the eelfang chronicles

Betsy’s employer had their annual party to celebrate the Mexican army’s unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 (or something like that). Because the farm employs a number of workers with Mexican or other Hispanic backgrounds, they throw a nice party every May to help celebrate heritage and to herald the coming spring.

My favorite part was the food – chile rellenos, tamales, fresh hand-made tortillas, charcoal-grilled carne asade, queso fresco, ceviche… I’m getting hungry again just thinking about it. Seth enjoyed the live band (he kept walking right up to them and dancing), but his favorite part was definitely the mud puddles. We were all pretty dirty by the time we got home.

We went down to Portland last weekend.  The plan was for me to attend a Blazers game in the evening, and for the whole family to spend the day relaxing.  Ah, the best laid plans…

The Blazers game didn’t happen, unfortunately.  I had put off buying tickets for a while – every time I remembered and tried to make the purchaset, either Seth was fussing and wanted me off the computer, or I was at work and my credit card was in my other pants at home.  By the time I finally got around to it, they were sold out.

The morning before we drove down, Betsy’s voice was raspy and starting to fade.  Before the weekend was over, she would lose her voice almost completely.  That, along with the rest of her cold symptoms, made the trip rough on her.

Have we mentioned recently that Seth is a 16-month old baby (and not an adult)?  Because that’s also an important part of the story.  It was tough on him to be in the car for 3 hour trips down south, outside for an hour or so, and then back in the car to go to dinner or to a place we wanted to visit.  And when we did get out of the car, he was strapped into the stroller.  He didn’t get nearly as much time to run around and explore the world on his own terms as he normally gets, and he let us know about that.

Fortunately, we had an excellent and gracious host in my friend Vic, who let us stay overnight at his house, led us to some great places for food (The Kennedy School and Pine State Biscuits), and was a formidable Mario Kart foe when he and I stayed up until midnight racing (with Scott P joining us from the deep south for the first hour or so).  He was patient with a sick Betsy, a cranky Seth, and a frazzled Todd, and we are very grateful for his company.

I’m glad we went down, and we’ve definitely learned some lessons about travel with a toddler (minimize  car time where possible, make plans for naps/snacks however inconvenient, don’t let Betsy get sick).  It wasn’t the relaxing and laid-back weekend we envisioned, but we had fun anyway and it was good to see Vic.

Extremely long night last night. The poor man is coming down with some sort of sickness – fever of just over 100 degrees, runny nose, and you could tell that he was tired much earlier in the night than he usually is. He fell asleep relatively quickly, but woke up every 30-60 minutes after that. He would then proceed to cry very loudly for the next 15 minutes, refusing to be soothed. We are still co-sleeping with him, which is both nice in situations like this (we don’t have to get out of bed to run to his room) and tough (both parents are awake and can’t take shifts, although I tried my best to fall back asleep when Betsy was holding him).

Betsy believes this is some sort of cold/flu, and thinks his crying sounds sick. I’m wondering if this is a large group of teeth all coming in at once, as it’s been a while since his last tooth, teething can cause runny noses, and his cries sound pained to me. Whatever it is, it’s not a lot of fun.

So, I’m at work with about 3 hours total sleep from last night, and in the middle of one of the busiest periods I’ve ever had at this job. Betsy had a few more hours to be in bed this morning, but she doesn’t fall back asleep as easily as I do, so I suspect she probably got less total sleep, and she has a far more physically demanding day ahead of her. It’s going to be a long day for both of us.

A while ago, I ran across the idea of Soup Swaps. Here’s the deal:

1. Make six quarts of soup (soup without potatoes and non-cream-based works best)
2. Show up at the event, and bring the soup in six containers that you don’t mind giving away
3. Swap the soup! At the end of the night, you’ll have six containers of other peoples’ soup to take home, freeze, and eat!

Last night, we hosted our very first swap, and it was so much fun! We ran the swapping like a fantasy draft (i.e., drawing the picking order at random, round one people pick in order, then every other round people pick in reverse order), and it worked quite well. Though really, all the soups looked and sounded so fantastic, I would have been happy with any method of swapping. A few people got really creative and brought muffins, home-fried tortillas and chile paste to accompany their soups.

If I had to do it over again–and we probably will!–I might try either lessening the quantity of soup to make to, say, 4 quarts. Either that, or leave the quantity up to the individual, and then they get to get back as much soup as they brought. Then again, it was cool to see 54 quarts of soup sitting on our kitchen table all at once. It also ended up being the perfect night for the swap because today is the first really cold day of Fall, and I enjoyed a tasty bowl of homemade (but not by me!) chicken dumpling soup for lunch, and have a freezer full of five more varieties! Yum!

