298 days later, exciting news at last!

At long, long last, our wait for our son is almost over! We have finally received word of our final ruling in the Taiwanese court, and we get to go get our new son! Hurray!

His original referral pic from last October:

At 8:30 P.M. on Sunday, we got the call from our agency. I almost didn't answer the phone as I was worn out from all the yard work and didn't feel chatty. The news gave me a lot more energy!

It had been 298 days from our first phone call and email with a possible referral to this phone call. We knew that there would be a wait, but as it passed six months, the usual far end of the waiting period, it became harder and harder to be patient. J's adoption was five and a half months from referral to meeting. Our wait for D's adoption will have been more than ten months. We watched a lot of families with far later referrals travel and got quite discouraged. Intellectually we knew he was coming, but emotionally we grew a little doubtful. I haven't written about D's adoption before this, because of privacy issues and also because it stretched on so long that we were feeling rather as if it would never happen. But now it is really almost here!

D is two and a half now, and hs been in foster care for eleven months. We've sent pictures of our family and home to him, but this is going to be a big adjustment for such a little guy.

J is beside himself at the news. He was ready to get in the car and head to the airport when we told him the next morning. He has been asking for months, "Why we no go get my D?" He has also made a long mental lists of things that he will teach D when he arrives. Topping the list are "not to drink poison" and "to not holler down the stairs at bedtime." He's also been practicing his seat belt directions so D won't "fall out of the car and be smashed." (J has a very vivid imagination and it tends towards the gruesome. His idea of joy would be to ride in an ambulance after being saved from a "mergency" by a fire truck/police car combo.)

Tien, our agency rep, asked if we could be in Taiwan by Wednesday (which means leaving Tuesday due to the International Date Line) but even with our eagerness, that was a little overwhelming (Roni was aghast at the idea of wrapping up his only-six-week-old job in one day)so we're shooting for this coming Saturday. The combination of finding flights that work and getting an AIT appointment have made things a bit complicated, plus the agency recommended travel agent is in Taiwan on vacation, 15 time zones away, so our actual departure/return dates dart around the calendar and there has been a whirl of phone calls, emails, and web site searches. At the moment, we're traveling either Saturday, August 22 or Wednesday, September 2.

Our timeline so far:

10/22/08 - first call about tentative referral

11/20/08 - dossier sent to TWCA in Taiwan

02/27/09 - court hearing

07/06/09 - first ruling call

08/16/09 - final ruling call

D's update picture from June - he's really starting to leave his toddler stage behind:

A bit of gardening

One of my goals for this summer (from an unrealistically lengthy and elaborate to-do list) was to replace the weedy, gravely section of our backyard with a new patio. There used to be an old cabin at the creek's edge, which was torn down after my parents built our house. The circular driveway became a large section of the back lawn, but it was never very successful as the soil was too shallow. Add to that a couple of very dry summers where we didn't water enough, and eventually only the dandelions were thriving (and moss - how do we have moss in dead dry lawn?)

I've built a brick patio before, so I knew the basics. What I didn't figure in was the extreme hardness of a driveway packed down by 40+ years of cars, and my extreme inability to put down the knitting needles/spinning fiber/loom/book/TV remote and actually work on it.

Roni got it started (in March, I think) by digging out a section near the steps. Which then languished until it grew very, very weedy. After a pointed conversation in July, he rented some machinery thingie (I didn't see it, but apparently you stand on it and it somehow makes weedy dirt into ragged weedy dirt piles) and made the spot bigger. Which is when it became apparent that neither one of us is all that energetic, and it was going to cost a lot to keep renting the machinery thingie. (Though we now have a ball hitch for the SUV.)

So, we turned to our usual home renovation method of throwing money at people more skilled and persevering than ourselves. Enter the landscapers. Monday the bulldozer came, Tuesday the frames were built to my desired shape, Wednesday the cement was poured, boards off Thursday, dinner on our new patio on Friday. Yea!

We switched from brick to cement for budgetary reasons. I had a couple of small pads poured at two locations by the creek as well where we've struggled to keep the growth down in the sitting areas. (Should have had them done bigger, but it gives me a future project.)

However, after all that, I was shamed by my lack of energetic participation - it was my to-do list after all - so we are doing the finishing garden work. We had 16 yards of topsoil delivered on Saturday and after a trip to the nursery and the Amish furniture lot, we have been shoveling, assembling, and sweating since.

Roni has made multiple trips to the hardware store to get cement wall blocks and boards. We've cut back creek brush, shaped raised beds and filled in around the patio and disassembled parts of the deck railing for posts. Sunday, Mom and Mr. Al came to help - they assembled the new gliding bench for the creek side pocket patio, moved some dirt, and tended newly planted/transplanted green stuff. J was amazingly energized by all the digging potential and became crew boss, bucket carrier, and king of the hill. The dirt may never come out of all his crevices.

We'd be done, except that exciting news turned us to packing, leaving partially filled raised beds to await our return.

