We have spent a lot of time lately having fun… too much time.. I got sick. LOL
A couple of weeks ago, we went to Disneyland, and a week before that we were in San Diego to go to the zoo.
Every night of the week we have been out and about… Here are some pics..
Our group in California Adventure (the second part of Disneyland)….
This us at San Diego Zoo…
Saturday we leave for Vegas…..
A while back ago, I posted about an experience we had babysitting 5 kids. Our friends have 4 boys and 1 girl, ranging from 2 – 11. It was a greate experience.
I admitted in that post though, that it was for a few hours one night, and it nearly killed me. 
SO. The first weekend in December those same freinds are going away for 4 days and 3 nights… and we are watching the kids.
This will be a great “trial run” as it were, to get all the different facets of waht day-to-day parenting is like. I know it is not the same, but it will be quite a learning experience I am sure.
We’ll keep you posted, but if you don’t hear from me again, you know why. 
LOL
No matter how long, or short the “wait” is, I think it is brutal for those who are waiting. It gets even more brutal though, when the wait is something more of an enigma and this growing monster that makes you wonder if it will ever end.
Those of us who are waiting, meaning that you are LID and have nothing else to do but wait for the referral, are learning tough lessons about patience and disappointment. A lot of us, especially those of us who are in the June LID group, originally anticipated a 6 month or so wait. That means, that we would have been nearing a referral right now.
We are 5 months into the wait. AS it stands now, we still have another 12 months to wait. Not only is that twice what we thought it would be, but added to the 5 we have already waited it is 3 tiimes. A lot of the “waiting” parents get very upset about this. Not me though.
Don’t misunderstand. I can not even wait to go get my daughter and have her be a daily part of our life. I am not upset though, because I know when the time comes and I look into the eyes of the beautiful little girl who is now going to know me as Daddy, I will know that this wait helped bring us together.
It also makes this all seem a little more like pregnancy. A part of pregnancy and birth is chance. You conceive a child, and everything about that child, even the sex, is determined at the moment of conception. So for us, we have a more “sterile” and methodic process that we go through, but the varying wait times make it seem a little more chancy. I am not sure “chancy” is a word, but whatever.
I am SO wanting my daughter right now… I yearn for her, I imagine the time we will spend together, I see the smile on her face when I walk through the front door, I dream about going to the park, and to Disneyland, and having our freinds and family fawn over her, and realizing each and every day that she is my precious one, my baby, my little girl, my beloved one…
Of course, until then, I can wait, because I know that my precious one is out there, and that when the time comes, and they put that little girl into my arms that all this time spent waiting, and hoping and dreaming will have all been worth it, and I won’t even remember it.
Well… Blogger got weird on me. I kept trying to post new entries and it would not upload to my server… I sent them several notices about it, but they never got back to me… so… I am now blogging with WordPress.
To be honest, I like this ALOT better. I have a local interface that I installed from the downloaded wordpress engine. It is all written in PHP which I am fond of. Switching the templates to create new looks will be alot easier as well.
Pictures will be easier to add and remove as well. I have opted not to have a seperate page for photos anymore, and instead will just be adding them in the main blog under a photo category (another feature blogger doesn’t have).
So anyway… I am back after a couple of months of downtime and I will be posting more and more now that I have nothing to do but wait.
Well, at least not for a few days…
Laura and I are trying something new for awhile… We began to notice that EVERY night we would end up in front of the TV, when we didn’t have plans, and just veg out for the night.
I used to love to read and would make time to do so, but lately I never seem to be able to focus on reading anything for more then a few minutes… I blame TV for that. SO as a solution, we are not going to watch TV on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays. Day or night. The TV stays off. We have a few shows that we like to watch those days, but we also have TIVO, so we can just watch them later.
So… tonight I will be thinking about the book in front of me and trying not to think about the huge TV in the room…. LOL
I feel for the people who are LID late last year and they wait and wait and wait. OF course, we have a similar problem. Most of our friends are aware that we have been waiting for a 4 – 5 months now. Back in June when we got our LID we told people, “Oh, it will be another year before we can expect a referral”.
Now, that 5 months have gone by, we are still saying “Oh, it will be another year before we can expect a referral.” It get’s old saying that.
SO… last day of October… bring on the referrals!!