I’ll be posting the recipes here so they’re easy to refer to.

A quick update on our financial situation, as outlined originally in this post…

We applied with both of our mortgage companies for a load modification. Our second mortgage (20% of the loan) responded within a few weeks, and offered us a temporary relief program that cut that payment in half for a little over a year, with no strings attached. That was a pretty sweet deal, and it’s definitely taken some of the pressure off. It wasn’t enough to get our monthly income/expense ledger back in the black, but the red number at the bottom is a lot smaller.

Our first mortgage company has had our application for about 4 months now, and according to our last conversation with them, they are supposed to be contacting us “any day now”. All the paperwork is in order, and they’ve confirmed that we made it through the initial screening – at this point, it’s just in the the hands of the main decision makers, and they’ll be calling us with an offer shortly.

Meanwhile, Betsy and I have been daydreaming…

Reading the book Your Money or Your Life has led us to rethink some of our fundamental assumptions about housing. What is the real value of our house to us (over an apartment)?

• It’s an investment, but a highly illiquid asset at a time when liquidity is needed, and one that has performed extremely poorly recently with a cloudy outlook for the near future.
• It’s a garden we can design and maintain, but we have neither the time/energy to maintain it or the finances to buy new plants.
• It’s a place we can call our own, and loads of stress that we can call our own as well.
• It’s a lawn that Seth can run around on, making things like visits to the zoo, fun toys, trips to visit family, or someday even preschool unaffordable.

And the list goes on from there. Buying a house is a “thing that young families do”, but does it make sense for us currently? Are we getting appropriate value for the amount of life energy we’re pouring into work and stress?

We’ve allowed ourselves to daydream about other options. What if we lived in an apartment in the Mill Creek area? Drives to visit our friends would be 5 minutes instead of 45, and 30 minutes to my parents instead of 70. We’d be able to set aside a small sum for personal purchases (dinners out, toys, new clothes), increase our charitable giving and still be able to save substantially for the future. We’d be able to focus on the values that are core to our lives – fellowship with family and friends – and not spend that time/energy worrying about a piece of land. I’d miss White Center/West Seattle something awful – the food and culture around here is fantastic – but we value people, not places, and we could always have weekends set aside to come down here for grocery shopping, tacos from a taco van and ice cream from Full Tilt. Betsy noted that she’s trying to not get in a “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” mindset, but it’s easy to do when you wouldn’t be responsible for watering, fertilizing and mowing that green grass.

In a way, we’re almost hoping that the mortgage company refuses to make a deal, and our hand is forced. What would it look like if we stopped paying our mortgage and lived for “free” for 10-12 months while the foreclosure process went through, saved up all that money that we had been paying every month, and then moved into an apartment with a savings account that had a decent pad in it? How badly would that limit our options for the future, and would that be worse than the limits we’re facing on our present? Obviously, there would be a lot to consider if that was the only option available to us… but the silver linings on that particular dark cloud are interesting to think about.

We’re still waiting for the mortgage company to come to a decision, and the most likely scenario is still one in which we stay in our house for a while yet to come. We’ll need to make some decisions about what makes the most sense for us, for our values, and for our future.

1. Betsy reminds me that Seth is performing science experiments. Does gravity keep on working the same way every time I drop something? This is a good idea to keep in mind, and I realize that all of the work we’re doing is helping him learn about the world around him. At the same time, though, I can’t help thinking that there is a dual-nature to this experiment, one with a more psychological bent: how many times in one meal can I drop the same spoon on the floor before Mom and Dad get tired of picking it up? One drop every 20 seconds for 10 minutes is about the maximum so far.

2. A recent post on DadCentric resulted in some interesting conversations around the house. You can read the post for yourself, but in essence the question is this: if a bully is harassing your child, and they’ve tried everything (asking the bully to stop, avoiding them, appealing to an authority figure, ignoring them, etc), is it ever okay to advise the child to punch the bully? Curious to hear your thoughts.

(Standard word-of-warning: DadCentric uses naughty words from time to time and wouldn’t be appropriate to be read out loud in a workplace.)

Before I leave for work in the morning, I always stop by the bedroom to give Betsy a goodbye kiss and see Seth one more time. Normally, Seth is asleep at that time, and as I know that any touch from me will wake him up, I restrain myself and just whisper a few words to him.

This morning, when I walked in, Seth was wide awake and murmuring softly to himself as he scanned the ceiling and walls. When he saw me, though, his eyes lit up and he got a big grin on his face. Oh man… That’s definitely going to keep me warm at work today.

