Monday Mashup

My hubby is the greatest.  He spent the majority of our gorgeous long weekend in the garage.  His goal was to clean & organize it so we could park the van inside.  First was to make sure he could stay connected to the sporting world.

TV, Stereo which is wired to the computer, & the baby monitor in case he'd be able to hear Tova over all the other racket.

Whatever helps get the job done.

At the end of the second day he’d created this.

Wide open space.

Which we promptly filled with this.

In the garage where it's supposed to be.

I told you he was great!

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I’ve been a little amazed at the number of facebook posts today about Obama’s speech to school kids.  I am shocked that so many people I call actual friends (not just facebook friends) seem to get their news from FoxNews, home of news that only seems fair to the unbalanced.  Just Kidding!  Save you hate mail!  I find Fox detestable;  I get my news from The Daily Show, home of completely unfair & unbalanced news but then again, they never claim to be anything other than that anyway, which I’m sure viewers of Fox find just as detestable, although probably funnier.

Anywhoodle.  Here’s a link the transcript of the Scary Speech of Indoctrination.  I haven’t watched it but I did read it & thought it was great.  I like the reinforcement to the kids that they have responsibilities in their education.  Ethan needs to hear that more.  He’d be happy to have someone talk at him & not do anything other than draw plans for his next great Lego Star Wars creation.   I take some blame for his laziness.  He’s our first so I helicopter parented him for about 3 years & 3 weeks & then Gavin came along & Ethan had to learn to do a few things for himself.  He’s the child that would like to blame everyone else for his problems & have anyone else fix what’s ailing him even though it’s well within his power to fix it.  Not that the President’s speech is going to fix that, but it’ll be nice for someone other than me to try to get the point across.

Speaking of politics.  Here’s a great video explaining the need for universal health care.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

K~

Defending the Defenseless

Many states are facing a severe lack of cash.  All states are required to balance their budgets.  IL is proposing to  cut $460.4 million from the budget.  Guess which departments are facing the biggest cuts?

If you guessed:

• Dept of Human Service
• Dept of Children & Family Services
• Dept of Aging
• Dept of Public Health
• Student Assistance

You win!   And thousands of children, elderly, & disabled people lose.

All of these departments are vitally important.  My life has been most impacted by foster care so that is what I’d like to concentrate on today.  Jason & I have family & friends that have either made foster care their career or have dedicated their lives to fostering kids.  Foster parents are some of the most generous, giving, caring, & selfless people I know.  It is not easy to take in a hurting child.  Yet they do it with grace, because they see a need & know they can fill it.  Our friends & family take ‘the least of these’ & make them the most.

Isn’t that why we are here?  To defend the defenseless?  To protect the unprotected?  To support the unsupported?

This is what we need to defend IL foster kids from:

• Elimination of all counseling services and psychological assessments;
• Elimination of all Child Advocacy Centers
• Elimination of all after-school tutoring, job preparation and mentoring for youths
• Eventually, the child-to-caseworker ratio also would increase from 15:1 to a whopping 50:1 (violating federal mandates of a max of 25:1).
• Payments that foster parents receive to care for the children would be cut in half.
• Elimination of foster parent training (if they could get anyone who would still want to be a foster parent, knowing they will have to cover almost all of their foster child’s expenses, including daycare).

If you live in IL, will you please join me in contacting your state Legislators & the Governor?  Tell them they cannot balance the budget on the backs of these children.  Let them know that just because the children, elderly, & disabled don’t have a voice, doesn’t mean we won’t use ours!

You can find your Legislator here, as well as the governor.

You can find more info on the governor’s webpage & an op ed piece from the Chicago Tribune.

K~

*This  post is not open for debate about big gov’t & why should we be supporting kids from women who won’t take care of them.  These kids didn’t ask for this.  It stinks that we have to foot the bill; but I know I’d rather foot the bill for a 5year old’s counseling & monthly care than for his penal servitude.

I’m Rich!

This coming week is going to be an expensive one.  Buying a house is never cheap except now I’m not so concerned because MSNBC says I’m rich.

My supposed financial status was mentioned 3 times in this article.

The offending phrase?  Here’s a taste.

