hello world

It has been a little while since I have posted anything. I know that my reading public has been anxiously waiting for the latest news in my life. Sorry Kimball. My life seems to still be consumed by the same things. Between foster care, work, and church, there isn't much time for anything else. I think that I tend to say that a lot.

Foster care has been living up to its craziness these last few months. After Christmas, birth mom was doing well in her rehab program and was doing well with her visits (definition of good = bobo doesn't die during the visit) and so court determined that birth mom should get two overnight visits during the month. That lasted for a couple of months, because none of the overnight visits (actually any of the visits) went very well. Bobo would tend to come home and take three days to recover. Because of those struggles, the court decided to stop overnight visits (a full on miracle) and finally recognized that even though birth mom has stayed sober in rehab since last June, she still struggles to do little things, like feed her son and put him to sleep. At the beginning of March, birth mom moved to a new rehab which gave her a little more freedom. After a couple of weeks there, she relapsed the last weekend in March and left rehab. This all came as quite a shock because as far as her sobriety, she had been doing so well for about 9 months. Since she took off from rehab, everything has changed. The visits were scaled back drastically and were moved to the county visitation center. The biggest change though is that we haven't seen birth mom since the fallout of her relapse and leaving rehab. She hasn't come to any of the visits. While this is definitely a positive for us and bobo staying with us, it bodes all sorts of not good for birth mom. It seemed even before this that the county was saying that birth mom was running out of time since bobo has now been with us for going on 14 months and birth mom has not made any improvements in giving the little fatling even the most basic of care. So to sum it up, things are moving well for us, but we are conflicted because we don't want birth mom to be where she is.

Our lives do include more than just living the dream called foster care. We were able to take a much needed break from reality and travel out of the perpetual cold called "Rochester" to the sunny delight of Gilbert, Arizona to see family and relax during the middle of February. I won't try and recreate the magic that happened there. Lisa captures it well here and here. All that I will add is that fun was had and good food was eaten, but I'm fairly certain that if you know me, then the good food part probably doesn't come as too much of a surprise.

February was a rather big month for us. Besides the trip to Arizona-land, we also celebrated our 7th anniversary. This was our 6th anniversary celebrated here in Rochacha. Crazy. I remember meeting couples that have lived here for 25-30 years and they'd talk about how they moved to Rochester for school 30 years ago and ended up staying. Little did I think that we'd still be here at this point in time. Don't get me wrong, we really like Rochester and have made good friends here, we are just far from family. Scottie just needs to hurry it up and figure out how to beam us wherever we want, when we want.

The last big to do in our shortest month has to do with our beloved little fatticus. On the tenth, we danced around like fools (that was mostly just Lisa, I would never do anything like that) and celebrated the fact that ciccia nostra had been with us for a year. Lisa wrote about it here.

Life continues to move forward in spite of all of our efforts. Lisa and I both love the stage that bobo is at right now. He is getting into everything, has started walking (and thus falling and testing the strength of his cranium and other facial features) and has grown quite the head of hair. It is funny and interesting to me how much of a personality bobo has developed. He thinks it is the funniest thing in the world to play peekaboo as well as to have you chase him. He will run/walk/fall/crawl from you, stop and look back to make sure that you see him run/walk/fall/crawling away and that you are planning on chasing after him. He then will take off again, looking back to make sure that you are following. I know this is riveting information for all of you. In other news, the cow jumped over the moon, just read that and wanted to share. My reading material has changed of late as well as my music selection. I tend to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle" or some other hip hop tune for the entertainment value that it gives to Lisa.

Now that I'm caught up, I can hurry up and wait another couple of months before I put fingers to keyboard to record our most precious moments and memories for future posterity, friends, and the occasional random Internet stranger/blog stalker. Happy times.