Stylish Blogger Award

I got a blog award! Thanks to Browniris at The (In)fertility Diaries for tagging me.

Here's how you play...

1) Thank and link back to the person who awarded you.
2) Share 7 things about yourself.
3) Award 15 other bloggers.
4) Contact the bloggers you've awarded and tell them about the award.

7 Things about me...


1) I am a horrible cleaner. I'm just not good at housework. I can procrastinate away any sort of laundry, dusting, scrubbing, straightening, whatever it is. I would rather step over piles of stuff than put it away.

2) I am currently addicted to the Travel Channel's show Ghost Adventures. Mister's sister got me into it. There was a marathon on TV on New Year's Eve, and we watched practically the entire day. Even weirder is that Mister is also addicted to it. Mister hates TV and never watches anything.

3) It's supposed to snow and ice again this week. I have always hated snow, but this winter has brought a new fire to that passion. I went to the grocery store to stock up today, and I also stopped at the liquor store to stock up on wine. I'm beginning to think that I may need several bottles of wine to get me through more snow. I don't have a drinking problem or anything, don't worry about me. Yet. If it keeps snowing though, all bets are off.

4) I never tried to garden before last year. I had flowers and tomatoes. I liked doing both. I'm going to expand my garden this year to include more vegetables. If I keep thinking about being outside in my garden, it will make me happy. Though it is kind of a ridiculous thought to imagine a garden when there are 4 feet of snow on the ground.

5) I hate exercising. I have never found any type of exercise that I've liked. I played soccer in school, and I hated it. I was on the track team, and I hated it. I'm just not Sporty Spice.  I don't mind walking, but I've never really been able to motivate myself into any consistent exercise program.

6) Speaking of procrastinating about cleaning, I'm a procrastinator for everything. I'm blogging and watching TV instead of cooking dinner. I'm making meatball subs for dinner tonight, but I haven't started. They're not going to be slow cooker meatballs, just pan fry and dunk in the sauce.

7) I'm fairly certain that I eat chocolate every day. A day that I don't eat chocolate is a sad day indeed. I don't like white chocolate at all though. Of course, it's not chocolate, so that's probably why I don't like it!


So that's 7 things about me.

I know that I was late doing this post, and everyone else has already done it. I'm supposed to tag 15 people to play along, but I'm kind of a badass rebel, so I'm changing the rules.

If you are reading this, and you have not already posted the Stylish Blogger post, I tag you! Anyone who would like to play along, I have nominated you for the Stylish Blogger Award.

Now I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine and start cooking my meatballs.

I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!

Seriously. Enough is enough. About 9 weeks until spring and my goodness that seems far away. We got another foot of snow last night, and we're running out of places to pile it all.

The dog goes outside and sinks up to her head because the snow is so deep.

Melt, damn it!

When to tell people

Way back when we first started our adoption paperwork, we didn't tell anyone. It was a few months later when we asked our 2 closest friends to write reference letters. They were both thrilled and excited for us. It was easy and exciting to tell them our news, and they both said they were honored to write letters on our behalf.

Connecticut has a weird requirement that 1 reference letter come from a family member. We decided we'd ask my brother and SIL to write a letter for us. For some reason, it was a little more nerve-wracking than to tell our friends.

As an aside, I'm going to tell a funny story about my brother and SIL that made it much easier to tell them about our adoption plans. I'll get back to my original point shortly.  One day last spring, my brother sent me an e-mail in the middle of a weekday. He said, "Is _____ still your phone number? I called and called and no one answered." I wrote back to him right away and said that it was, but I hadn't answered because my phone was upstairs and I was downstairs. He wrote back and said he'd call again in 5 minutes, but he really needed to talk to me. Of course, I spent the next few minutes with my heart pounding, absolutely convinced something was wrong. We don't call each other that much, let alone at 1 PM on a Tuesday. So swirling in my mind was death, divorce, destruction, something awful. 


