DOS Furor

My mind has been spinning all week, so please forgive me for not posting more information! When something big happens, believe me, I’ll post.

Yesterday we had a nice late morning/early afternoon play time with Heather and her kids - first playing at a park, then lunch out, then a quick shopping trip. It’s always nice to see them.

When JediBoy and I made our way home from that, my mind slipped back into all the details that go into preparing for the Guatemala trip. My current pick-it-apart problem is choosing exactly how to make the airline reservations - online myself or using the travel agency recommended by our adoption agency. I may be able to find cheaper tickets using the computer myself, but the reservations have to be made within an hour or so of when we get The Call. So I’m trying out different sites, comparing discounts, looking at flight options. There’s one set of flights that looks appealing - less than 8 hours from airport to airport, leaving here at 2-something in the afternoon, arriving there late evening. But we only have a 55 minute connection in DFW - is that enough time? Hm.

That’s what’s spinning round my head. It didn’t help that PisecoDad was out of town for a meeting on the other side of the state and didn’t come home until about 8:30, just as a big wave of thunderstorms started washing through.

There’s also a lot going on in the Guatemala adoption communities. The Dept. of State issued a statement this week - basically a warning saying that Guatemala will stop all new and in process adoptions as of Dec. 31. Fortunately, this does not affect our current adoption, since we’ll be complete within two weeks or so. But I can clearly imagine the agony for families who have a referral and have just entered PGN and now don’t know if they’ll be able to bring home this baby they’ve fallen in love with. All my Guat groups and sites (the major one is GuatAdopt) have been talking and tearing apart this DOS statement, and there are several petitions and letter-writing and phone-call campaigns starting up to plead with the US government not to give up on the in-process adoptions. I even got an email about it from my agency - and generally they stay very quiet on policy/political matters. They have revamped their site and are no longer taking Guat paperwork (for beginning adoptions) as of Monday.

Putting It Together

The past 24 hours have been a whirlwind for us. There are lots of details - arranging the money for Visa, medical, transportation fees, filling out our final forms and getting them notarized, etc - that have been eating up my brain. We spent a large chunk of time with Leigh & company last night, playing, eating pizza, and sorting through clothes and shoes.

This morning I’ve been trying to sort those clothes into our own stash, arrange paperwork and somehow spend quality time with my son at the same time. We were dared into making a craft, though.

After eating two sheet pizzas (it was really quite a party) at Leigh’s last night, she sent me home with a baggie of twelve of the little “pizza tables” - the plastic three-legged bits that keep the box lid from smushing the pizza. JediBoy & I had a fun time while we were washing them - it was a bit like playing my favorite improv game, Props. We kept turning them this way and that, thinking about what we could do with them.

I thought about using them as painting tools - you could make cool dots with the legs, and neat circular impressions with the tops. I thought about using them with playdough or Model Magic, just to add dimensionality. Or, just building with them like toys. I’m not sure, if you created a structure you wanted to make permanent, what kind of glue you could use to adhere them. They do have a lot of appeal as building toys, or the obvious tiny tables for dolls.

Eventually I had four of them stacked together - because of the arrangement and legs and holes, you can put four together and you come up with a ragged cylindrical shape. I thought it looked like a loom; JediBoy thought it looked like a barrel. So out came the lanyard and perler beads. We worked on weaving the lanyard around the sticking-up legs like a loom, sometimes adding beads. I helped JediBoy get them started and stopped, and he directed me to make a little tighter design on the black one. Here’s a view from the top down:

He made two - a blue one and a green one - mostly independently. (I helped him weave the ends in.) He enjoyed doing it but because the lanyard is slippery he sometimes got frustrated when the row he was weaving would pop off. We could do it another time with ribbon or yarn, but the plastic-on-plastic-on-plastic motif was a draw for me today. Here he’s loading up the finished products with his Playmobil bits:

Travel Talk

We had a long phone call this morning with the woman who is in charge of travel arrangements at our adoption agency.

Lots, and lots, but yes lots of teeny nit-picky details. The important highlights were:

- We may wind up traveling any day of the week, not only on a Sunday as was previously stated. (They used to be able to nudge the Embassy into having our appointments only on Tuesdays.)

- Average time right now from PGN-Out to Pink is 4-6 weeks, depending on city of birth. The city we’re dealing with tends to be on the fast end. For you calendar watchers, the four weeks will be up this Friday! I was told to take my cell phone with me any time I leave the house from now on - the Pink could come any day.

- Generally we will travel less than a week after Pink, not the 1-2 weeks they were seeing over the summer (Embassy slowed down, now is back to speed).

