proof she "doesn't remember"

the other day i was talking to a therapy group on the phone and they asked me a little about karyssa's history. so i explained "she was 13 months when she came to us through foster care and before that she was highly neglected." she was watching a movie so i got up and walked to the other room so i wouldn't bother her. lately when i go through a drive-thru window or talk to someone on the phone she'll ask "what did you say to that lady?" a little while after the phone call she asked "why did you say that to that lady?" not "what" but "why". i said "do you mean why did i say you were neglected?...do you know what that word means?" and she said "when i was a baby." *tears* yes...exactly like when you were a baby! i didn't know what to say or how to approach it. we want to be honest but i don't want to paint a bad picture of her birth parents for her. if she comes to that conclusion on her own than so be it, truth be told, they deserve it. but i don't want to be the artist of that. so i said "they didn't know how to take good care of you, that's why you got to come and live with mommy and daddy. and i'll make sure you're never neglected again. i'll take very good care of you." not sure if that's a good or bad way to approach it but...i was a little surprised. i mean, she's 3. but now that she can talk all kinds of new information is coming out.

in cute news: asher's been trying to climb stairs like he's just walking up them instead of doing it one foot at a time on each step. it's so cute. and bonus: he finally slept through the night last night. the night before he got up at 4:15 and i went in there and put him back in bed and he screamed bloody murder and paul went in and told him to stop that and get back in bed. and with that we didn't hear another peep from him until after 7:00. little booger. not sure why he listens to daddy and not mommy. i love him. and the other day i was looking at a christmas card a friend had sent me. it had pictures of her 3 girls on the front and i was examining how much they'd changed since their card last year. he was sitting in his chair next to me and saying "i wanna see!" which sounds more like "ionasee!" except that he doesn't just say it once so it was more like "ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!ionasee!" and when i finally caught on and turned the card so he could see the girls he stopped, examined, and said "aaaaawwweeee." it was SO cute! he is such a little character. last night after dinner we were decorating cookies for desert and i went to take pictures and said "say cheese!" and he said "cheese!' and i got my first on-cue picture of him-SMILING! so excited about that development. and lately i've noticed when i say "give mommy a kiss" he hums as he's coming in for the kill. teehee...yes, yes i do that.

*sigh* i love these kids.

does it have to pour EVERY time it rains?

we're house shopping. it is so. much. fun. and i am not being sarcastic. i LOVE looking at houses and layouts and decorating styles and colors and back yards and neighborhoods. ugh! every time we pull up in a neighborhood and our realtor starts to look for the address i say "it's the third one on the left" or "this one right here." ha! she keeps commenting on how much we've done our homework. little does she know we are LOVING the homework. i check the sex offender registry, check the school ratings, then i physically drive by the houses at LEAST 3 times before we even go inside so i can decide if i really want to stare at the house across the street for the next twenty years. ha! LOVE house shopping.
don't love when we finally put an offer on a house we LOVE LOVE LOVE only to have them accept another offer. i'm telling myself the other buyers were cash buyers willing to pay full price. but i DO love that it means i get to house shop some more. and boy was i disappointed. so we looked. we got close. we revisited. we went back to other houses. we went to more houses. THEN a house popped up that was EVERYTHING we wanted. big yard. 5 bedrooms. potential to move and expand....by the way, we LOVE tearing down walls, redoing kitchens, carpeting and hardwooding and painting. UGH! love it!
so we put in an offer on a house but it's a short sale so now we gotta wait forEVER and a day...or 60 days, something like that. maybe by late may we'll know something.
but that was yesterday. today i had to take asher to children's for an evaluation on his throat. they aren't sure why he can't swallow water without choking. or aspirating as they all love to say. i hate that word aspirating...it's so....medical. and not in a good way, not in a cure way...in a problem way. *sigh* so i took him down to the children's hospital and sat down in the waiting room trying not to think about the fact that we were at children's and people don't go to children's for a cold...they go to children's because their kids are really sick. and my baby is not really sick. at least that's what i'd like to believe. but as we're sitting there waiting for the same doctors that are going to see the boy next to us with the trach tube and the girl in the next section over is bald from chemo it makes me reconsider how not-sick my baby truly is. i went to the bathroom and cried for a minute. then he was seen by 3 doctors, a couple specialists and a few more people that i'm not sure what their role was. i think it was a nurse and an assistant. tomorrow we go back for a few little procedures and a 24 hour stay. i was exhausted tonight when i got home. karyssa didn't nap today, we think, because every time she was checked on she was in a new spot with more items in her hands she shouldn't be playing with-typical karyssa fashion.
now i'm home, the kids are in bed, and i'm trying to decide if i should have chocolate cake or salad for dinner. and the place we're renting is on the market and has it's first showing tomorrow afternoon so i gotta leave it clean on our way out at 5:00 in the morning!!!
and all i can think is "thank god we don't have to deal with the house stuff for 60 more days".

