Revolution

Hi to the small group of everybody who is following this blog.  There's some to catch you up on.

First of all, our first foray into adoption fizzled.  I found out that it wasn't going anywhere when I overheard The Husband talking to a friend and saying "things are going so good right now, I don't want to change anything."  Which was, needless to say, aggravating, but whutcanudo?  So that was in the spring of 2011, I waited a year and we talked about it again, and I offered that we could go for another round of infertility treatments, but at the end of those, if we weren't pregnant, I wanted his promise that we'd go ahead with the adoption.

So, this past May was all kinds of fun.  My body reacted to the Clomid with pregnancy symptoms and for a little while we thought that we might actually be pregnant, but the stick never turned blue.  The doc ran some blood tests and came back with a diagnosis of Low Ovarian Reserve, said the words "egg donor" and that was the end of that.  We are now off to the races on getting ready for a kiddo.

We're getting back on track, and that's great.  I didn't write in the interval because a hundred posts about "I want a kid but B is scared so we're not going to get a kid and boy am I pissed" isn't really either enlightening or therapeutic.

Our second home visit is a little over a week away.  The house is a wreck.  We're putting a new floor in upstairs, replacing the carpeting with bamboo one room at a time.  We've decked out the kiddo's room (formerly the guest room).  It used to be furnished with a boxspring and mattress that rested on the floor, a folding chair beside it as an end table, and a hand-me-down IKEA dresser.  The dresser's still in there, but now we've added a real bedframe, a matching end table, and a bookcase.  When I came home with the bookcase, B made a comment about that room now being the best furnished room in the house.

In other news, shopping clearance furniture at World Market, you find some fabulous deals.

Back in the Saddle Again

I really couldn't bear to look at this blog over the past year. It's been an agonizing holding pattern. Looking at the date on the last entry, I realize that it's almost exactly a year to the day after I wrote that that we finally made an offer on a house. And today, we got the notice that we're clear to close! We sign the papers on Tuesday afternoon and start picking up where we left off.

Has it been a lost year? Yes and no. I've had a lot going on at work, and work has been going very well for me, but I don't think that would have been materially different if things had gone smoothly a year ago. It's made a vast deal of difference, for the better, in B's life though. He's progressed a lot with how to deal with stress and how to recognize and cope with his co-dependent tendencies that I don't think would have been as easy if he was trying to parent. During this last year, he actually stated a preference as though it was no big deal. Which was a very big deal.

We got a much better deal on the house we ended up with than we could have on the house we had initially wanted. And we got a fantastic deal on the loan. Financially, this was a very good delay.

Balance that against the guilt from knowing that some kid, somewhere out there, spent an extra year waiting for a forever family. I'm able to be rational about it now, but I suspect that when some kid becomes my kid there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. On the inside.

B has asked for a little time to get settled in before we start the home study, and I can't say no. My youngest brother is getting married at the end of September and we'll have a full house for the week of the wedding, plus we've volunteered to host the rehearsal dinner/backyard barbecue, and B has said that as soon as the wedding is done and behind us that he's good to go to start moving on getting kids home, but he thinks it's a bad idea to compound the stress. And he's right, but I hate to admit it.

That's the drama-light version of this past year. We waited around and worked a lot, then we got a house. The end.

Oh, and there's a new puppy. And she's adorable.

What to do?

Our timeline had been to be making an offer on a house by... right about now.

But, it's looking more and more like it's going to take longer (our biggest hint: we aren't making an offer right now. That's how we know it's going to be sometime in the future.) For one thing, our credit report has some old stuff on it that should have come off because it was paid in full or aged off a long time ago, but even some of the things that were paid in full, the companies/agencies who reported them never reported that they'd been paid. Instead, they changed their names slightly every month to keep the now inaccurate entries constantly current. A credit card that I paid off and closed in 1993 is still on my report. And, because we're going for an FHA loan and credit is tight right now, it all has to come off - all of it - before we can get approved. We're working as fast as we can on getting this done.

Which is just as well, because we've discovered that getting out of our lease is going to be harder than we'd thought. We sent in our letter of intent not to renew our year-to-year lease three months in advance of the anniversary date, as required. Our landlord sent us back a letter informing us that because only B signed the letter, it didn't meet the conditions for not renewing and our lease is now automatically extended to July 31, 2010. If we want to get out of it before then, we have to pay the landlord a $1k non-refundable extra-special-permission bonus and then find someone else to rent the apartment at our own expense.

I've started tracking down other people who are in the same boat with this Fan Apartments as we are - there are at least a dozen I've found already - and one of them told me that Fan Apartments has turned down three applicants for his place already, and he's still on the hook for rent and responsible for finding a new tenant, even though he's already done a walk-through and turned in the keys.

So, long story short, we figure at this point our best bet is to take a breather, be happy that the time pressure is off, work more on getting all the crud off our credit reports and becoming perfect little mortgage-seekers, and then, when we're all ready to go, call the Fire Marshall. Fan Apartments is a repeat offender for chaining and padlocking shut the fire escape on this building. Any port in a storm, right?

