Nothing. Zilch. Zero.

OK, so we are headed into what will probably be the longest weekend of my life. Ever. Unless China pushes the time to referrals extra long...then next weekend will be.

Will I keep my sanity? Will I sleep? Or will I tip over Saturday from sheer exhaustion, and not wake up until Monday morning? Will I not eat from nerves, or eat myself into a sugar coma from nerves?

Why is this a secret? By all accounts, CCAA pulls out how many days they are willing to match , put those in a big pile, and then start matching kid - parent - kit - parent...so why can they not tell us what is coming? Why can't they make this process a bit less nerve-racking on the people who are going to parent their children? Hell if I know? I can't write that one off to Western vs. Eastern sensibilites...any one in any country can easily understand the stress someone feels while waiting for a child.

So...here I go again, another weekend. A couple thousand more heavy sighs.

Is It Really Going To Happen?

It looks like we're cutting it awfully close, which I kinda expected...but rumors are saying right now that we are in. I'm still letting the chickens roam uncounted here, but I'm starting to believe...

Oh Gawd...what if it doesn't happen? Oh Gawd, what if it does happen? Is there a file with a baby in it paperclipped to our file right now being signed???

Rules Of Engagement

OK, trying to distract myself from the Deafening Silence of Nothingness coming from a large country in Asia...

Did y'all see Rules of Engagement last night? Maybe they wrote this episode without the writers that are on strike...it was abysmal...the cliches! Oh my God the cliches...make it stop!!!!
1. The manly-man in the show, Jeff, of course wants a son.
2. Jeff gets all "it's not my swimmers" that caused us to not get pregnant.
3. It turns out to be Jeff's swimmers.
4. Jeff thinks when he's told to drink more water that Scotch would work, as it has water in it.
5. Jeff and wife Audrey are happy and fine, until one person asks why they haven't had kids yet...they tried for 6 months (oh, the committment), it didn't work, so they "sunk themselves into work." Or some other lame-ass excuse like that. And it takes one person asking once and they decide to change the course of their lives? They cave to the ideals of society that quickly?
6. And they go get all the tests done and completed and answers to infertility in like one 1 hour appointment. What about real life, docs not even listening till at least a year, sometimes more...and months and months of tests - heck, just waiting to get a dye test takes, what 3 weeks??
7. The young, soon to be married couple, gets in a spat about the future and when they have kids...he, raised by a hippy-ish mom who never married Dad, assumes that she will stay home with the kids. And she's not content with that idea.

Oh the cliches, the cliches...the evil, stereo-type inducing cliches.

Calgon, take me away!

My rumors are lost...

Where oh where have the rumors gone??? Not a single stinking peep, and it's the 26th of the month!!! I'm going just a shade bat-shit crazy here!

I was going to write a long post about my SW here today. But I don't have it in me. I'm weak, I'm a jiggling bowl of jello...I just want to melt into a puddle of tears while looking at the referral of Baby H....

I don't have any more righteous indignation in me right now...I'm so tired of answering the "when" question...

Gobble, Gobble...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Hope you have a good day, be it with family, friends, or without them - whatever makes you happier! :>)

I'm trying to stay focused on what I have to be thankful for, which is so much. I truly am blessed in life. But I'm also spoiled, so it's easy to focus on the one thing that I don't have this holiday...but I will look around the table tomorrow and see my husband, my Dad and my step-mom...and the kitties under the table, knowing that step-grandma will give them some Turkey on the sly...and I'll be thankful for the 11 years married, 2 years engaged, and the 1 year dating I've had with P so far. And thankful that my step-mom has made it thru so many medical crises over the years - we may not see eye to eye some of the time, but she makes my Dad happy. We're cool now most of the time, so that's something to be happy for. And my Dad, who for all my bitching (usually in the work arena with him), is a good Dad. He missed a lot of stuff growing up, and he's not as emotional as my psyche wants, but he's good, and we're spitting images of each other in about 80% of our personalities. And he was always there for me, even if he did miss a lot of little stuff along the way. And he's 60 now, but looks like a very healthy 50, and his mind is probably even younger than that, so I'm so thankful for that - I hope to have him here for a long, long time.

I'm thankful for all my friends, ones I've had for years, and ones that I've met thru this adoption - y'all mean so much to me, and you also can never know what your support thru this adoption has meant to me...

And, I'm trying oh so hard to be thankful that I'm finally "close" to Baby H. I know, I'm a selfish witch, but this one is hard...

So, long post when I meant a short one...when in the end all I really want to say is Happy Thanksgiving.

And cough up those referral rumors, will ya?

Ronnie Burns Died

You probably don't know who he is. Most of us don't. I didn't, till I saw his obit in the Chicago Times, in the little section where they list famous, or almost-famous people who have passed on.

He was the son of George Burns and Gracie Allen.

But that's not what I read. Here's what I read:
"He was the adoptive son of George Burns and Gracie Allen."

Huh? WTF? Why the hell does it matter? Did they love him any less because they didn't birth him? What is it the Chicago Trib's business to point this out? Does this change the fact that he's dead? No.

Do Angie and Brad love Shiloh more than Maddox, or any of their others? I doubt it. Did George and Gracie love Ronnie less? I doubt that too...What about Meg and her daughter from China? What about my friends A&A, do they look at their precious twins every morning and say "well, not a bad consolation prize"???? Hell no. They pick them up every morning and thank the heavens above and the earth below that these two souls came into their lives...no different than my other 20 friends or so who have birthed their kids.

On the RQ site, a wise man posted something that was in the back of my head, but I have never pulled to the front of my head, and even thought out all the way, but it was what was nagging me all along...he said:
His daughter was adopted. Past tense. She is not "is adopted." Adoption was an event that happened in the past, and it will affect all their lives for years to come, no different than if the kid had had any kind of various traumas in their life otherwise...that's the truth. She will always be just "my kid". Never, ever, ever, "my adopted kid".

I wish the rest of the world would just get that.

My brain is still bleeding...

Oh my, it was soooooo much more worse than I thought it could have ever been!!! Even my worst enemies would have taken pity on me....well except for the SIL - she would have been in the corner, silently giggling at me.

Here's what I learned about adoption at the twins baby shower:
1. China makes a lot of money off of adoption.
2. Everyone in this world knows someone who has adopted, and many times more than not, with dire results.
3. I'm better off getting a Chinese baby than a Russian baby. That is for many reasons, amongst the biggest:
They are smarter.
They are cuter.
The Chinese government won't give out boys, so if you want a girl, that's the place to go.
4. You don't get stretch marks or morning sickness this way.
ohhhh, and this one is the biggest and most important:
5. People who do NOT know what the fuck they are talking about tend to say it the loudest and with the most emphasis of anyone in the room. I mean really? After asking how long we've been waiting (and hearing a number in they YEARS measurement), who the hell thinks they can tell me any fucking detail about how Chinese adoption works, unless they are whipping out pics of their own cute little one that they adopted 4 months ago from Jiangxi??? Yeah...that's what I thought.

I have a dent from banging my head against a wall/table/countertop/cutesy wrapped playskool toy for the idiocy and offensive comments I heard!

And why, oh why, am I the "neighbor that is adopting" when I'm introduced? I think M2 said that phrase more than "Thanks for coming to my shower" all night. Can't I be the "neighbor that organizes girls nights" "neighbor that works for a printing company" or "neighbor that is just a little bit crazy, but we keep her around for yucks"????

OK, I'm done. I'm going to bed. I have to be up early to go to Happy Workland and train someone to make me obsolete.