Adoption preferences
Rich foreigners have been adopting children from poorer nations for decades. Mia Farrow, now the mother of 14, adopted an orphan from the Vietnam War in 1973. Jolie adopted her sons Maddox and Pax from Cambodia and Vietnam and her daughter Zahara from Ethiopia.

There are a few myths out there about adoptive parents that really make me uncomfortable.  The first is that I am a saint or at least better than you because I adopted my daughter.  The second is that I am rich because I adopted my daughter.

I’m going to debunk those myths right now.  I am not a saint.  I am a very unsaintly person.  I’ve been known to swear when I’m really upset.  I yell at my kids way more than I like.  I hold grudges.  That’s just the starter list.  I adopted my daughter for very selfish reasons but I don’t feel the need to justify them to you.  And in no way, shape, or form, am I anywhere close to being rich.  We do all right & we don’t lack for much but I’m not wearing shirts made of money or bathing in liquid gold.  I drive an 11yr old van with over 200,000 miles on it, my dishes are chipped Corelle & I haven’t bought a new quilt for my bed since I got married 11 yrs ago.  And we waited 2 years to do Tova’s readoption because we didn’t have the money.  We’re not rich.  Okay?

Ack, they didn’t pack my soapbox!!!

I am so sick of Angelina Jolie & Madonna being held up as the standard for int’l adoption.  In my humble opinion, neither have done their adoptions on the up & up.  Malawian law says the adoptive parent must live in Malawi for 18-24 months & Madonna skipped country well before that time frame was up.  And don’t get me started on Angelina & the whole birth order, waiting at least a year between adding a child to the family thing.

Slowly backing away from the soapbox.

K~

A New Performance Enhancer

Did you hear the other big news story from the weekend?  No, not the octuplet/single mother/what the he!! was the dr thinking story.  No, not the Super Bowl & it’s overpriced/oversexed ads.  You know, the Michael Phelps Pot story!

Was this a surprise to anyone?  After all, this is the same kid who served probation for a DUI charge when he was 19.  I keep hearing over & over how everyone is so disappointed in him & he’s now yet another tarnished role model.  That’s all perfectly true but I think if you’re relying on sports figures to be role models you deserve what you get – as a group they don’t have a great track record (get it?  Track?!  I am so much funnier in person, you only get a small sampling on the blog )  Plus, the chances of him losing any endorsement deals are nil.  Since when did AT&T, Speedo, & the like, have a conscience?  If they pull their deals, 10 bucks says they’ll cite the economy.

Allow me to extrapolate for a minute.  I promise there’s a point.

Some of the great baseball players, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, etc, were known to be heavy drinkers & look at all the batting records they set & held for many years.  They weren’t exactly the picture of health on their days off (or possibly on their days on) & yet it finally takes some juiced players to break their long standing records.

What kinds of athletes were these baseball greats?  It’s the same mold Phelps is from.  They were great athletes while using performance dehancers.   You know, because nothing helps your coordination, concentration, & motivation quite like alcohol &/or pot.  Imagine what they could have achieved while sober?!

Frankly, I’m amazed.  Phelps must be a superior athlete to have pulled off his 8 medals & 7 world records while possibly ‘helping’ his body in such a way*.

Give this guy another medal!

And a brain.

K~

*I realize I am making it sound as if Phelps was using during the Olympics.  I would hope he wasn’t but I would bet Monopoly money that during his years of training for the Olympics, he wasn’t exacly clean.

A Wii Little Headache

Too much Mario Kart!  I was trying to improve my standing in hopes of adding another course but all I got was a headache.  Lesson learned – Do not play Mario Kart for more than an hour.

On the upside, all my hard driving paid off.  We now have a new character, Rosalina, & she kicks butt!

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Jason is on his last 2 days at his current office.  I’m sad about it, Jason’s excited to get started on his new job.  I avoid thinking about next week at all costs.

I have started looking at houses again.  It’s a paradox – I don’t want to move but I am enjoying the online house hunt.  We haven’t physically looked at any Repo’s but I think we might.  There are a few we’ve marked that look interesting.  The hard part about buying a house is we have no idea how inflated Metropolis’ market is.  We know our current home’s market isn’t inflated so that helps but I certainly don’t want to overpay for a new house.  Realtor’s are all fine & good & I really like our Metropolis Realtor but they do tend to be an optimistic bunch.  I, on the other hand, am not an optimist, I’m a realist (Jason would say pessimist but he’d be wrong

It’s a hard time to sell a house.  Everyone wants to make money on their house & most people, me included, have a hard time seeing the real sale value of their home.  No one wants to overpay & as an aside, you won’t overpay for my house.  It’s worth it’s asking price & then some!

