strung across the street so it looks really festive. this year we are going out for fondue. one of my FAVORITE things to do. not sure if it will be la fondue in downtown denver, or the melting pot in louisville. can't decide. LOVE the ambiance at la fondue, but melting pot has a coupon for free desert. we'll see. but for now, i only have 18 days to go. i've been counting down since december.

chugga chugga chugga chugga

the ball feels like it's really rolling now. tonight i said "gosh, do you think i should call our home study worker and see where things are?" and lo and behold we already had a message on the machine from her. (we're really bad at checking that darn thing.) she got our first inch of paperwork in the mail today and is ready to set up the 2nd meeting. i called her back and left a voicemail. then i went through our list of things yet to do and realized we're alot farther along than i thought. paul keeps bragging about how he has next monday off, something about a banking holiday, but what he doesn't know is that's going to be his due date for reading the rule book and signing off on it. it's literally the most boring thing i've ever read. i even had to read the HUD regulations for the title agency and even THAT was more interesting than the foster rule book. so he doesn't know it yet, brag all you want buddy, monday is going to be assigned reading day. hahahahahaha! i LOVE to tease.
here's what else we have to get done, in no particular order:
get physicals;
fill out our virginia (that's not so much for lovers) background checks and sign them in front of a notary;
take a cpr class -and i emailed him (because his voicemail was full) tonight to see if we can take it this saturday;
2 or 3 more home study visits;
print our family photo;
ok-but here's the big part: fill out where the kids will go to school and/or daycare, and the problem is that darn looking-for-a-new-job thing. where they go to school hinges on where we live which hinges on where i'm working. sooooo...we're a little stumped on that part.
and a few more things i can't think of. but we're getting there. we might actually be able to get all of this done by march 2nd!

bad blogger, long week

ok, i've been such a bad blogger that i'm surprised any of you still even check on me. this week has been busy already and it's only tuesday.
this week i'm learning from the guy who's leaving. it makes me so sad. he reminds me of my brother dan so to see his feelings hurt or his heart broken is really difficult for me.
to know that it means that i'm going to be ridden twice as hard is even worse. and to make matters even worse, the boss's son keeps saying "oh, man, (sigh)why are you leaving us?" i want to say "ummm....because your mom let him go so quit making it sound like it's his choice to leave!" he's such a tool.
since the holidays are over i decided to do something about the one pound here, one pound there that i keep gaining. so i'm counting my calories. so far, i've lost 5 pounds but tonight i fell off the wagon and had some cookies AFTER some chocolate chips. and i've been wii-ig my butt off. i love the hula-hoop part. have i mentioned that. anyhow...we are watching american train wreck...er...uh...i mean american idol and when that's done we're going to wii.
tonight we had our favorite salmon recipe. we made it up. here it is:
1/2 cup (not firmly packed) brown sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 T olive oil
1 T grated fresh ginger
1/2 t lemon juice
Few springs of cilantro
1 lb of Salmon

Turn the oven on to Broil.
Sautee the brown sugar, soy sauce, olive oil, ginger and lemon juice for just a few minutes until it carmelizes.
Put the salmon on a broiler pan skin side up and broil 3 minutes, take the skin off and drizzle 1/3 of sauce over salmon and broil again for 5 minutes. Turn salmon over, drizzle another 1/3 of sauce over and place cilantro leaves on the salmon and broil for 5 minutes. After you pull the salmon out of the oven, drizzle the last 1/3 of the sauce over salmon and serve.
It's really yummy with long grain rice and peas, or broccoli or asparagus....mmmmmm...asparagus (say it in the Homer Simpson voice).

Zip it Chatty Cathy.