So the phone rings a few minutes later, and my brother said, "Don't worry. Nothing's wrong." and he proceeded to tell me that the reason for his call is that he and my SIL have just begun the process to adopt! And that their agency requires family information, so he wanted us to help him fill in the paperwork that would pertain to us. 


Always composed, (NOT!) I crack up laughing and say, "Wait, you're adopting?" 
"Yes," my brother said.
"Well no $@$!" I respond, "Us too! And we need your help to fill out our paperwork too!" 


Obviously, we both agreed to fill out paperwork for each other. We laughed, and still laugh that we told each other about our respective adoptions on the same day. I love that that's part of our children's adoption stories. I love that our children will have cousins who were adopted. Even though they'll have very different adoption stories, they'll have adoptions in common when they won't share common DNA and genes.

I'm getting off track though. Back to my original story. So my brother and SIL's agency made them fill out paperwork about each member of their families. They told everyone in their families very early in their process. We didn't. For a long time, we didn't know from where we'd be adopting, and it changed several times before we decided to do a domestic adoption. We didn't want to tell people one thing and then change it shortly thereafter. We knew it would take a long time, we didn't want to answer a lot of questions when the answer was just going to be, "I have no idea. No, really, we don't know." So we didn't tell anyone except our three references.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving, and we told my brothers and my dad. At Christmas we were going to tell Mister's family, but somehow the conversation never happened.

So one side of the family doesn't know, Facebook definitely doesn't know, and any friends outside of those 2 sets of friends who wrote our letters don't know. Or so I thought....

Our old friend who recently reappeared in our lives knows. I told him way back in 2007 that we would adopt someday, and I think he may have understood that to mean that we had started the process back then. Shortly after he and I e-mailed about adoption in 2007, he e-mailed Mister to congratulate him on adopting. Mister was like, "Huh? What?!" So I assume that he probably asked Mister as they've talked more recently, knowing that it was something that we were talking about 3 years ago. He asked Mister last weekend on the phone how it is going and what's next in the process. So he's supportive, he cares, he's happy for us. Which is really how everyone has been that we've told.

No one's said anything rude or annoying or asked intrusive questions. Which is not too surprising, since only about 10 people know, and 5 of the 10 are family! But still. It's all those other people who don't know. I don't really know how to handle them.

I asked some people on an adoption forum once, and so many people said they told early, wished they hadn't told, and had to deal with months or years of annoying questions. Some other people said that they didn't tell at all, not even family, until they were traveling to their child. Some people said they waited until they were home with the baby. No one was mad that they hadn't been told because how could you be mad when you're playing with a baby.

But I can't help feeling like I'm keeping a big secret. It feels weird to tell people now, because really, there hasn't been any news to tell. Yet, I feel like if I tell people when we're matched, or when we're home with a baby, that might be too shocking. I don't know.

I guess if I were pregnant, there'd be all kinds of people  - people we'd tell when we were TTC, people we'd tell early in the pregnancy, people we would tell later, and then people who would just see me and figure it out. Then there would be people we hadn't seen in a long time and they'd see us in a year with a baby.  I get that. The difference is the timeline. If I were pregnant now, while I wouldn't be 100% confident that I'd have a baby born in the fall, I'd have a rough timeline in mind. For this adoption, I have no rough timeline in mind. Maybe sometime within the next 3 years. Maybe. But that's kind of a lame timeline.

So for those of you who have adopted, when did you tell? How did people respond? Have you had unexpected annoying or intrusive questions and comments? Also, if you told some people and not others, how seriously did they guard your secret? I worry that someone might tell someone that I didn't want to.

Old Friend

An old friend has recently resurfaced in our lives after several years. He was Mister's roommate in college, and a very close friend to both of us. He was kind of like my 4th brother. After college, he ended up moving to Boston, so we remained close and all saw each other often.

In 2007, he called me to say that his wife was pregnant and they were moving cross-country to be closer to his wife's family. We all got together one final time in Boston before they moved, and that was the last time we saw them. Not really because of anything but that they lived really far away, they lived in a small house and didn't have a guest room, and shortly thereafter they had a new baby so it would become hard for them to travel often.

