Adventures in knitting, writing, parenting, and learning how to live a healthier life with whole and raw foods.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
A Fine Day
FC1 had her birthday party at home yesterday. Pizza Hut and Dairy Queen ice cream cake. She's also having a party this Friday at the local skating rink with 15-20 of her closest friends. That'll be a trip. Hopefully on Monday I'll have lots of good pictures! Then Saturday she's having another party at my MIL's house with all of Richard's nephews and family. How spoiled is this kid, huh? She's such a sweetheart though that it's just plain fun to spoil her.
Gotta jet!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Spinning Under the Willow
Not so much exercise last night, but had some very good quality time with the girls. Found out something interesting, too. FC1 was named after her mom's foster mother, from when her mom was in foster care as a child. I thought that was so touching, that she named her firstborn after somebody she obviously admired a great deal. Then I was brought back down to earth by the fact that even though this woman had that kind of impact on her, it hadn't been enough to break the cycle. Damn. This fostering business is a chocolate-covered lemon, with the sour always lurking just below the sweet. That said, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Just yesterday I was having a conversation with a coworker about foster care. He is of the opinion that kids just shouldn't go back to their abusive/neglectful/whatever real parents. I don't think he gets it that kids need their parents. Or at least their primary parent. It's not that they want them, or prefer them. It's a human need, and if that's missing, there's a piece missing from that child from that point on. Period.
This is where my faith steps in as well. I believe each person has their own path in life, with God at their side. It is not my place to decide that this child doesn't belong with their parent(s), if that parent has passed the state's requirements. I can't protect beyond a certain point, except to hope that the tools I've helped them develop will serve them well. I must be at peace with all possibilities after I let go; they may thrive, they may stagger and fall, they may follow in their dysfunction's footsteps. This is where I end, where I must let go and trust God to be there when they need Him most.
This is where I become my final incarnation as a foster parent: Available.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Spring is Firmly Here
We went to a local restaurant that has the best ranch dressing I've ever had and I only ever order one thing there: the grilled chicken salad. Yummm. We even ate outside next to a trickling little water feature because it was so nice out. Finally! Afterwards we walked to the park across the street and I went down the big slide with the girls. They were thrilled. Then I attempted to ride one of those springy little horse things that stick out of the ground. Yikes. Not recommended for adults over 100 pounds. Then Richard and I both went on the swingset for a little while, after which I got some knitting done on the super secret sock. Not a ton of exercise but at least we got out of the house and had some fun!
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Bizzy Bizzy Bee
Life has been ... interesting. The girls are doing fine, Richard is fine, and me? Well, not so fine. Just got a bad case of the blah's lately. I could blame it on work but then I remember how good I have it and feel like a nincompoop complaining about my cushy, sit-down, safe, stable job. I could blame it on the weather but the weather is getting beautiful. I guess it boils down to the fact that I just have to get off my rump at night and work out so I feel better. I just feel stagnant inside.
So maybe I'll use this blog thingy as a prompter for that. I'll post every day and see it all written down (or up, in the case of a blog) and feel better about myself.
[jumps down off the pity potty]
Toodles.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Swingin' and Sniffin' and Horfin'
Notice the Hot 'n Sexy white FOTL's peekin' out there. Yeah, baby! Sizzzzle!
Deb, you're a lousy shot, but I love ya.
Here's one of the boys who was very nice to two very odd, snorting ladies dressed in business casual at the batting cages.
Go Debbie Go Debbie Go Debbie Go!
Two swingin', snortin', almost-horfin' dorks. Too much fun.
Embryonic yarn
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
And here's where I disillusion myself that I am indeed NOT a reader, at all, apparently.
Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (In my defense, I was reading the spanish version. Tough going in 7th grade.)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (It's on my shelf. Makes me look smart. It was also a gift.)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down (Favorite, favorite book of all time, every time.)
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Picture a Day 365
Today Richard and the girls did some landscaping in the front yard. Richard went on Craigslist and got a whole bunch of plants from people who were giving them away and brought them all home, along with some large cement landscaping rounds. He's ambitious.
I just wandered around and took pictures.
Now, the next pictures are sorta strange. We have a Lint Tree. Not familiar with that species? It occurs in nature only when next to a dryer vent.
Happy Monday!