Catching up

First, I have to catch up with some of the highlights of the past year.

Fall

• The boys started school. The transition from kindergarten to 1st can be difficult and D had some *big feelings* in October and November. In 3rd grade, A's teacher was always nice but did not challenge him at all. The previous summer, T and I had decided to hang back and not meet the teachers until the first parent-teacher conference in November. In hindsight, that was a mistake.
• The kids played soccer and had some wonderful, wonderful coaches who nurtured both their skills and their self-confidence.
• My friend whose alter ego is Superwoman got the whole family passes to see President Obama in Philadelphia. We stood about 40 feet away from him and I hollered like a thirteen-year-old at a One Direction concert.
• We spent the traditional Thanksgiving at my brother's house in Maryland, something the kids look forward to for months.
• My sweet puppy died. She had been with me for 12 years and was a far better person than I ever will be. She found the joy in everything, knew how to stand up for herself, and forgave quickly and completely. I still miss her every day.

Winter

• As Christmas approached, the boys' brains turned to mush.
• I took time off work, did some home repairs, refinished some floors, and painted almost the entire house. The kids each moved into their own room.
• We gave A permission to grow his hair out. He had been asking for months but hadn't been ready to commit to the care that longer hair would require. He's done a fabulous job. It's helped that he's had several Black men available to advise him.
• The kids played futsal.
• T lost his job when NIH funding didn't come through. (In the last twelve years, the NIH has cut funding for science research by 22%.)
• I went back to work and got a second part-time job.
• A large tree broke in our backyard in a windstorm. T turned the stump into a cool treehouse.
• It was a VERY cold winter and we went to Florida again.

Back

Let it never be said that persistence does not pay off.

My mom has asked about my blog literally (in the literal sense) every time she has seen me for the past year. So here you go, mom. One year to the day, I'm starting again.

It's not surprising that I stopped. If you look at my blog roll, you will see that every adoptive parent who was blogging at the time that I started has either completely stopped or slowed to only the very occasional post. Most of us began blogging as something to do while we waited for a referral, wrote feverishly as we adjusted to our new realities as parents, and then felt less of a need as the adoption of our children became just one of many complicated parts of our lives. Also, adoption from Ethiopia has almost completely shut down, so there are few new people joining the Ethiopian adoption blog community. In fact, the only blogs I read that continue to update regularly are those by adult adoptees or those that focus on adoption as an industry rather than a personal experience. Maybe as I restart this, I'll find that my focus will change, too.

This is not just for my mom. My memory is shot, so I need to be writing things down anyway. And even though no one has commented on this blog for a long, long time, the stats say that people are still reading it, so I must have said something useful at some point, and with any luck I may do so again.