up to my eyeballs in therapy

today i had a bit of a meltdown. which then led to asher graduating from occupational therapy. why is he in occupational therapy you ask? because of his poor muscle tone. uuum...excuse me? what? "ya, remember when he first came in and he was all balled over and slouchy?" "he was 4 months old..."
i told the therapist that my friends are asking why he's in therapy and i don't know why he's in therapy anymore. we did the swallow study, we can see that he has a little bit of "asperating" when he swallows. but why is that? "poor muscle tone." ??? again with the poor muscle tone. really? he's a ball of muscle. he has baby fat and he's hard like muscle. not like a rock-don't go that far overboard here with me. so i took him to an ear nose and throat doctor who referred him to an aerodigestive clinic who first wants a sleep study done before they'll put him on the list for the "board" to discuss when they decide in their weekly meeting if he would qualify for the aerodigestive clinic. i'll schedule that after i get the results from the pediatric baby opthomologist appt but i really think that appointment won't be necessary. see, he has to go to that because his eyes are watery. i think they're just watery because i have to put baby oil in the tub with him now to help with his eczema. ya, the allergist said to take him off peanuts, egg whites, (not the whole egg...just the whites) oranges, tomatoes (only raw tomatoes, not sauces or cooked tomatoes), and i'm not supposed to introduce more dairy (milk) until the eczema clears up in a few months.
see where i'm going with this? i'm exhausted from his appointments that needlessly lead to yet more appointments on a perfectly healthy baby!!!! i'm drowning in appointments and therapies and evaluations and tests and diagnoses that i don't think are quite accurate. thank god he came with medicaid. or maybe it's the medicaid that's a problem...maybe that's why we get scheduled for test after test after needless test!
anyway-this was the attitude i went into therapy with today and thus the reason we have been discharged from ONE appointment in the week. i figured out today that since june we have driven to the therapy center approximately 40 times. 30 minutes both ways DURING naptime. you can imagine how well that flows for kids on a schedule. *sigh* NOT well at all!!!!

affection

lately sweet pea has been initiating affection. it's amazing. i tell her that her hugs and kisses are like breath to my lungs. it feels like i've never breathed before when she hugs me and all of a sudden i can breathe. she's always accepted affection, but she's never initiated it until this last month. it seems the more final everything becomes the more safe she feels and the more confident she is in her place in our family. i love it. every night we lay down together and read, all 4 of us in her bed. and then she kisses brother man and we kiss her and then we take peanut to his crib and we turn out the lights and leave. sometimes he goes to bed before story time. last night he was sick so he didn't make it to story time. so it was just me, sweet pea, and paul. after story time we both kissed her cheeks at the same time. she LOVES that. she lays there grinning when we do that. and we kiss her approximately 500 times on each cheek. then she pulls her face back so that we kiss each other. and then we kiss her again. and then she kisses us. and then she kisses just paul, then just me. then we kiss her all over again. she loves it. she loves to feel the affection, she loves to see the affection, she loves that paul loves her and she loves paul and paul loves me and i love her and she loves me and on and on it goes and she just soaks it in. i love the way she loves. i tell her how amazing she is and how she's perfect and then i go through and touch her and tell her how her hands are perfect, her cheeks are perfect, her lips are perfect, her eyes are perfect, her legs are perfect and on and on i go. and she just lays there grinning as if not to grin loving to hear how perfect she is. i love that baby girl.

on a more serious note....

sorry to all my bloggie friends for not updating more. i'll just be painfully honest in this post and those that get offended can get over it because it's my blog and it was meant to be my therapy.

i've gotten more pregnancy announcements than i can handle lately. i know. you're thinking "you've got two kids. get over it." shut up. you've clearly never dealt with infertility to the point of adoption so you can just shove it or open your mind to what i might be going through. even though "i've got two kids" doesn't mean i won't mourn the loss of the kids that have paul's genes. or never fearing the dreaded 18th birthday when birth families can come back into the picture. i don't know what to expect with our birth family so it's hard not to think as soon as the kids turn 18 they are moving back in with their birth families never to be heard from again. it's totally their choice. and it's a hard fact to face day after day knowing that if they chose that we're left, once again, childless. not that i know anyone who was adopted that did that...it's just my imagination going wild.

that being said, we are beyond humbled that we get to adopt these children and raise them as our own. they are more like us than their birth families sometimes. we got to meet with our birth dad last week. he told us he's not such a fan of camping. which made me giggle a little bit inside because normally people that like to camp have kids that hate to camp and then their grandkids love to camp. it seems the love of camping skips a generation. so i'm thrilled to know our birth dad doesn't like it. because let me tell you, his kids do. when i pull out the camping gear sweet pea SQUEALS with delight. this last weekend we went camping with our extended family and both kids smiled the whole time.