Shortly after his baby was born, I started to really think about and deal with my grief about infertility. I think after our diagnosis, I sort of slid through, thinking, "When we're ready, we'll adopt" like it would be that simple. Also shortly after his baby was born, he fell in love with his sweet daughter. He would, with his heart in a good place, wanting us to share in his love, e-mail us frequently and say, "When are you guys having kids?! You've been married a long time. Come on!!" and other things like that. I ignored the e-mails and continued with my new job that I loved, and kept thinking, "when we're ready, we'll adopt."

He sent me one too many of those e-mails once, and I opened up to him, sharing the story of our infertility, sharing my grief and sadness that our life hadn't turned out as we planned. I told him that we were hoping to adopt someday, but that we weren't ready yet. Until then, I didn't want him to ask me about it anymore. I told him that if he wants to talk to Mister about it, that's fine, but I didn't want to talk about my hope for the future when it was so nebulous and so very connected to my sadness about the present.

Because he is a kind and sensitive person, he said the right things, that he was sorry that we're sad, he's sorry about our infertility, he never meant to make us feel bad and that he too was hopeful for our future.

We really didn't talk much after that e-mail exchange, and I felt guilty, like it was my fault. I threw this awkwardness out there, and neither one of us really knew how to deal with it. So neither one of us really did deal with it and it just kind of sat there. Meanwhile, we're thousands of miles apart, busy with our own lives. It might have been different had we been nearby, because we probably still would have continued to see each other frequently. When you only talk on e-mail, it's hard to talk about anything but the most major things in your life. His was a new baby, mine was lack of a baby. So we kind of drifted apart.

Recently, he and his wife announced that they're expecting their second child later this year. Obviously, we love them, so we're thrilled for them. On the other hand, they have a 3 year old we've never met... :(

The part that's really funny to me is that within the last few months, he must have somehow been missing us a lot. He reconnected with Mister and they played fantasy sports together and have completely resurrected their friendship. The added benefit for me is that he has reached out to me as well, e-mailing frequently and actually stating his desire to be friends again, to write more often, and to talk on the phone. He offered to play fantasy sports with me, but I don't play, so I challenged him to online Scrabble instead!

So this friend who had been almost completely absent from our lives for the last 3 years is back. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason other than that he missed us and that our friendship was important enough to him that he regretted drifting apart. And honestly, I missed him too, so I'm grateful that he was willing to reach out, to make this effort. I appreciate that my friend had the wisdom to feel like our history as friends was more important than the awkwardness that pushed us apart. The thing that was holding me back was really the awkwardness. How, after saying, "don't ask me about when I'm going to have a baby" do you go back to talking about baseball scores and the weather and other people you know? Especially when all the other people you know are also having babies at the same time? The awkwardness only got bigger and bigger the longer it sat. Yet when he reached out, I realized I actually didn't feel awkward at all anymore. So I'm even more grateful for his renewed effort in our friendship than I thought at first.

Interpersonal relationships are funny. That's for sure.

Adventure in NYC, or "There's a 2 o'clock in the morning now?!"

It's a multi-part story of an adventure in NYC.

Good - Mister met a bunch of friends this weekend for a happy hour in the city. We drove down and it was really easy. There was hardly any traffic (strange for a Friday at 6 PM.) We found a parking spot on the street. The best part is that the meters are active until 7 PM and you pay in 12 minute increments. We pulled in at 6:48! So we paid 50 cents to park for 12 minutes, but really we could stay as long as we liked. So we did. We went to the happy hour and drank some wine and ate some tapas. Good deal. (I will admit, however, that I got kind of bored after an hour or so and I texted my SIL who lives in the city. I told her where we were, and she said, "Come out with us!" and she told us where she and my brother were.)

Better - After a while of texting, Mister and I decided that since my SIL and brother were on the Upper West Side and we were in the Village, that's kind of on our way home. Can't get from the Village to Connecticut without going all the way through Manhattan. We left the happy hour to head uptown to have drinks with my brother and SIL and their friends. We found a parking space right in front of the bar where they were. We had a great time hanging out with them, and it was completely impromptu.

