Sorry

For those of you who still check in here with any regularity to see if we are indeed still kicking...my apologies. I know I am a horrible blogger, not posting anything amusing, or thoughtful, or even downloading an occasional picture. I could tell all of you that I am busy, which would be true. We are in the depths of trying to finish up the school year, survive the dance competition/recital season, and adjusting to finally getting "services". In the strange world we inhabit, it appears it is either feast or famine, and currently we have a feast. After a year and a half of getting very little support or help with our preadoptive "situation", we have now apparently qualified for about thirty hours of various helps, weekly! So I am currently trying to adjust to having these lovely, energetic, creative young things around, trying so hard to be helpful. All the time. It feels as though they live with us. I'm quite certain I will see more of them than hubby, once the camp season is in full swing. But they assure us that if we decline even a minute of prescribed help, we may lose approval for said minutes, which is apparently dangerous, should you find yourself in dire need of minutes later on. And I gratefully scratch my head and wonder how much more we could have needed help, as we did the first eight months or so. I ponder the fact that we seem to have survived that without any minutes at all, and how mysterious it is, that my edgy fractious children seem to have settled into this smooth pleasant groove the last month or so, minus minutes. Or maybe it's just me. Maybe my muscles have finally just relaxed after the Tsunami of little girls that hit our shore a million years ago.

Small or Tall?

"The glass is neither half full nor half empty rather; it is twice as big as it needs to be."

I'm not sure who actually said this. I've seen it around a bit, and it makes me think.

Mom's Birthday Picnic

My Beautiful Cake

Made By My Beautiful Daughter

Eaten By My Ravenous Family

Homing Birds

Baby Boy is presently hunched over his laptop, researching homing birds...any type. He is currently reading the Harry Potter series, and is enamored with the idea of having his mail delivered by bird. I am actually quite satisfied with the nice lady who braves our wretched, rutted dirt road...but OK, I can kind of see the appeal. And lest you worry that I am allowing my son to read dangerous books, I'm reading the series too. I figured I needed to see what all the ruckus was about. I still haven't come across the problem yet, but I'm sure I'll find it soon.

Anyhow, this isn't really a post about Harry Potter. It's about homing birds. I was thinking about them as I kind of half listened to Baby Boy mutter to himself, and considering that they have a certain similarity to children. At least the homegrown kind. The homegrown kind seem to have a built in, wired in desire to run home. No matter how much they may enjoy being somewhere else, eventually their hearts, and wings, turn them home.

Older adopted children are like birds with no home wired in. They wheel about searching, and follow after anything shiny. They'll stop and sleep on any roost. They'll eat anyone's food, drink anyone's water. Many remember a home of sorts, but they have gotten too turned around by storms and distance, to know how to fly back there.

What will they do...that is the question of the day. Will they spend their entire lives on the move, always searching, never finding...never coming to rest? Or will they relearn "home", and in time train themselves to return again and again?