so...i kinda glossed over that little part where we met with our birth dad. *sigh* it was the most intense hour of my life. i cried. he cried. i cried some more. he cried again. paul just sat real quiet. (that's his version of crying.) but we explained a little bit more about ourselves. i explained that we can't have kids of our own so his kids are it for us. and he said shockingly "why?!" and i just explained "they don't really know. a little of this...a little of that. not real sure." it was interesting to me that he can't imagine why anyone CAN'T get pregnant since it seems to happen when he breathes in the general direction of our birth mom. let's hope he stops breathing on her because we have a little house.

there are days where i have a REALLY good attitude about infertility. but there's days where it still kicks me when i'm down and i can barely pretend to be nice. i'm sure pregnant friends expect a huge congratulations, and i'm terribly sorry i don't have it in me. but i don't. so please don't expect it. also don't expect that i don't want to be friends anymore. that's not the case. but for the next 9 months i won't be looking at your stomach. for some reason i'm still really excited when the babies come and they are out. but i just can't rejoice at the pregnant part. maybe i know too many people with emotionally painful pregnancies that it's hard to rejoice when it's just a pregnancy and not a real live baby. i've known women to lose pregnancies in the 40th week. so to be excited before it's a real live baby is hard for me. i don't know.

this post is sort of a heart-barfing post. there's just so much to update you on and they are so intertwined it's hard to post about adoption without the infertility.

as far as our case goes...it seems like it's all happening so fast i can hardly post fast enough. it feels like all these months of visits and documenting and doctor appointments and court dates and all of a sudden there's no more. no more visits, no more court dates, no more documentation of behaviors. there are still evaluations and therapies but that's a drop in the bucket compared to all the other appointments we've been up against. and then the emotional *whew* of it all being over with. our hearts ache for our birth dad and at this point we will not get to keep contact with him and that's very hard for me and paul. we understand the kids need separation but it doesn't make it any easier for us to know they will have that separation.

i guess there's no good way to wrap up this post. it's so random. but there's what's on my heart. sorry if you're offended. well, honestly, no i'm not.

clueless and irritating

this is one of those posts where you're probably thinking "oh dear, was it me?" and it probably wasn't, i just get it so often it's hard to keep track of exactly which time it was that put me over the edge.
sometimes people say things to me, normally on facebook, and they have NO clue how it will effect me. how can they not know? because i don't even know until after they've said it. the strangest things will sting like a bee while other things that should hurt me to the core go right over my head like they asked me if i'd like a cup of coffee.
sometimes it depends on who said it. other times it will depend on when they said it. sometimes it doesn't bother me a bit at the time and then later i'm just so annoyed all i can do is roll my eyes like a junior high girl and click on the "hide" button. yes, i do that. then after i forgive them, i un"hide" them. it's how i cope.
i've recently been thinking about if we are truly ready to quit trying for our own since our house is currently at its limit, or if i really really really need to experience pregnancy just once. i KNOW you all mean well.....but....i'm not just saying that as an insurance to get pregnant because i "relaxed". yes, you are VERY well meaning in saying that. you also need to know that a) i might truly be ready to stop trying and b) it's been 3 years now. that's a mental benchmark for infertility and c) just because i stop trying does not mean i will automatically get pregnant because i relaxed. the statistics show, i've said it before, but i'll say it again, that the SAME NUMBER OF PEOPLE GET PREGNANT AFTER ADOPTION AS THOSE WHO CHOSE NOT TO ADOPT AND STILL GET PREGNANT. there are NO studies that prove that adoption OR giving up is a means to pregnancy. i REALLY appreciate the sentiment and i REALLY appreciate that you are grasping at straws to make me feel better. but you do NOT in any way, shape or form need to do that. sometimes i'm just telling you what's truly spinning through my head.
now, there's others that pop babies out left and right and with out thinking about it-because how COULD they know what almost 7 MILLION women they have NOTHING in common with struggle with?-they'll say the MOST insensitive thing like "well, i never know when i'll be popping out another." almost as if it's an inconvenience to them that they struggle with fertility instead of infertility. give me an effing break! (i'll keep it PG since my niece checks this blog. hi, adea!)
other times all it takes is one of those pregnant women to "like" one of my facebook statuses when i'm clearly referring to infertility and it feels like they are trying to come alongside me and say "i am here with you, i totally get it, that's exactly how i felt the 10 minutes i was waiting for my pregnancy test to turn up with the + sign i get minutes after trying to even GET pregnant." and i just want to strangle them with their stupidity.
*sigh*
for the most part, i'm over it. for the most part it doesn't bug me. but every now and again i just can't take it anymore and i think if i share with you the painful parts of my innards, then it's tit for tat for sharing some painful parts of your innards.
aaaaah. glad this is off my chest. sometimes i want to post some of the still-painful parts but i don't because i feel like i need to spare you, some of my loyal readers, or i'm afraid of who might read and get offended but if it's ok with you, i'd rather stay painfully honest. it is how this blog came about as my therapy anyway.