Entries from August 2010 ↓

so i knew that adding a baby to the family would drastically alter my schedule, but a few things that have dropped out of the frequent rotation that have surprised me a bit include:

exercise (although i did manage a bike ride AND a run with the jogging stroller this week, so maybe there’s hope?)

petting my kitties.  poor kitties.

eating vegan (i just don’t have the time to plan a full day’s meals that are meat and dairy free anymore)

blogging (maybe if uploading photos didn’t take so long…. seriously.  there are SO many unwritten blog posts floating around in my head…)

getting pictures and videos off of my cameras, sorting through them and putting interesting ones online.

cleaning the house–especially vacuuming.  i mean, i don’t want to do it when he’s awake and in the same room as me for fear of startling him or it just being so loud for his ears and I don’t want to do it when he’s asleep for fear of waking him up.  sigh.

taking pictures of random beauty (it’s hard to tote my “big black camera” when I’m also hauling a baby and a diaper bag around.  Even harder to actually take photos while holding the baby.)

keeping up with certain things on my Google Reader that I used to love.  Like the Fresh Modern Quilts Flickr pool.  And Pioneer Woman’s food blog.  And pretty much all of my photography blogs.

sewing, lately (I think I’ve got a bit of a mental block going on with this.  like I feel like I need to clean the house or do something else virtuous in order to “earn” time in the sewing room, but by the time I’ve finished said virtuous task, the baby is awake again and needing my attention.)

giving myself personal challenges or resolutions (like “I’m going to blog once a day for a month!” or “I’m going to eat vegan once a week for a year!” or “I’m going to do at least 10 minutes of yoga a day”).  I’ve been trying to decide if giving up these types of quantity goals for awhile and just giving myself a break would be a good idea (less guilt when I don’t do ANYTHING on a particularly regular basis) or if I’d just become lazy.  Maybe my current challenge could be “I’m going to not beat myself up over dropped balls at least until after Baby Dude’s first birthday.”  HA.  I love my optimism that even considers that life might get EASIER with a one-year old!  Maybe 5th birthday would be a better deadline?

and yet, there are also some things that I HAVE managed to do that completely surprise me like:

picking raspberries at a friend’s house and making (somewhat seedless) raspberry freezer jam AND apricot freezer jam

reading the book “The Creative Family” by Amanda Blake Soule (I’m 3/4 of the way through.  with a non-fiction title.  about activity ideas I can do with my child in about 3 years or so.  ever so useful now.  But it’s compelling and a surprisingly quick read.  and it’s right beside my breakfast cereal bowl.  perhaps that last bit is the key.)

bake tomato and corn pie for dinner for myself when J was out of town in Chicago last week.  I love this dish and J’s pretty lukewarm about it and the baby was in a good mood (at least he was when I started.  by the end of the pie-making he was getting a bit impatient and I’d resorted to singing operatically at the top of my voice to distract him while my hands were covered in flour and pie dough and I just wanted to finish the darn thing and get it in the oven so I could give him my full attention.) and it did make for some excellent leftovers.  (I like to add a layer of thinly sliced zucchini to this pie too.  And don’t cheat and use a pre-made crust because this dough is so biscuity and crusty and delicious that you really shouldn’t miss out.)

make some changes to my Facebook account to make it less daunting so that maybe I’ll actually start checking it again and manage to keep up with my friends.

I don’t think it’s JUST about my real priorities coming to the forefront.  Some of it has to do with the fact that Baby Dude seems to enjoy hanging out with me in the kitchen but not so much in the sewing room.  Some of it has to do with the fact that most of my recreational activities are now squeezed into the last 2-3 hours of the day when the baby is asleep and before I fall asleep too.  But yeah, some of it is probably my “real priorities.”  It feels like I’m choosing the “comfort food” versions of my daily activities instead of balancing them out with the “healthy food” bits of activities.  Sometimes it catches up with me and I realize that I HAVE to exercise soon or I will just burst with anxiety, but too much of the time, I find myself lured in to one brightly lit screen or another for most of an evening.

I think I’ll try to have a (mostly) screen-free day tomorrow.  Or maybe I won’t.

Here is a the classic “finalization photo with the judge” and no, we probably shouldn’t have both worn plaid, but oh well.

this isn’t the most in-focus picture of baby dude with his birthmother, but i love the expression on both of their faces.

and here I am making a strange smiling-while-chewing-my-food face at one of the few dude ranch activities we got to fully enjoy–the campfire cowboy breakfast.  Complete with serenading, guitar-strumming cowboy (you can actually see about half of his guitar beside that tree trunk in the photo below) and a “hayride” to and from the site.

just a post (no photos for now, i’m too exhausted) to let you know that we returned home this evening from our last required trip to Texas for baby dude’s adoption process.  we are finalized!  no more hoops! woo hoooooooo!

the legal part of the trip was actually very easy and even a little bit fun since we were one of nine families from our agency that were finalizing that day.  it was sort of a mini-reunion of our orientation group and what fun to see all of these people that we’d met just over a year ago, heard their stories about how they’d come to make the adoption decision, and here we all were with beautiful children.  awesome.

we snuck out a little early to drive 2 hours south of the city to pick up baby dude’s birthfamily to bring them along to camp.  Every summer, the adoption agency hosts this big reunion at a ranch near San Antonio and anyone affiliated with the agency is eligible to attend for the weekend.  I would say that our experience at the rance was a little …. mixed.  It was really the first “not-just-to-visit-family” vacation thing we’ve done with baby dude and it quickly became clear to me that i would need to adjust my expectations of what all could be accomplished (horseback riding? not really.  tubing down the river?  uh-uh.).  plus, baby dude and i both had yucky colds (stuffy sniffles, a little cough and a fever–super uncomfortable in the 100 degree weather!) which really put the brakes on our ability to really take advantage of the fun possibilities of the ranch.  I also found myself torn between wanting to have really deep conversations with the other adoptive families who were there and feeling like we needed to spend as much time as possible with baby dudes’ birthfamily because they so rarely get to see him and his birthmother especially has told me how much she misses him.  i noticed the same thing was true for other adoptive families who were there with their child’s birthmothers.  I know that it’s important for us to spend time with the birthfamilies, but I don’t know if the ranch (did I mention that it was 100 degrees? and that it wasn’t a particularly inexpensive place to stay?) was an absolutely necessary part of that particular equation.  I almost wonder if baby dude’s birthfamily wouldn’t have enjoyed a more private vacation with us instead–where we could just focus on each other without these distractions.  But perhaps my views are skewed because I spent so much time in the (thankfully air-conditioned) cabin sleeping off my cold.  bleh.

positive parts of the weekend included a “hayride” to a fantastic cowboy campfire breakfast (with the largest skillet of scrambled eggs i’ve ever seen!), snippets of really wonderful conversations that I did manage to sneak in with other adoptive families around the edges of other activities (hmmm… maybe that’s a motherhood thing?  no more long, heartfelt chats because someone’s kid always needs attention?), oddly enough–not feeling self-conscious about feeding my baby a bottle of formula because i knew no one there would judge me for not breastfeeding him, meeting baby dude’s birthmother’s new boyfriend that we’ve heard so much about (he’s a really nice guy and seemed surprisingly comfortable around all of this chaos), interesting conversations with baby dude’s birthmother on the way to and from camp, and seeing her have a chance to snuggle with baby dude and admire his little chubby baby self and his big beautiful smile.

i’ll attempt to post photos sometime this week….