So, in the never ending battle to get the house ready for a child, we have decided to tackle the backyard…
A little history. We moved into this house about 2 years ago, from a house around the corner. We rent from a GREAT landlord who keeps the rent cheap as long as we take care of the place and pay the rent on time. Well, the house we are in now, had a famiily in it that tore the place apart. They had a huge pitbull in the backyard that they used for fighting.. It was so sad. We reported them a few times, but without proof they wouldn’t do anything about it.
They also used the backyard to grow marijuana… They had rows of corn, and in between the rows of corn were rows of marijuana… NICE neighbors.. We finally convinced the landlord to evict them and then moved in ourselves. We completely redid the entire inside of the house, part of the deal we made for the rent.
The backyard was mostly dirt, with some nasty grass towards the back. We spent about a year, wanting to do something about it, but never got around to it. Finally about 8 months ago, I decided it was time, so I went in the back and used round up to kill all the grass. Did that a few times over a couple of weeks, and then used a sod cutter to get all the grass out. SO then I had this completely dirt yard. much better.. LOL
The I marked off where I wanted to put the patio, got a shovel and dug a 4″ deep 15 X 15 foot area for the patio.. WOW. I am not designed for this type of work.. LOL
Well, then work picked up and other stuff got in the way and I just couldn’t get to the yard. About a month later the backyard was all weeds. Then a month after that the yard was weeds that are taller then I am. The dogs would run back in to the yard and just disappear. It was hilarious. We would just see the weeds rustling where they were running around. I am sure they loved it, but what we didn’t love were the fleas.. They were infested quick, so I had to deal with it. So I got a weedwacker and went after the weeds. It was great. I looked like the Terminator with that huge gun that shoots about 1000 bullets a second… 5 hours later, you could see the backyard again..
So another few weeks went by and I started talking to a friend of mine who does landscaping. He says, “alright, were doing this. Get your stuff together and this weeked we are hitting it.”.
So over the next month we got the rest of the weeds out , took out the old cement slab (a 6 x 6 2″ slab that was just poured on top of the ground. I lifted it up and hit it with a sledge and it broke into about 30 peices..). I borrowed a tiller from a friend of mine and we tilled the ground up and put down some top soil, and then tilled that into the ground.
At that point we had a great area for the sod to go down on, but first we needed to put sprinklers in. So in 4 hours we trenched the area and laid all the pvc pipe and 9 sprinkler heads connected to two valves. In the front main section we have 4 sprinklers that shoot about 20 feet. They are in the corners and cover the whole front section of the yard. Then in the back corner we have 5 heads that cover that section. The patio area is not touched… so cool.. We could actually sit on the patio with the sprinklers going without getting wet at all. ( I imagine hot summer days, me sitting on the patio under the canopy drinking a beer, while my little girl runs in circles playing in the sprinklers… ahhh the good life.)
In my next post, I will tell you all about the nightmare that is ordering pavers from Lowes online….
OK – well as some of you know, my wife forced me to go with her to IKEA to buy a new wardrobe thingy (called a PAX since IKEA doesn’t name anything the way it make sense.)
So Friday night at 7 PM we left to drive to Costa Mesa (about 30 minutes away) to buy this thing. Now mind you we had our eye on this for more then a year… We just have been waiting to get the house to a point where we felt comfortable buying it.
So off we go. Since I was with the wife and since IKEA is designed to make you walk through the ENTIRE fraken store before they let you escape, we were there until about 10 PM.
So 3 hours and $450.00 later I am loading 9 foot long boxes that weigh about 300 pound in through the back window of my Hyundai..
We get home at about 10:30 or so and Laura decides that after a year of waiting for this wardrobe that she just can not wait one more night for the wardrobe to be assembled…. OH MY….
Now – here in California, where it is supposed to be 70 degrees year round, we are in the heat wave of the century, like many of you… So for the next 2 hours in a 90 degree house I am try to put this thing together with the instructions they give you with the fat pear shaped guy who visually walks you through with no written instructions… I don’t like that little fat man!!!
At about 12:30 AM we have all the drawers assembled and the main structure of the corner unit assembled. I have drunk about 3 gallons of water, and then sweat it all out, and am just about wiped out.. We have all the pieces of our bedroom on our bed and in the surrounding area, to clear space for the wardrobe unit (which did I mention is 8 feet tall) to be assembled. So I tell Laura – “OK, help me stand this thing up.”
