grrlTravels

Ack, the messenger approaches

I called yesterday just to check on the status of our dossier. I am still missing the little bits of paper, and find myself fretting over them and wanting to call to check in. I know they are fine, and in good hands, but you see I feel naked and aimless without them.

The patient agency coordinator assures me all is well. "Your last seal arrived today." "I didn't know we were accruing seals. Would that be a Baltic seal or a Weddell seal? Can he balance a ball on his nose? And why is it a 'he'? Ha ha ha..." I MISS MY PAPERS, OK? I NEED TO KNOW THAT THEY ARE ALL PRESENT AND ACCOUNTED FOR. Also that you like them too. She tells me that we are "on target for December". And then pauses to let me know that she wants to get off the phone, maybe to help someone that actually has a real question.

In Other News...
One of my adoption compatriots informs me that The Wait is down to 5 months. (If you aren't familiar with the wait, you obviously aren't adopting from China. The Wait is all you really care about if you are.) I hadn't heard. Please excuse me while I go and have just a small panic attack, maybe one to go?

I'm going to hug E. a little tighter when he gets up from his nap. And then go and buy some small Christmas gifts for the daughter that will be here before we know it!

It's the happiest time of the year

It's that time of year again. Yes, it's time to decorate the house. Time to buy gifts and wrap them as well. Also time to send out cards, bake cookies, throw parties, feel festive, watch the Grinch on tv, and hope for snow. But that's not the time to which I refer.

No, it's time for the commercials to start. The commercials which really make me grit my teeth, mutter the occasional oath, and, rarely, launch something at the tv. The specific commercials to which I draw your attention are the ones where some seemingly dopey (and a few undeservingly grouchy) actors get a car for Christmas. Oh yes, a new car with a BIG RED BOW on it. And not just any car, not just any new car, but a Lexus for goodness sake. A Brand New Lexus. For Christmas.

Back in the old days when I used to read Harlequin romances, there was what I considered to be a lame argument against reading them. (Yes, I just admitted that I used to read the literary equivalent of a cereal box. Or what's on the plastic around the toilet paper rolls, if you're really desperate.) The argument was that you shouldn't read romance novels because they would set your expectations up too high. You would expect that at some point in your life you were going to have a mysterious, exciting romance, and reality, when it came, would cause you to drain the bitter cup. (Yes, Harlequins. The ones that could be written by computer for all of the interesting and original plot devices they contain. Now stick with me here.) No dashing stranger. No man who is desperate for the sight of you and can't live with out you. No tall, dark, handsome, and in love with your silly little self. In short, no white knight to come riding up at the 11th hour to sweep you off your feet, put you on the front of his horse, and take you off to live in the castle. (It was a long time ago. 25 years? I think I was thirteen at the time. Still embarrassing, but there it is.)

Well, if you want to talk about setting the bar a little too high, I think that the Lexus commercials set the bar into the troposphere. Or the stratosphere. Or even the mesosphere--you can just take your pick. Once upon a time I wondered if my parents would come up with a car for my graduation from high school. And then college. They didn't. But in all fairness, they really couldn't afford an exorbitant gift like that. How many people can? For that matter, how many of us are out there in the trenches day after day, trying to teach our children to be thankful for what they have, and to appreciate the good things, the blessings they have, and to not be ungrateful, apathetic, and indifferent by the time they are 6? There is the teeter-totter of giving your kids everything you want them to have and not giving them too much. And it's a teetery totter for us, I can tell you.

So I'll patiently drive in the incredible traffic and circle for as long as it takes to find a parking space. I'll calmly recycle the 23 daily credit card applications and 100 pounds of mail order catalogs that arrive in my mailbox. I'll even swallow the 489,000 diamond/jewelry commercials those of us who admit to watching tv are subjected to each day during the happiest time of the year. But I will not take the Lexus commercials sitting down. You can find me standing, probably in line to buy another gift for E. But it will be something small--maybe a teeter-totter.

And now for a real holiday

There are Hallmark Holidays and then there are the real holidays. Valentine's Day? Hallmark. Secretaries Day? Hallmark. Father's Day, Mother's Day, Children's Day, Grandparents Day? Hallmark. If you need someone to remind you to tell the people that you love that you love them, and to do something nice for them, well then the Hallmark Holidays are for you. I'm pretty sure that my most meaningful mothering moments won't be on Mother's Day. And I never feel romantic on Valentine's Day--too much pressure.

But Thanksgiving is a real holiday for me. Mostly because it is easy to get caught up and not be thankful for what you do have. I try to live life with a thankful outlook and Thanksgiving is a chance to celebrate that. I love turkey. And most years we are traveling on Thanksgiving, traveling being my most favorite thing to do ever.

Some years it's easier to be thankful than others. I was not particularly thankful two years ago, E. having been born on Nov 17. I was too tired and overwhelmed to be thankful at that point. Mostly I was worried about survival and maintaining my sanity those first days. Later on I was more relaxed and rested and I was thankful for him. But not that first year. The year we got married and we had our first big fight about where to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas I was thankful for K. I had been through a lot and felt safer and more secure than I had in a long while. This year in some ways it is hard to be thankful, the majority of the year having been colored by my mother's illness and death.

However I strongly believe in a life lived with a spirit of gratitude. It makes things better. It makes me better, more patience, kinder, less stressed. It helps me to appreciate the hard work that the grocery store checker or the bank teller or the toll taker is doing, slow or not, good attitude or bad. It helps me appreciate all that I have in my life, a wealth of riches that most people in this world could never hope to achieve. I was so disturbed by the other passengers on our cruise ship last spring. Belize? "I hated it--there's nothing there." Progresso, Mexico? "It's a dump, don't even bother getting off the ship." Cozumel? "Touristy and crowded, not worth your time." What were they missing? The humanity. The different way of life. The beauty in the ordinary, the mundane, the differences. Having more doesn't make us BETTER, people. But it should make us thankful.