So… we were told to prepare everything (copies of passports, tax and Embassy forms, money in specific denominations to cover Embassy fees, exit tax, transportation costs, gift for the Foster Mother, etc.) ASAP.

Wheeeeeeeee!

Artsy Afternoon

After lunch, JediBoy wandered upstairs to listen to his Jim Weiss King Arthur cd. Apparently it’s not enough that he listens to this cd every night at bedtime, because he often listens to it at least once during the day too! That gave me a lovely reading break (finished Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides). When he came downstairs, we played four rousing games of Sum Swamp - he was upset that I handily won the first two games and kept switching his creature pawn, until he won using the red turtle. Then won again with the turtle, and declared the turtle the king of the swamp.

We each read a book - he read his TMNT reader, “Pizza Party,” and then asked me to read one of our two Electric Company books, “Fargo North, Decoder, and his Coat and Hat.” He loves that book, and loves the Electric Company, and is just at the perfect stage for it right now. So keep an eye out for Electric Company books at yard sales and library sales!

Then he asked for a “project” - I’m glad I had something up my sleeves. First, inspired by Melissa at The Lilting House and Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning, I pulled out the real watercolors for JediBoy. He loved the story about the little gnome who wants his beard to be treated with care (gentle use of the paintbrush) and enjoyed cleaning his brush and wiping it on the cloth diaper beside him.

Once he’d finished his painting (and yes, we had the talk about carefully choosing to use “good” paper), he wanted to do something else so I pulled out a pile of old magazines and we made collages.

Two of his were fairly random collections of pictures that caught his eye, but the third tells me it’s time to put something together for supper:

Manic Monday

JediBoy came downstairs about 8:30 raring to go; I have extra energy saved up from the weekend and lots of fresh ideas from my time spent reading blogs last night. So we’re a very good match today. As soon as he came into the office, he asked what we could do together.

First I read aloud versions of Snow White, Cinderella and The Wolf and the Seven Kids while JediBoy colored. He continues to love coloring the copied versions of his Robin Hood caricature! Then we did take-turns reading. He read all 12 stories from the orange HOP workbook, and after every 3 stories I took a turn. I read The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola, The Perfect Spot by Robert J. Blake, A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni and The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater. They’re all loosely related - about art, painting, color, decorating; and more so about independence and being self-assured about your own art, color or decorating. “The Perfect Spot” has glorious illustrations that make me feel I’m really off for a walk in the woods at camp, and also really touches on the father-son relationship that JediBoy and PisecoDad struggle to balance.

Then we had a short break for a little bowl of cereal. JediBoy then asked me to read him Even More Parts by Tedd Arnold (JediBoy read the big, bold words on each page and I read the extra idioms along the bottom borders) and then his new Pirates of the Caribbean reader, Escape from Davy Jones (a present from Long John Silver, of course!).

The pirate book got him excited about adventuring and so he went outside to practice all his various pirate, knight and Robin Hood moves. I took advantage of his hour-long burst of independent imaginary play to check my email and put away about three loads of laundry.

We have a pretty easy division of laundry labor here. What I despise about doing laundry is lugging the bulky baskets down two flights of stairs only to have to lug them back up a couple hours later. What PisecoDad can’t stand is having to keep track of when it’s time to do which loads, remembering to flip or retrieve them (he can’t hear the buzzer) or putting the clothes away. That works out pretty well, then. I just point him to a load of laundry, let him know when the washer stops, when the buzzer sounds, and he hauls it back upstairs again. I can do the putting away parts and I’m usually not too bad about it, except sometimes on Sundays when I’m too relaxed! So today I had yesterday’s three loads waiting for me upstairs. But I kind of like putting laundry away, I like the feeling of abundance that comes from filling up a dresser. It was pleasant, with the fall breeze coming through the rooms, carrying the shrieks and hollers of my little knight-pirate-hood playing in the yard.

He came back in and wanted to color some more with stories, so I started reading Abel’s Island by William Steig. I’d never read this one before, so we were both caught up in the story of the mouse who was swept away to a tiny island.

I read about four chapters to JediBoy when he asked if we could send one of the pictures to his Pappy (who is in South Africa until November - but we’ll mail it to his house in the US instead). So we got out pencils and pens and stickers and envelopes and mailed away not one but four pictures he’d colored and not yet given away. Now I think it’s time for lunch!

Socialization Class

As you can see, socialization is a severe problem for our local homeschooling mini-co-op.

Ahem. Or, we spent the day at Chuck E. Cheese with Emily, Nate, Anna and Ben.