More Randomness.

Blagojevich just appointed Roland Burris to finish Barack Obama’s Senate seat.  I wonder firstly about Blago’s sanity.  I truly think the man is either living in an alternate universe, or horribly egotistical.  And then I have to question Burris’ sanity.  Who in their right mind would even accept so much as a Tic Tac from Blago, much less a Senate Seat he’s on tape trying to sell?  Burris looked stunned when the press started asking questions about his appointment under the corruption cloud.  Has he been living under a rock?  Did he not know that was coming?  And Blago looked like he was thoroughly enjoying the limelight.  There is something seriously wrong with that guy.

I’ve taken some preventative Advil & I’m off to kick Ethan’s butt in Mario Kart.

K~

IL Politics Saves Late Night Comedy

Last week The Daily Show’s John Hodgman discussed Jon Stewart’s Lame Duckedness as a late night comedian.

I was worried that shows like the Daily Show would lose their edge after Bush left office, but maybe all they have to do is change their focus.  Instead of concentrating so much on nat’l politics, they should set up an office in Springfield.

Maybe it’s the water…  Whatever it is, IL has a hard time electing politicians who are not crooks.

George Ryan IL’s former gov is currently serving a prison term for racketeering, fraud, etc & is asking for a presidential pardon.  The director of the Lincoln Library has a shoplifting problem & most recently, IL’s current gov, Rod Blagojevich has been arrested for selling Obama’s Senate Seat.

If your child says they want to grow up to be an IL politician, I suggest checking their pockets for stolen lunch money.

K~

Flood

I’m finally getting through my Reader & I’ve read a few blog postings about the flooding in Hanoi.  Click here & here to see pictures of the incredible amount of rain that’s inundated Hanoi.  Here’s an AP article about the flooding.

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So far, no nibbles on our house.  I have to contact our Realtor today & ask him to come back & take better pictures.  The pictures he has posted on the website are not great.  He has one picture of the front of the house, with the garage door open & 2 of the back of the house.  Nothing from the inside.  It makes me a little upset because the day he came to take pictures, our house was clean.  I mean, really clean.  As in, no clutter to be seen clean & it took me 2-3 days to get it that way.  Now I have to declutter again & make sure everything is ’staged’ so he can do this the right way.  Insert eyeroll here.

I’m off to park the kids in front of the tv so I can muck through the kitchen.

K~

The Irony of Sameness*

This has the potential to be a long rambling post.  Grab a drink, a snack, & you might need a Kleenex (that seems to depend on your proximity to me).  You’ve been warned.

I’m not a good secret keeper.  I should rephrase, I can keep your secrets just fine.  I just can’t keep my own.   I never understood people who could keep their pregnancies a secret for 3 months.  With each of my pregnancies, friends, family, & strangers were told within 3 minutes of the two blue lines appearing on the pregnancy test.  I have a hard time not sharing the big & little details of my life.  I’m an open book.

That makes this past month absolute torture.  I have been sitting on some potentially big news & couldn’t tell people.  I told a few people, merely in a research capacity but for the majority of our friends & family, our news will be a shock.

Are you ready?  Can you stand the suspense?

We’re moving to Iowa.

In December.

Of this year.

Jason has accepted a position with his company at a research station near Metropolis IA (not the town’s real name.  Just trying to preserve a little bit of anonymity).

Jason is excited for the challenges in his new position.  He’s been happy with his current job but when this position came to his attention we talked for many hours about whether this would be a good career & family move.  We both think it will be.

There are very few places in the company that we would move & the new station is one that we had always said would be a good place.  The biggest benefit to our kids, besides the closer proximity to Target, wait, that’s a benefit for me, will be the shortened distance to grandparents.  Instead of a 6-7 hour trip, it’ll be 3.  We’re all looking forward to having greater involvement of our extended family in our lives.