Awesome - Has anyone ever gotten 2 on-street parking spaces in NYC exactly where you want them at the exact time you want them? This is incredible. We usually drive around the block for ages. Or park really far away and walk.

Crazy - We were at the bar with my brother and SIL until 1 AM. We got home around 2. I'm reminded of a favorite Simpsons episode. Bart gets in trouble with Principal Skinner, who punishes him by making him do the Principal's astronomy research. In order to do the research, they have to observe the stars at 4 AM. Skinner tells Bart he wants to meet him at the observatory by 4 AM. Bart says, "Whoa... they have a 4 o'clock in the morning now?!"

I find myself saying that whenever I'm awake at a surprising time. So pulling into the driveway, I thought to myself, "Whoa... they have a 2 o'clock in the morning now?!" 2 AM is a little late for me these days. I'm not 20 anymore!

Disgusting - I wore jeans to these bars. We went out on Friday night. Saturday morning when I got dressed, I wore the same pair of jeans. I wore them around all day.

(Here's the real disgusting part.)

Later, maybe around 6 PM, I was sitting on the couch with Mister and I moved my leg and I saw something on the back of my pants. It looked pink. And weird. And not like anything anyone wants on jeans.

I touched it. I shouldn't have. It was gum. EEEEEEEWWWWWWWW! Someone's chewed up gum was on my pants!

These things always seem to happen to me and no one else. I guess it happened when we were sitting at a booth in the 2nd bar. Maybe it was stuck on the front of the booth and got stuck to my pants. It stuck to my calf, so it's the part of my leg that would have rubbed up against the front of the booth. I was really grossed out. Stupid bars.

I ran upstairs and put on some different pants and attacked the gum jeans with an ice cube. I was able to freeze the gum off my jeans in about 10 minutes. It wasn't too bad. But still. EEEEWWW!

An otherwise fun trip to the city though. On the other hand, this was all Friday night. It's Sunday morning now, and I've slept twice since then. Why am I still so tired?! 2 AM is ridiculous.

And if I can't even handle staying out until 2 AM without 2 days of recovery, how am I going to handle the sleep deprivation that comes with a baby?! Oh boy...

Today is Steelers vs. Jets. I am from MA, but I hate the Patriots. I live in CT, but I'm not rooting for the Jets. Mister grew up in PA, so Let's Go STEELERS!!!!!

Did you do anything fun this weekend?

It's that time again!

Yes, once again it is time for ICLW. I took a few months away from ICLW during the holidays, but I'm back. You can read a little more of our story here.

Today I will tell you some new things about myself. (This gets harder after more months of doing it...)

1) I am into audiobooks lately. Weird, because I don't have a commute. I get the CDs from the library, copy them onto my computer, put them on my iPod and listen to them at night. I've been trying to catch up on some old classics that I have never read before. Currently, Don Quixote. So far, I'm finding it to be hilarious, which surprises me. I always thought that since people read it in high school, it would be dry and boring. It's really not.

2) While I was growing up, my mom always watched All My Children. Almost every day, I think. So it's not surprising that I watched it too. I always loved watching with my mom. It was stupid and silly and we laughed at the ridiculousness every day. In 2005, as my mom started to get really sick, she stopped watching. I was working full-time and it changed from something I could do with my mom into something that reminded me every day that I was no longer watching with her. I stopped watching, and I didn't really miss it. Suddenly, around Thanksgiving, after almost 6 years, I started to watch again. I'm relearning all the characters and story lines. And after 6 years, it doesn't have that feeling of missing my mom that I had in 2005. It's now just something I like.

3) I used to be the pickiest eater ever. The first semester of college, I ate Golden Grahams, pizza, PB&J, and English muffins. And dessert. Always dessert. Oh, sometimes turkey sandwiches, but not always. Some of my most hated foods were potatoes, tomato sauce, spaghetti, meat, soup, most vegetables and anything spicy.