Overcome by fiber fumes

Sock Summit 09 started with a bang - the noise Paige's car makes when it is rearended and then pushed into a semi. So, 20 minutes before Roni was going to drive me to the train station on Saturday, we upended our plans, cancelled the train ticket, packed a bag for Roni & J, and drove the SUV to Portland instead so we could bring Paige and her kids back at the end of the weekend.

J didn't handle the drive down very well, "It's a long time. Why it a long time? Why we go such a long time?" Three hours of that. Oy. Four was almost the last birthday for him.

But we made it, picked up Paige from her sister's, were dropped off at the Convention Center, and entered into yarn bliss. Oh, the color! Everywhere, things to pet and covet. The marketplace was beyond fabulous.

I hadn't managed to get into any classes - 30,000 attempts to get into 5,000 spots crashed the server the day sign-ups started, but we were happy just to wander, fondle, and see the sock museum, knit some stitches on the world's largest sock, and talk to vendors. I really want another shot at the classes someday, however. All the wonderful knitting I saw "on the hoof" really made me want to learn.

The funniest part was at the end of the day when Paige and I laid out all our new treasures and were reminded yet again that we have definite color preferences. All my yarn was pretty much the same colors (though in amazingly beautiful variations) and her skeins also had a pretty clear similarity to each other. Green-red-purple dark tones for me. Blue-green-purple for her.

My one color anomoly was a 2 1/2 pound bag of alpaca/wool fiber that started as one brain of 10 oz. Then I added a second, cause they were only $10. Then Paige pointed out that that was silly-cheap, and why not get them all? So, I did. Luckily, the woman had only four left or we would have had to leave one of Paige's kids out of the car to fit in my fiber.

My treasure - only add four more skeins from the next day.

My budget melted down a bit, but every bit of it will get used! There are some fabulous woven scarfs, and lace knit wraps coming up in the future.




Paige's stash additions - also partial as she added more the next Marketplace session as well.



We sat in on the Luminary Panel on Sunday - amazing group of women, including the inventor of "ssk, " Barbara Walker. Imagine originating a stitch combo used thousands and thousands of times a day by knitters everywhere. Also, Judith MacKenzie McCuin who someday I will get to take a spinning class from, and Pricilla Gibson-Robers, who wrote Kniting in the Old Way which is helping me become brave enough to knit a sweater without a pattern telling me every single stitch to increase or decrease. Full list of participants here. Then we sang happy birthday to Elizabeth Zimmerman (it would have been her 99th), her daughter Meg Swanson (someday I will have the skill to make one of her sweaters!) and headed home.

When I talked to my uncle and told him that I'd spent the weekend at a sock yarn event, he said, "Was it some kind of assigned therapy?"

No one knows if there will be another Sock Summit - if there is Paige and I will be there.

The ride back was happier for J with Paige's kids to entertain him. It was very crowded with six of us and all the stuff they'd needed for a week's vacation (and the fiber) but we made it in, all the doors shut, and we got home. J didn't fall asleep until we hit our exit, at 10:30 p.m. Just like a grown-up! he said today.

Birthday Boy

J turned 4! Amazing to us that he's gone so quickly from a toddler to a rough and tumble little boy. He's very proud to be 4, but is also spending a lot of time planning to be 5. He really wants to get to ride a school bus.

After days and weeks and months of relentless sun, it turned grey and chilly for his lake park birthday dinner. Mom, Roni, Mr. Al, Aunt Virginia and I were the invitees. We huddled together for warmth and ate a little extra cake to add warming fat layers. J ran around like a mad man, bouncing like a pin ball off of objects in his way. A little excited, maybe?
He was thrilled with every present: a police car (I'm going to regret those siren buttons), a tow truck (the police car has been breaking down a lot already), a Handy Manny from Aunt Virginia who didn't realize that she was picking such a favored cartoon character, a sock monkey (they vaguely scare me, but J slept with it that night) and a sand/water toy (which was the only one we didn't immediately take away so the sand wouldn't ruin it).

He finally got to snatch the Thomas train off his cake - the delay of which had led to a meltdown at the Safeway store. He was also thrilled that there is such a thing as S'mores icecream, pointing out each marshmallow to us all.

Can I just say again, ohmygosh, my kid is 4!

Summer bloom

This is my favorite time of year in the garden. The zucchini are starting to reach amazing sizes, and the rudbeckia is finally blooming. The bees are going mad for the flowering lemon balm, oregano and thyme, and the hammock is ever ready. I parked it right next to the blueberries so I can pick and eat them without standing up.

We spent a couple hours at the river park today and had a great time, other than being terrorized by a Canadian goose that did not want to wait for us to throw the bread crumbs - we ended up chucking all the crackers at once and making a break for it while it was distracted. I don't go to this particular park very often - it is the nicer one, but farther away. It is shadier, so worth the drive today.

J had a new (very old) bulldozer to use in the wood chips. J's toy was very popular with the other little children, some of whom didn't quite understand that it wasn't theirs. J's pretty good about sharing, but a little tentative about getting things back. His method seems to be to stand very close to the child playing with his toy and hope they'll get the hint. They don't.