Click here to see the pictures…

Read for the Record and More

How could I have forgotten to post all day?? I’ve been happily, lovingly preoccupied. The highchair has to stop being our recycling station and turn back into a highchair, which of course leads to a total clear out of our cabinets and dining area (but of course). I’ve been turning over in my mind the issue of car seats during plane travel.

Any tips on that, by the way, would be appreciated. We’ll be traveling down with one 5 year old who is technically big enough to ride on a plane and in cars in Guatemala without any carseat. We’ll be traveling home with an 11 month old. Should I get a lap ticket and let the airline guide me, using a sling or bjorn maybe to hold her snug during takeoff and landing? I just read today that the tether/harness contraptions aren’t allowed on many airplanes. Should we tote down an empty carseat just to use for bringing baby home? Should we take down a convertible carseat and have JediBoy use it on the way down (just so it’s not taking up cargo space) and have GuateGirl use it on the way back?

You see how carefully complicated I can make everything! Anyway, between that and a particularly heavy period bugging me today, I’ve been quite distracted.

But I *do* still have a dear 5 year old boy. We spent the morning at a local children’s museum, drawn there by a “Read for the Record” event for an outdoor reading of Ferdinand. Here’s a picture of the matador reading…

JediBoy then just stayed near me as I flitted about during the day. He spent a long, long, long time looking at books himself, a while playing with Magnetic Poetry on the fridge, and a chunk of time helping me clear extra recycling (bags of bags and some extra old newspapers) out of the dining area.

Tonight we went to a restaurant for dinner where they were having a special demonstration by a local karate school. He is *so* interested in martial arts… we must think about pursuing that for him. After our trip to Guatemala!

More Good News!

More good news tonight!

This is the time that is so exciting - the good news is starting to come faster and faster. : )

We got the call tonight for our “2nd DNA Authorization.” What this means is … our Guatemalan attorney has submitted all the Guatemalan paperwork (PGN documents and new birth certificate) to the US Embassy, and the Embassy has requested the 2nd DNA test.

Because our agency always gives us the longer wait times first, she told us that
-the request will arrive at our testing center within two weeks
-they will do the test and have the results within a week
-once the results are back at the Embassy, Pink should be issued within a week
-we will travel one to two weeks after receiving Pink

Now, this puts our longest reasonable wait time at 6 weeks. HOWEVER, she told me that the current *average* time from 2nd DNA Authorization (today) until Pink is 14-19 days, traveling within a week of Pink. This means that we can hope to get Pink between Oct. 3 and 8 - making our most likely travel week the week of Oct. 15.

Yay!

Wordless Wednesday, (Don’t) Talk Like a Pirate

(see more Wordless Wednesday)

Shiver Me Timbers!

Avast, me hearties! Today be TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY! For those of ye scurvy landlubbers who didn’t know, any holiday, however small, is reason to celebrate at our house.

Cap’n JediBoy come down this mornin’ to find a treasure chest and some of his pirate toys strewn about the playroom. Indignently, the Cap’n asks: Who made this mess? A good mudder never fesses up, so I stay silent. Soon enough, the Cap’n raises his eyes. There’s a sign here! The Cap’n looks t’me and I growl, “Aye! Right enough, a sign! Looks like a clue t’me, Cap’n.”

The shine hasn’t yet left his eyes, maties. It took him near on 20 minutes t’find all the clues and come upon a right good treasure chest nestled in the yard. Arr! The best surprise of all had t’be the pirate costume the First Mate & I picked up at yonder Dollar Store last night. A vest, eyepatch, bandana and pants for a buck, that be a real feat. The Cap’n’s been wearin’ it all day.

He also was sweet on the pirate crafts I’d done picked up on clearance the summer last. A wooden boat t’paint and assemble, a wooden pirate magnet to color, and a few other things for, in most cases, a mere 30 pieces of copper each. A good deal I’d found, and made the Cap’n right happy too.

I hadn’ta been t’the grocery last night, so the planned bag o’ Pirates Booty was missin’. Never mind that, the Cap’n made plans to raid the local provisions stockade, and we went out in costume to retrieve our pirate snacks. We had such fun stalkin’ the seagulls in the parkin’ lot and scarin’ the poor landlubbers who weren’t expectin’ t’see a pirate out today.

Arr! We could only eat those right good pirate snacks while watchin’ our new pirate film: Muppet Treasure Island. The Cap’n and I laughed right out loud, we did.

The Cap’n’s gone out t’play in the sun. I’ll be back, me hearties, with photos of our day.