Fast forward 15 years, and I'm kind of a foodie. I'd still eat Golden Grahams, pizza, PB&J and all that, but I now include potatoes, tomato sauce, meat, most vegetables and everything spicy. I'm still not crazy about spaghetti. I eat just about every other type of pasta out there, but spaghetti feels weird to me. It's just not my favorite. And beets and broccoli. They're definitely on my "will not eat" list. I do believe I've gotten over my pickiness.

4) Despite the fact that our wait feels interminable, (also despite the fact that the wait has just begun...) I am fighting an internal war between admitting that this adoption actually may happen and trying to protect myself by not acknowledging anything that makes it too real. I have a secret obsession with reading about baby stuff, shopping for baby stuff, and learning all I can before I become responsible for someone's life. I want to be good at it before I even try! So I'm studying and reading and learning and researching online. But then it becomes too real and I don't actually ever buy anything. I want to know all about stuff, but I don't want to have it in my house. If that makes sense. I suppose as long as I know what I want, when it's time, I can go to the store with a list and get it all at once.

5) Things that I love that I don't have nearly often enough - sushi, manicures, baking days, trips to the movie theater, new clothes, and days with temperatures in the 70s. Wow, that makes me sound like a Real Housewife or something. I'm totally not. Though who doesn't love sushi and manicures? And weather in the 70s. Oh man. It snowed again here last night. What wouldn't I give for 70s and flowers?

What are you into these days?

Oh yeah, the banana cupcake with nutella frosting. Just because I like to share. I'm quite pleased.

Fun Updates

Hi!

It's been a while since I posted. I was away all last week at a friend's house, which was great. Any time I go somewhere, even if it's winter, it still feels like a vacation. I always love a vacation! Even if it takes a week for me to recover...

1) We're officially waiting, which I guess we knew. I'm kind of mad about it, because despite the fact that we mailed everything to the agency on December 14, they didn't get everything filed and processed until January 11. So we kind of lost a month that I thought that we were waiting but we apparently were not. Grr. More frustration. I hope the rest goes smoothly. I'm not changing my ticker though, because I've been waiting that long, whether or not the agency thinks we have.

2) My SIL invited me to go to a black tie gala with her in 2 weeks. It's been a while since I've been to a black tie gala, so that should be fun. And by "it's been a while," I mean that it's been like 6 or 7 years. In case anyone thinks that I'm so fancy that I'm at a black tie gala often, well, they'd be wrong.

3) This is not new news. In fact, anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time will know this. I HATE WINTER!!!! I hate it with a passion. We have about 3-4 feet of snow on the ground in Connecticut and it's supposed to snow more this weekend. And I seriously can't take it anymore. I wish I lived in a place like San Diego where it's always sunny and 75. I counted, and it's about 10 weeks until April. That's not too long. I guess I can push through 10 more weeks.

4) I am going to make cupcakes today. I found this recipe online for banana cupcakes. Then another one for nutella frosting. I love nutella and I have some very dark brown bananas. I think it'll be a good combination.

5) Happy ICLW. I'm going to post more this week, just in case some people come by!

Infertility on TV

Did you watch How I Met Your Mother last night? What did you think?

I actually didn't watch it when it was on, but I saw a lot of people in my Facebook feed talking about how funny shows shouldn't make people cry and people were feeling sad. So this morning, knowing what it was about (kind of) I decided to watch it on CBS.com.

I have to say, I was kind of annoyed at all my well-meaning friends for the first 20 minutes of the show. (On CBS.com, it's only a 21 minute show!) It was a funny episode, I thought. Dark, of course, which is really the only kind of humor around when having invasive tests at the RE's office. As we all know.

Then the last few minutes were kind of a gut-punching twist that I wasn't expecting. Took me right back to 2005, it did.