After kissing him goodbye and leaving the room, he started fussing more vocally, and Betsy had to wake up and feed him. She wasn’t particularly enthused to be waking up at 6am with the very strong possibility that Seth wouldn’t be going back to sleep again. I wish I could have taken him with me to work today, and given Betsy a day to take naps for hours and hours…

The evening before I went back to work for the first time, I was holding Seth in my arms. As I looked down at him, I realized that I was going to miss a major portion of his life. If I’m away from home 10 hours a day (including commute), 5 days a week, and sleeping 7 hours a night, I’m only in the house and awake for 40% of the week. That means there’s a very good chance that I’ll miss his first steps, that I’ll miss his first words, and so many other milestones in his life.

For the first time in my life, going to work is filled with a very real sense of loss. I’d always preferred weekend and vacation days over the work days, of course, but the deal seemed pretty equitable on the whole – I’d give up a third of my week in order to have a nice place to sleep for another third of the week and food, entertainment and other opportunities for the other third.

Leaving Seth at home, though, changes the balance of the deal significantly. Suddenly, the thought of building a cabin in the woods and living off the land doesn’t sound so crazy anymore. Could we live off of nuts, berries and whatever vegetables we could convince the land to grow? Could I finally write that novel I’ve been meaning to start for over a decade now, and find that big publishing deal that would allow me to stay at home and write? Or are there any tech companies out there who really need to contract out some work to a independent consultant with a wide-ranging but not significantly deep skill set?

I’m not sure if I’d be ready to work at home even if that was a choice, though. I have to admit that the first day I got on the bus to ride to work, I spent the first 30 minutes just marveling over the fact that I could just sit there, listen to music, and read a book, and that I didn’t have any diapers to change or dishes to clean. It felt pretty great, actually. I started feeling guilty about feeling great, though, and by the time the bus ride was over, I was missing my family so much I almost turned around and got on the next bus back home. I still feel that weird mix now, after a couple of weeks back at work – every night, I can’t wait for the bus to get home so I can see Seth and Betsy, but I also wish the bus would slow down and give me time to watch one more episode of Battlestar Galactica or read another chapter in my book.

But every time I come home, I vow to never leave the house again. Holding Seth in my arms after a long day at work can only be described as a rapturous experience – the amount of love I have for the little guy is overwhelming at times. It’s the highlight of my day every day. At the end of the day, when Betsy has gone off to get a headstart on sleep, and I’m walking him around in circles in the living room/kitchen, I sometimes wish that he would stay awake just a little longer for me so that I could keep looking into his eyes.

Looking into his little face, I realize why I work – it’s no longer for me, for Betsy, or for our mortgage. Everything I do is focused on making a better life for him.

My favorite people ever

As you’ve probably noticed by now (unless you are reading this via an RSS feed), we updated the look of the blog over the weekend. My hope is to update the picture in the manner on a monthly, or at least quarterly, basis as Seth grows bigger and bigger.

I also changed the subtitle of the blog from “An Adoption Blog” to “A Family Blog”. There’s a few reasons why, and they seem interesting enough to warrant mentioning:

1) If all I was writing about was Seth’s adoption, we’d run out of topics in the very near future. The adoption process isn’t 100% over yet (topic for another post), but the finish line is definitely in site. But the process of being a family has just begun.

2) The old title felt almost like this blog was speaking to the topic of adoptions in general. There’s two sub-reasons why that doesn’t work – a) I hardly have the knowledge or authority to write about adoptions in general, and b) our adoption was so extraordinarily open and positive that it feels like we’re setting false expectations for the rest of the adoptive community if we represent our experience of “amazing, wonderful, emotionally and physically healthy birthfamily builds relationship with lucky adoptive parents” as the norm.

Also, can you tell that I’m writing this post during work hours? The part of my brain that segments thoughts into list items and sub-list items is on full active duty right now. I promise to return to the meandering paragraphs that go nowhere which define my style next time I write.

3) There are certain terms and/or uses of language that are generally looked down upon in the adoptive community. For example, it’s considered “correct” to say that a child “was adopted”, rather than that he “is adopted”. It’s the difference between considering the adoption to be an important event that brought the family together, and considering the adoption to be a defining characteristic of who the child is. The third reason for the title change follows those same lines – if this blog is primarily about Seth and our family and Aria’s family and how we all relate to each other, the adoption was a very important moment in that history, but it’s not the definition of who we are, what we mean to each other and what we write about.

So that’s why we changed it.

More pictures coming soon! But I should get back to work now…

Seth Ari was born today at 12:34PM.

He’s 8 lbs, 1 oz, length 19 1/2 inches, has brown hair, and is perfect.

Everyone came through just fine, more details to come as soon as
Todd gets back to his computer!

Merry Christmas!!!!