Karen's Journey

Yesterday we ordered in Chinese food. This whole stopping my work day at 3:30 thing just isn't going well and once again it was well past five when I finally logged out, tired, beat up, and not close to being done. I ordered vegetable mu shoo. We usually get veggie lo mein, but I wanted something different. It worked out well last night. I just tried to eat leftover mu shoo for lunch. At first it seemed like an epic FAIL. The wrapper fell apart and was impossible to hold -- the veggies landed in a heap on my plate. I was ready to toss the wrapper and just heat up some rice, but then I remembered my acquired-through-adoption Ethiopian heritage. I ripped the mu shoo wrapper into scoop-sized pieces and ate my mu shoo like I was eating doro wat with injera. It worked perfectly! Does that count as fusion cuisine? Sometimes you have to take your successes where you find them. :)

The other day at bedtime, T asked his nightly "good night" question, "Mommy, can you tell me a story of when I was little or you were little?" The conundrum is I know very little about "when he was little." How many times can I tell him that he was afraid of the pit toilet and so would use the woods and his uncle would yell at him? Or that he and his brothers would play hide and seek by hiding in the trees, but he was too little to climb the trees so he was always the seeker? Or that one time there was a pot of food heating over the fire and no adults around and he tried to see what was cooking and tipped the pot over and the hot food spilled onto the ground and his foot, and the entire top of his foot blistered and it hurt and he cried and no one hugged him or kissed it all better? He has a heck of a scar, so I know it was bad. But that's all I know. It's like this child stepped through a portal at the age of four and everything before then ...

I recently received our annual post-placement report reminder from our adoption agency. Every year we have to file a report with the Ethiopian government updating them on T and how he is doing. For us, it falls in February. When I received the reminder, I thought, "Okay, it's January; maybe I'll get it done before the end of February this year." Except it arrived in February. I can't explain where January went -- it's just gone. And I'm still working on last year's post-placement report. So close to being finished, but stymied by a lack of both black and color ink in the printer. Once I can print out the final set of photos, I'm ready to put that one in the mail. and then I can start on the one that's due by the end of this month. Which is seven days away. And there's a birthday party tomorrow, which means birthday gift shopping today. And a bathroom that's being remodeled. And I'm still one-point-five people at work, getting pa...

As T and Hubs prepared to leave the house this morning, I grabbed a washable pink marker and drew a heart on T's hand. He then drew one on mine. I kissed his heart and he kissed mine. Then I suggested he draw a heart on Daddy's hand. He happily complied and then suggested we all kiss our hearts at the same time. "One, two, three, SMOOCH!" Ah, attachment parenting at its best. I gave him a hug and said, "Happy Valentine's Day!" "Happy Valentine's Day to my whole family!" he chirped. "And for my family in Africa." A sentence fragment that spoke volumes. He has never before mentioned his Ethiopia family without prompting. This was the first time he dropped his guard to let me see that he is thinking about them, loves them, and misses them. He is too strong to cry or let on that he is sad, this one. So the mere mention that he was thinking of them as this family drew hearts and kissed them and wished each other a Happy V...