**SPOILER**

Infertility and the death of a parent... sheesh. That's crappy. But hey, at least they're not actually infertile. It just hasn't happened for them yet. Which, whatever. It was clearly the worst year of my life that began with the death of my mother and ended with an infertility diagnosis. I wouldn't wish that year on an enemy or a stranger. Or even a fictional TV character.

But it wouldn't be bad to see a TV character actually be infertile and continue to live their lives. Come on TV, show us what it's really like. I'm sure that whatever show tried to actually document infertility would get terrible ratings.

On the other hand...

You know what show on TV that I have always thought deals with infertility in a sensitive and almost realistic way? King of the Hill. Seriously.

I don't know how many people watch King of the Hill anymore. It's on Cartoon Network and Fox reruns late at night. But the thing I love about the infertility story line is that it comes up sometimes. Hank and Peggy had trouble conceiving Bobby, and now he's 12 or 13. They would have liked to have had more children, but they never did. But 13 years later, it still kind of bugs them.

Sometimes. Not always, and since their son is 13, they've kind of moved on. But every once in a while, they'll talk about wishing they could have had other children, or that they would like to try to have another baby. (This is where the realism comes in...) But of course, Peggy never gets pregnant again. And the best part is that they just live their lives. They have this sadness around this one part of their lives, something they always wish could have been different.

And just like in real life, they always wish their lives had been different, but they weren't. This is their life, and they continue to live it. I'm sure if the show had been focused when Bobby was 2 or 3 and Hank and Peggy were TTC again, infertility would have taken over a lot more space on the show. But since he's in middle school, they're dealing with middle school, and "Boy, I wish we had been able to have more children..." comes up once in a while.

The thing that I always wondered about King of the Hill and infertility is because it's so sensitive and realistic, I wondered which writer had that personal experience. Because seriously, who's going to imagine that that's how it feels? Clearly writers can't, otherwise How I Met Your Mother would have ended differently. Or Charlotte never would have (finally) gotten pregnant (with one *of her own*) after adopting from China in Sex and the City. Or any of the other contrived infertility tropes we see on TV and in movies.

So knowing that someone who worked for King of the Hill had that personal, first-hand experience kind of makes me sad for that person. Because as I said earlier, I wouldn't wish it on an enemy or a stranger. Or a fictional TV character. Or, apparently, the writers of said fictional TV characters.

Have you seen infertility portrayed in new and interesting ways on TV lately?

2011???

How about that! I can't believe it's January again.

This week feels weird. Usually we go away during the week of Christmas and we're home by New Year's. Everyone else is already ready to start resolutions and being serious and everything and I'm not even feeling like it's January yet.

Last week before we went away, I only cleaned up slightly, so I came home last night to a fully-Christmas, post-blizzard house. Not only am I mentally unready for January, my house is physically unready.

I don't even have a 2011 calendar yet! I always make one on iPhoto from last year's pictures of our vacation, or other fun events throughout the year. Yet another thing I'll have to try to do this week.

I need to work on getting myself back into my regular routines (or even consider adding some new ones, like exercising or eating vegetables...) though I'm going away again next week. I'm going to visit a friend next week, so I have postponed any thought of a New Year's resolution. Not that I've ever really been much of a resolution person. And if I were, mine always came in September at the beginning of school, like, "I'm going to really do all my homework this year..." or as a teacher, "I'm going to plan my lessons WAY in advance instead of 15 minutes before the students arrive..."

If I were to make resolutions, they'd be the standards - eat less, exercise more. I've done fairly well with my birthday resolution of giving up soda. I'm proud of myself. I had kind of a blip right around Thanksgiving, and stopped again. Though I had soda this week while traveling in PA. I don't really anticipate any withdrawal from it now though. When I had soda, it was something to drink and not something I was really craving. So we'll see. I'm feeling good about that resolution. The others - eat less, exercise more, well, not so much. I'll get there. Lately I've been thinking about eating more vegetables, which I consider a good first step.

So I started this post early this morning and now it's afternoon and I *STILL* haven't done anything productive today. I ought to throw in some laundry, go to the grocery store and clean something in my house.

Guess I should go be productive...