That being said, we’re heartbroken to leave our IL family.  For 10 years you have embraced us & loved us & been with us through pregnancies, adoption, & many other life changes.  We have been so blessed to be a part of such a wonderful community.  I don’t have words to express how hard it is to leave all of you.  We stopped looking for our IL exit after about 2 years here.  It was not a stretch to see our kids graduate from high school here.  I had our lives mapped out.  I’ve been happy with the schools, I imagined the kids being part of different teams & I was so looking forward to being a band parent in IL’s best marching band.

Now we’re entering the great unknown.  Will Gavin’s preschool be as good as his current school?  I highly doubt it, the bar is set pretty high.  Will Ethan find another wonderful neighborhood friend?  Will Tova flip out & need to be surgically attached to me?  Will we find another church family as welcoming & wonderful as our current family?  It’s very hard for me to leave the well-liked known for the scary unknown.

But I’m slowly gearing up for the challenge.  I’ve mostly stopped crying when I tell people we’re moving (this post doesn’t count).  I’m anxious to start the house hunt.  I’m working like a mad woman trying to get the house in order.  I hope to be ready to list it in about 2 weeks.  Carpet next week, paint, a massive house clean, & a yard clean up are in order before I’ll feel ready to stick the sign in the yard.  The company makes moving as stress free as possible.  Gotta love packers! (Not the football team.)  My biggest concern is finding the right schools.  Ethan will blossom where ever he ends up.  Gavin is a bit more persnickety.  His current class is phenomenal & will be very hard to replace, a fact he’s becoming more & more aware of.

The kids are really doing fine with the move.  Ethan’s excited.  He’s not big on emotion (unless Gavin does something to him) so I don’t see him being too sad about this until after the move.  He’s definitely in the ‘big adventure’ camp.  Not to rag on Ethan, but he is seriously oblivious to the obvious.  I think if we dropped him off at a new school tomorrow, he’d be “this is a new school?  If you say so.” & walk in as if he owned the place.  Sometimes being a floater is a good thing.

Gavin is all about his friends.  He’s already feeling sad about leaving his neighbor friend & his class.  He keeps talking about when we come back to visit & who is going to come & visit us.  He’s also obsessed with the idea of moving to a dairy farm.  Obsessed.

I have no idea either.

I’ve stressed we’re not moving to a farm & if he feels that strongly about it, & he does, he can buy a farm after he graduates from college.  Our current compromise is that we’ll talk about buying a dairy farm in 10 years.  Whatever works, right?

Tova is Tova & will pick up on my stress but being not quite 2, she’ll adjust.

Whew, this did get long!  Just a few more details to cover & then I’ll be done.

Jason’s looking at a start date of 12.1.08.  The kids & I will be here until Christmas Break.  Jason’s hoping to split time between his old office & his new office, so both places will hopefully have an easy transition.  We anticipate spending Christmas at our new place in IA.  I’ve had a few people ask if we’re taking the pets.  It seems like such an odd question, but yes, they are both going with us.  I’d rather set myself on fire, than give them away.  How was that for dramatic?

Did you make it all the way through?  Congratulations!  I’m sure this will be a constant source of blog fodder for the next few months, so I hope you enjoyed it!

K~

* I’ve had a post I’ve been working on titled Sameness sitting in my drafts for a few months now.  Jason & I were talking this summer about how we weren’t facing any new changes.  We’re done having kids, his job was secure & fulfilling, I was happy with my role, life was looking calm.  God does have a sense of humor.

Password, but not the Game

It’s time to do the password thing.  I held off as long as I could but it’s time.  If you’d like the password, please leave a comment & I’ll send it to you in an email.  I’ve enabled comment moderation again & I won’t publish your email addresses.  If I don’t know you, please either leave your blog address or a little bit about you so I can try to verify you are who you say you are.  If I can’t, no password, but most likely the posts won’t be about you & I don’t plan on doing a ton of password posts.

I loathe to do this.  There are many theories on blogs, some people will post anything & everything, others use pseudonyms & won’t publish pictures.  The purpose of my blog was first to inform family & friends about our adoption.  It quickly became a great way for our family & friends to keep up with the kids.  Lately it’s evolved into a sort of journal.  I’m much faster at typing than handwriting so it’s an easy, enjoyable hobby for me.

I like being open on my blog.  I enjoy the give & take of blogs.  I’ve “met” many wonderful people through blogs.  I’ve even been told people enjoy reading my blog.  I don’t mind blog stalkers, I stalk a few blogs myself.  What I don’t enjoy is blog busybodies.  Hence the need for the password.