today was a loooooong day of training. but now we have 2 of 3 days done. there is a couple in the class that are kinship foster, which means, they are trying to get custody of children they know. these particular children are their grandchildren. the more they talk the less the rest of us have to wonder how their kids landed in foster care. and every fleeting THOUGHT that goes through their mind is outwardly expressed. at one point she cut off one of the facilitators in the middle of a sentence to tell us all about a movie she'd seen about a foster kid. complete with EVERY detail from beginning to end regardless of the fact it was a fiction movie!!!! at the end of the day we were supposed to come up with 5 good house rules. granted, they won't be used in EVERY home, they were just trying to give us a foundation of what our expectations should be directed towards. we had already gone through an HOUR of how we should stick to a schedule. so we don't need to make 1 of our 5 rules bedtime, or dinner time etc. but chatty cathy over there decides she'd pipe in AGAIN. for some reason the facilitators just let her talk. i'm not sure if they just enjoy her stale smoker's breath or if everyone is just too tired at the end of 2 intense days to cut her off. she began telling us how she thinks a rule should be that they have dinner EVERY night at 6:00. (regardless of the fact that we were just told these rules have to be rules that we are going to be able to abide by ourselves so that the kids learn consistancy and to stick to rules.) i could tell we were about to listen to another 10 minutes of why this would be a good rule. finally i took it for the team and piped up "i don't think we need to make that a rule since we've just established that would fall into the schedule." you could FEEL the sigh of relief from the rest of the class. chatty cathy got my drift. thank GOD it was the end of the day and that we have 3 weeks apart before day 3.

more on foster stuff

today was our first full day of foster training. it was very interesting. we learned a lot. they kept taking breaks and i kept feeling like i wasn't ready to stop hearing. so that's good. tomorrow is another full day. we won't be able to talk about the kids history's or family's or what's going on with them as far as issues goes. so i won't be able to say much at all about them. maybe we have a boy or girl or their ages etc. even when we register them for school we can't give out anymore info than our contact info and very minimal stuff. the social worker has to release any further information. but it is making me very eager to meet some of the kids and see what we're up against. not sure what more to say. we're pretty maxed out as far as attention span tonight.
somehow i kinked my shoulder while i was playing on my wii tonight. and the weirder part is that all i was doing was hula-hooping...that has nothing to do with my shoulder. i'm trying to unlock 20 minutes but i'm beginning to think there's nothing more to unlock. i love hula-hooping. i could do it for an hour if it would just keep going. ok...maybe not since i get dizzy after 10 minutes. but it's my favorite game on the wii. and i rock at it. paul can't beat me. he doesn't even try anymore.
sorry i've been a bad blogger. since wedneday nothing much has happened that was worth typing up.

big day

today m'lady let jeff go. as a lay off, not as a "you're fired" kind of thing. i'm so sad. i asked her if she was sure he wasn't a better fit than i am. she had already made her decision though. now i'm going to be ridden twice as hard as i am now. and i even came back to a post-it note after lunch, 3 in fact, but they were all one message. it stated that i needed to do a pink sheet for a message i had left her and how i need to be more forward thinking. ugh! ya right-she changes her thought directions every 2 seconds and now i'm supposed to think like her before she thinks it? give me a break! i'm so sad tonight.

GOTCHA Day!

A year ago today our lives changed forever when we picked Tatum up from the her breeders at McDonald's in Atoka, OK.
And she rode in the car at my feet staring up at Paul in wonderment.
Then she crawled up in my lap and rode through Dallas like this:

That night we stayed in a hotel in Louisiana. Tatum was so scared at first. She snuggled up to Paul.

And she played in her water bowl...

And best of all, she got to sleep in the bed, for what we said would be the last and only time (ya, right)!

The next morning, we snuck her out of the hotel in the paper bag we had gotten dinner in the night before from Cracker Barrel.

And by that night we were home together forever. Oh, we love this little doggie!

HAPPY NEW YEARS!!

Today we took a hike with some good friends, Jason & Liz, that we met in a small group when we were living in DC. Now they live here in Longmont about a hop skip and a jump away from us. I think they have hiked more of Colorado in the short time they've been here than we have in the entire time we've lived in Colorado combined. We had so much fun today I think we might make it a New Years Day tradition. Which made today the first annual New Years Day hike. It was GORGEOUS. I found out that I am WAY more out of shape than the mean old wii told me AND my lungs are about the size of peas. We didn't make it as far as we had hoped. It's about 1 mile an hour pace when you're hiking in snow AND we couldn't find the trail after a couple miles. On our way back we realized there was a lake 1/2 mile up in another direction on another trail. We headed up there and found the lake frozen SOLID! We played on that for a while and took lots of really cute shots. Here's one of them. I have no idea why my hat is down over my eyes, other than the fact that it was cold and snowy.

As you can see, Tatum is still a little reluctant about the new camera.

And here's another cute one of our family. I think this will end up being our foster photo.