This year I am thankful. It was a long difficult year in some ways, but here I am, still thankful. Here's a list (I'd much rather write a list of things I'm thankful for than a list of resolutions!):

10. EZPass. No more fumbling for exact change or worrying if you have enough for the toll or wondering where exactly you put the toll ticket? Sign me up!
9. TiVo. Even though our TiVO is operating under the mistaken assumption that we are bilingual history buffs who love to watch reruns of game shows, it's still cool to watch a show while skipping happily over the commercials, pause your tv to answer the call (nature/hunger/telemarketers), or forestall that fight over what was just said by rewinding immediately.
8. Carp. The 4 or so big carp, including Walter, that live in the small lake behind my house afford me such pleasure.
7. Tacky Christmas decorations. The thing that Martha Stewart doesn't understand, and I can say this being a longtime devotee of her periodicals, is that tacky is sometimes ok, especially at Christmas.
6. Cinnabons. Really, isn't the world a better place now that we have Cinnabons?
5. The US Postal Service. From catalogs to birthday cards to surprise gifts to adoption paperwork--they do it all.
4. Recycling. It eases the guilt caused by the excessive packaging of seemingly every single purchase these days, the overabundance of unwanted junk mail, life's little conveniences (individually packaged portions), and rolls and rolls and rolls of toilet paper.
3. Our soon-to-be daughter who is living in China right now.
2. K. and E., my two guys who bring all of the goodness into my life and bless me with meaningful relationships. K. always reminds me, "What is life about, if not relationships?" And he's right.
1. God, who loves us enough to want a relationship with us, and sacrificed his son so that we can have the hope of eternal life.

I'll climb down off the old soapbox now and wish you a happy Thanksgiving Day and hope you can find your own 10 reasons to be thankful.

Bogeymen under the bed

What is it about people who design hotel rooms? First of all they choose the strangest combinations of loud wallpaper, stain- and glance-repelling carpeting, and synthetic scratchy comforters. Hang a few bad paintings on the wall, throw in a chair or two and voila. Mission accomplished.

My point being--what's the deal with the mirrors? I don't have a million mirrors in my house, and I don't know many people who do. A mirror in a bathroom, one in the bedroom, maybe one to open up a dim hallway or something in the living room over the fireplace. In the first hotel we stayed in in Orlando there were 3 gigantic mirrors all competing with each other. Two were opposite each other and over the jacuzzi tub. I am not at a point in my life (if I ever was) where I need to see myself coming AND going while climbing into and out of the tub. These were BIG mirrors, folks. Like the kind you would expect to see in an airport restroom or a amusement park fun house. Also, another L-A-R-G-E mirror facing the hallway in the bathroom.

So I looked at the mirrors and wondered about sadistic tendencies of hotel designers. I avoided the big tub. And I turned out the lights and went to bed. And in the middle of the night I got up to answer the call of nature. As I was walking to the bathroom I was smacked in the face with a childhood fear that apparently I've never overcome.

I never liked looking into mirrors in the dark. All you'd see was vague moving shapes and as a child they reminded me of ghosts. Many times I caught a glimpse of myself out of the corner of my eye in a mirror in a darkened room and scared myself silly. I developed a way to walk to and from the bathroom so as not to look at any of the mirrors on the way by looking down at the floor at all of the critical points. It took some practice, but I had a lot of motivation to master the course. No more "mirror ghosts".

And there I was in a hotel in Orlando, navigating to the bathroom keeping my eyes on the floor, reducing my peripheral vision, and looking neither to the left or the right. And suddenly I remembered my childhood fears and realized that all these years later I was in bogeyman mode. I think it's so ingrained these days that I just do it without even thinking. But the superabundance of mirrored surfaces really hit the point home. It was like walking on a tightrope blindfolded in a hurricane. Ok, not really, but there were a LOT of mirrors. Big ones, did I mention that?

It's bad when you prefer looking at hotel carpeting to seeing yourself in the mirror. I'm still trying to decide which is scarier.

Trip taking necessities

When E. was getting old enough we started putting some stuffed animals in his crib with the idea that he would bond with one and it would become his transitional object. I wanted him to have one. He has two identical blankies which he likes and sleeps with, but no real attachment as far as I can tell.

But he took to one specific stuffed animal, a little dog-bunny. We called him "Guy" because we were too tired to think of anything better. And Guy really caught on. He plays with the other animals in his bed sometimes, but he really loves Guy. The only time he sucks his thumb is when he is holding Guy. To keep him quiet in the plane or the car we just hand him Guy and he plugs himself up and sits quietly for hours.

It was recommended that we buy several Guys and so after the dog-bunny was chosen we went on an extended search, Internet and otherwise, to find some more guys. Eventually we did. We had two in rotation and one saved for later. (For some reason I think my son will want a perfectly preserved Guy for his old age. Don't ask my why--I am sure he will look at me with one of those looks, and I'll get to keep the non-original Guy.) We did lose one Guy and I believe in my heart of hearts that he is living at the Philly airport and waiting for us to return there to retrieve him. So we are down to one Guy and the spare.

Guys Loved and Unloved

When I say that he loves Little Guy, as he is now known, I mean he LOVES LITTLE GUY A LOT. The preservation Guy is now in rotation just in case we lose the real deal.

And so when packing, what it the single most important item to not forget? You got it. You leave Little Guy at home and you are begging the neighbors to run to FedEx for you, and meanwhile no one is sleeping.