Where's my brain?

I missed the third anniversary of Gabriel's homecoming to the United States. Adoption Day. Family Day. Whatever you want to call it. The day we three of us were all finally together in the same place at the same time with no worries about missing another moment with him. He and I flew back from Guatemala on August 26, 2005. So I'm officially two days late. Luckily, he's oblivious. I still feel bad...

Daycare decisions

A little under two weeks ago, we made the difficult decision to switch Gabriel to a new childcare center. While we love a lot of things about his current daycare, we've been waiting on this new childcare center's list for about 18 months and it's got a really good preschool program that I'm confident will help prepare Gabriel for kindergarten. His last day at his old daycare is tomorrow. We've been talking up the new school big time... telling him it's for big boys who pee pee and poo poo in the potty. Yeah, you guessed it. They require the kids to be potty trained. When we toured the facility after we found out we'd gotten off the waiting list, they asked about his potty training status. I said he was 90 percent potty trained (urgh... ish). They smiled and cheerfully said that he'd better be 100 percent potty trained when he enrolled. Gulp. Unless he has a breakthrough over the weekend, there's just not a chance. He's got his pee pees down pat but #2 is another story. His strategy is just to hold it as long as humanly possible in the hopes of finding some privacy at home to do his business. And by business, I mean in his underwear or pull-ups, not the potty:-( I'm hoping he'll take the whole big boy school thing really seriously and wait to poo at home, but I don't have a whole lot of faith. I think there's at least a chance we'll be accused of fibbing on the potty training front.

Another half behind us

It's hard to believe that it's been almost nine months since we ran our first half marathon. This morning, we ran our second - and wow - what a difference nine months of consistent running makes. Last November, we ran the half marathon in Roanoke in 2:16:33. Today, Kevin finished in 1:55:03 and I finished a few minutes behind him at 1:57:19. I was generous and let him run ahead of me around mile 10 so he could feel the wind in his hair:-) Matthew's wife Amanda was completely generous and hung out with Gabriel at the start/finish line, so we paid her back with some much needed brunch afterward. Amanda took some photos, so if I grab those from her, I'll post a shot of the three of us with our blingin' medals.

Can't believe we're really doing this marathon thing. I think we'll honestly follow through this time... we've paid our registration fee and the training's been going really well, so cross our fingers, we'll do 26.2 this November. If I could break four hours, that'd be incredible, but I don't think it's gonna happen. I'm bound to get slower as the distances get longer. One thing's for sure... Kevin's not allowed to ditch me on the big run!

Those people

Kevin and I have left the ranks of "those people" and joined the mainstream. By "those people," I am referring to the people who brag about how they either have no television or go without cable (we were of the 'go without cable' variety).


A few years ago when we were adopting Gabriel, we cut cable to save for his adoption. Then we decided that not having cable made us smarter. We read more. Talked to each other more. You get the point. Then we managed to find a replacement for cable. It's called the Internet. Now, once Gabriel is asleep, we sit on our opposing living room couches with our dueling laptops and have completely reverted back to zoning out and rotting our brains at night.

So, having come full circle, we decided that reintroducing cable (or in this case, Verizon's Fios) into our lives might actually bring us closer together. We could, say, watch the same show and then, I dunno, make fun of commercials together or laugh at the funny parts together or mutually bitch about how, even with 200 channels, there's never anything good on television.

Crappy news

Kevin had this really close friend in college, Kris. Kris was in our wedding, and if you had a drink in your hand and an hour to shoot the breeze, I'd tell you about how he inadvertently introduced me to one of the nicest, most generous human beings on the planet - and everything that followed. Kevin and Kris were kindred spirits, and Kevin was bummed when they lost touch several years ago. Today, we learned that Kris' family was in a terrible car accident while vacationing abroad and that his mother and grandmother died. We're not sure about the condition of his father, but we've heard that his young sister is okay. Kevin left him a voicemail this afternoon, but, of course, there are no words for, "We haven't talked in three years, but we once lived inside each other's heads, and I'm sorry." The older I get, the more overwhelming the randomness of the universe becomes. I can't find it in me to pray... maybe just to hope. That he and his sisters, at some point, find peace. They've got a really long road ahead.

I-171H Oopsy

About two months ago, I received a letter from USCIS (that's Citizenship and Immigration Services). Across the top, it said something like "Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition," and then it went on to say that my application was being forwarded to the National Visa Center. I thought, cool, once my paperwork gets to the National Visa Center, I guess they'll send me the I-171H (a piece of paperwork that's required in order to accept a referral and continue processing our adoption in Ethiopia). I filed the notice away and carried on with our summer.

This weekend, it occurred to me that we've really been waiting quite a while for that pesky I-171H. I started counting backwards... yup, time to pull out the paperwork and find a phone number, e-mail address, something. I'm scanning the notice and all of a sudden my eye picks up on a teeny, weeny little code down at the bottom of the page. What's that? I-171H. Oh. Yeah. I've been sitting on the form since June. For some reason, I was expecting it to shout "This is the piece of paper you've been waiting for!" across the header. Luckily, it doesn't really impact our process since we're still WAY down the list with no prospect of a referral any time soon. But I still felt pretty silly. What can I say? Everyone knows second children have it rough... their parents take fewer photos of them, they have to wear hand-me-downs, all their teachers greet them with, "Oh, you're so-and-so's little sister" and... their parents take a 'been there, done that' approach to their adoption paperwork:-)

Tirunesh Dibaba

Wow, I'm really on a blogging kick this morning. While I was sharing Ethiopian news, thought I'd share this New York Times article about Tirunesh Dibaba, the Ethiopian gold medal winner of the women's 10,000 meter race. If you read the article in its entirety, there's a nice description of life in southern Ethiopia.