K~

Vietnam Adoptions in the News (Updated)

I knew things were bad, but this is crazy. I clicked onto MSNBC’s homepage late last night to check the news & was greeted with this:

Chitose Suzuki / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vietnam running a baby racket?

I think most people in the Vietnam Adoption Community won’t be surprised by the story. However, it was a shock to see it on the MSNBC homepage as national news. It’s so sad. There are so many children & families caught in the middle of what seems like a pissing contest between the Vietnamese gov’t & the US gov’t.

There are real concerns with Vietnam adoptions. The governing body, the DIA (Dept of Int’l Adoptions) has no real authority over the provinces. We learned that the hard way last year while waiting for our oft rescheduled G&R ceremony. There is also child trafficking. This is not unique to Vietnam, it happens all over Asia, but with Vietnam’s new & extremely popular Int’l Adoption program, child trafficking has become a real concern for both governments.

The US gov’t hasn’t handled itself with cultural sensitivity or diplomacy when trying to combat the serious issues facing Vietnam Adoptions. Instead of working with the DIA, they have implemented processes that have offended the DIA & done little to foster cooperation between the Dept. of State & the DIA.

One such example is the new DNA requirement. The DoS is now requiring DNA tests on all relinquishment cases, in hopes (I think) of catching baby finders passing off children as their own. I think it’s a great idea to have DNA samples done on the orphans. Lots of international programs have this element. In Vietnam it’s a good idea in theory. The problem is implementation. The DoS is not known for their cultural sensitivity & woe be to the woman who snuck away to have her child & leave him at an orphanage when the DoS comes knocking for their sample. This new process requires cooperation between city & provincial officials, orphanages & agencies & also requires the presence of the DoS. The US apparently did not seek cooperation between the necessary parties, just said, this is what we’re doing, deal with it.

Can you imagine that happening here? Can you imagine the outcry if some foreign official showed up at your door demanding a DNA sample? Do you think our gov’t would stand for that? And why would the DIA & orphanages want to continue to work with the US? It’s so much easier for them to work with France & Spain so now referrals for US agencies have all but dried up.

The US has implemented a good idea to combat the trafficking. The Orphan’s First program has parents apply for their child’s I600 Visa (the visa that allows them into the US), before the parent travels to Vietnam to adopt their child. The idea was for USCIS (Immigration) to take 60 days to investigate adoptions before approving the I600 Visa & allowing families to travel for their G&R. (When we traveled we applied for the I600 after our G&R & then waited for the one person who processes adoptions for all of the US families to go over our papers & determine whether or not further investigation was needed. It took roughly 10 days). This process change is a good one. It allows for more in-depth investigations & will hopefully mean no more NOID’s (denial of the child’s entrance Visa) If only the DoS had added the necessary staff to cover the new demands placed on the already over taxed system, maybe 60 days would be sufficient.

I do not want to minimize child trafficking. It is a serious problem & a crime that has many victims. As an adoptive parent, it is my worst fear that my child was not left by her birth family, but bought for a price by a baby finder or taken as payment for a debt. I am glad the US has taken steps to prevent child trafficking. I just wish their implementation would have been better.

Adoption is not easy & it shouldn’t be. But the emotional toll is bad enough when you don’t have to worry about the program closing; this has been torture for the families that still wait. Our agency has 5 families that are currently waiting for their investigations. They have spent the last 5 months watching the days slip by, missing the babies that they only know from pictures. Each day their children languish in an orphanage is one day too many.

I wish I knew how to help. I wish there was a way the two gov’t’s could come together & truly put the orphans first. I wish child trafficking didn’t happen. I wish families could raise their own children in their own countries. I wish I didn’t have to face the tough questions that will come from my daughter when she is older.

There are legitimate orphans in Vietnam. I’m sure of that. I’m also sure they are the ones who suffer the most in this diplomacy game.

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Update

The US Embassy in Hanoi has released two statements today. One is Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam which states what has gone wrong in Vietnam adoptions & why the statement Warning Concerning Adoptions in Vietnam has been made. The essence of the Warning is if you don’t have a referral by Sept. 1, 2008, you won’t be able to proceed with an adoption from Vietnam. My heart breaks for all the families caught in this mess.

K~