Now – if I were in a movie, I would have paused right there, rewound and spent just another few minutes giving that statement a little more thought. Of course I did not have that option.
So we go to lift this thing up, neither of us coherent enough at this point to realize that I had forgotten to put the cardboard backing on the unit.
So, let’s spend a moment discussing this cardboard backing. Here is a piece of furniture that weighs about 200 pounds (with out all the accoutrement’s) and apparently this flimsy, folded, molded, and veneered piece of cardboard is the vital lynch pin to keep the whole unit together. But I digress.
We go to lift it up and about half way to being in a standing position the whole thing flattens out and pieces of pressed wood go flying in all directions. The unit is COMPLETELY ruined and beyond salvaging.
LONG LONG LONG pause and Laura looks at the unit and then at me and her face reads like I have just broken all the legs of her puppy right in front of her.
At this point, I used all the words that my mother used to stick a bar of soap in my mouth for using in the past, and decided that that was a good time to call it a night and go to bed. Of course, as you read earlier, all the pieces of our bedroom are on our bed and in the surrounding area…. So where to sleep? We could have just moved everything, but at this point the only thing that we wanted to do was kill that little fat man from the instruction booklet….
So Laura slept on the couch and I slept in the recliner… Well slept is a subjective word at this point. I laid there a few hours falling in and out of consciousness.
Saturday Morning….
As I wake up to the sound of my phone ringing for the second time. It is 7 AM and I have not slept at all. I am not 20 minutes late for a meeting and the phone is likely the person that I am supposed to be meeting with. I let it go to voice mail since I am not sure the sound of me waking up will add to this person�s mood at this point.
So I deal with my business in the morning and that afternoon figure I need to have a plan on how to deal with this mess…
FORTUNATELY, IKEA has a wonderful return policy and since we have all blamed the little fat man from the directions they tell me to bring the unit back and they will happily exchange it for a new, none destroyed one. So at 2 PM I am off to IKEA again, with a 9 foot long shredded box filled with destroyed pressed pine, which sticks out the back window about 3 feet..
Return process is rather uneventful, although there are A LOT of people who have decided they didn�t like their IKEA purchase, so I am there for at least an hour. When I go to load my new non-destroyed unit into the car, the helpful IKEA fellow that helped me load up, who didn’t look anything like the little fat man from the directions, tells me that maybe I should attach a flag on it since it sticks out so far.. After three trips with these things in my car, I tell him, as politely as possible, that this will be fine as is.
So, Saturday afternoon at 4 PM I roll home again to start this whole nightmare process over again. Fortunately this time, I ignore the fat little man and his clearly sub par advice, and just build the unit as logic would dictate. Two hours, 3 gallons of sweat, and more curse words then I want to admit too, we have the frame of our new corner wardrobe unit up and standing proudly in our bedroom.
Now, we just need to install the drawers, shelves, and clothes rods and the corner piece and we are all set…. Due to my need for beer at this point and our prearranged dinner plans, we decide that can wait till Sunday.
Sunday Morning….
Since I didn’t sleep well on Friday night, and Saturday night I was up late drinking beer, and watching the lightening out over the pacific ocean on the balcony of the Belmont brewing company, I was more then willing to sleep in this morning….. My wife had other plans..
Still bubbling over from excitement, she has decided to wake up early and attempt to install the drawers herself….
So for the rest of today, I have been moving furniture, installing lights, drawers, shelves, and other such sundries.
Now… I have 6 empty Guinness bottles next to me, and wife who is still Giddy as she organizes all her clothes and makes a new list for what she needs at IKEA….
So help me if that little fat man shows up, he may not make it.
You have heard that before….
Since we are done with the paper chase and have started the “wait” for our referral, we will likely be heard saying that quite a bit.
So in the next months while we wait for our baby to arrive, we will be remodeling the house, going on a trip (maybe) and redoing our back yard.
So in our first step to better our living space we have purchased a wardrobe for Laura to use in our bedroom… I am going to post about the escapades shortly.
Just got an email from our agency… We are officially Logged In…
So we were DTC – on June 23rd.
We were LID on June 27. Woo hoo!!!!
You can’t see me but I am doing my happy dance right now..
My wife, who is coming back from San Francisco as we speak, is on the side of the 5 freeway doing her happy dance as well.
So, if we can just get those referrals pumping again, we will be on our way to parenthood….