Ye gods, I really do loathe this kind of purposeless difficulty. And I still have to call the agency to let them know that our timeline has changed.

Numbers

Days until Sims 3 is released: 40
Days until every single thing in the history of time is cleared off of my credit report so that I can get a mortgage: 15 to 45
Days until I have to give my landlord notice or else renew my lease for another year: 7
Total dollar amount of all items keeping me from making an offer today: $2,087.43
Days left to prepare a level 1 D&D adventure: 10-20
NPCs created for adventure so far: 116
Days left to prepare for seminar on programming for EAV table structures: 2
Slides ready for seminar: 1. Well, almost 1.
Max size of sibling group we'll consider adopting: 3
Min age of oldest child in group: 12
Approximate times I've been told that teens are hard and sibling groups might "gang up on me": 15,000,012

If anybody who has adopted teens or sib groups happens to read this post, did you experience the same reaction coming from family and friends? My friends and co-workers almost universally report that teens drive them crazy. My otherwise supportive family practically turns into concern trolls when I mention the possibility of a sib group. I see it as a kid with an intact relationship and support network; they get very wide eyed, exhale audibly and say "three is a lot of kids."

And for the record, I like teens. They're just like adults but thinner, with less money and more drama. Being around teens is like being a fan of a low-budget soap opera.

UPDATE: so, I opened up the EAV presentation file to work on it, but instead of doing that, um, I did this.

Adoption Meeting

The blog is going slowly, I know. I'm trying to stick to adoption issues and, occasionally, work stuff for filler. Otherwise, I'd be putting up lots of posts about politics, links to things like this video of a robot which solves Rubik's Cubes in which the newscaster asserts that a cube has five sides and that the robot's best solve time (26 seconds) is "almost double" the fastest human time (10 seconds). I weep for humanity.

Or, I would be linking other videos like this one, which I've watched a dozen times today and it makes me cry and smile and I love it. I'm still weeping for humanity, but in a completely different way.

We had a meeting at the adoption agency yesterday. We went back over our opening checklist. The difficult part is that the goal is to be "open" with the agents, but it felt like everything we said just opened us up to misunderstanding. It went like this:

Agent: You've signed the agreement not to use corporal punishment, and you've been to the classes that have talked about discipline methods. Could you talk about how you were disciplined growing up and what your philosophy is with regards to discipline?

Me: I remember when my father announced that he'd decided that spanking was just teaching children that it's acceptable to hit when you're angry, and he wasn't going to do it anymore, and my first thought then was: "why did he wait until now, when I'm eight and too old to spank anyway, to figure that out?" I can see the rationale for a corrective light swat on a pre-reasoning bottom, but I think that, even if there weren't all the other reasons for not using corporal punishment on a fost/adopt, spanking a child over the age of reason is correction through humiliation, and that's a bad idea under any circumstances.

When we talk about discipline, the thing that I keep in mind is that it isn't possible to really "control" a child. A teenager, especially, is going to hit a moment when it occurs to him that there's not really a lot their parents can do to them, and what they can do might be a small price to pay for whatever it is the teen wants to do (I remember clearly when I had that delicious revelation). Children are autonomous beings, and it's up to parents to guide them by building a relationship in which parents' guidance and opinions are valued (or at least complied with because it's such a hassle otherwise...) And that works and it lasts - I still can't stand the idea of disappointing my dad. The important thing is to avoid overreaching the bounds of parental authority, because the inevitable result of that is that the parent either becomes a tyrant or a figure of ridicule or both.

And we have theories, not children, and we'll probably laugh our asses off a year from now at these theories, but for right now, that's where we're coming from. Use a light touch, build the relationship, horse whisperer stuff.

Agent: OK, but you understand that these kids might be 15 years old but emotionally aged 4, so they can't really make good decisions for themselves?

And everything was like that. Except for the part when we told them that what we really wanted was a kid with ropy muscles, good for "working the farm." They asked about what experience we had with kids and one of the things we told them about was the open houses we did in 2003-2006. I was going back to school at VCU and we made dinner for whoever showed up one night a week. Told a few kids at school about it the first time, and they came, and then they told two people, and they told two people, and it went on like that. There was somebody every week who we'd never met before, and we still keep in touch with some of the regulars. Met their parents when the 'rents were in town. Good kids, for the most part. We enjoyed having them around.

Still no firm news on the house situation. The house we'd like to buy has been re-listed at the same excessive price. We're getting close to the point where we're ready to make an offer, but we're not quite there yet.

Code Camp

If you're going to be in Richmond, VA on April 25th, and you want to hear a highly technical (which is the nice way of saying mind meltingly boring) talk about designing Entity-Attribute-Value table structures and programming techniques to compensate for their performance shortcomings, I will be conducting exactly such a seminar at Richmond's Code Camp (too lazy to link) two weeks from this Saturday. Should be fun, and by fun, I mean woohoo! I can check off one of this year's work "stretch goals!"