More light table fun - and an update

I've been keeping up my promise to "try" to do more activities in the evening rather than just watch tv. I haven't so much been keeping up with my promise to chronicle it on this blog, largely because the activities we're doing aren't all new things. We've done some more balloons in the bathtub, some more sensory table work, and LOTS of light table fun.

Tonight we colored salt and then played with it on the table. I just put salt and a few drops of food coloring in a baggy and we shook shook shook it up until we had some blue, some green, and some yellow colored salts. I then put them in three clear food containers and set up the (as my favorite blog would say) "invitation).

It was really pretty fun. We drew some letters and she attempted to trace them, and she just generally had fun rubbing the salt on the table and mixing the colors.

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And an update: Monday night we went to an information session with a local adoption agency to learn more about their domestic adoption program. We left both very happy with this agency, and we're getting the vital documents together and filling out the application. This may actually happen! I'll be honest: I'm a little bit scared out of my mind, but also very, very excited. I can only hope that our next child is as wonderful as Charlotte!

First Impressions

Charlotte has started doing impressions of people. I think the first one was of one of her daycare teachers, Miss Lucy: "I'm Miss Lucy, and I don't know what this is. What is this?" She has also done Carmen (from Spy Kids... yes, seriously), her grandmother, her aunt, a giant, and a few other people both real and imagined. Her lip does something funny and her voice gets exaggerated and kind of deep and then she starts.

Here's one of her being her Aunt Kandi:

The transcript: "I'm Aunt Kandi! Come over here and give me a hug." And then it degenerates into something about breaking her knee and her elbow lol; she doesn't have a long attention span for much of anything, and long car rides don't help. We were on our way back from a family weekend 4 hours from home, which I'm sure I'll write some more about soon. Please forgive the very weird video quality; I discovered as I was recording that I must have smeared a little ranch from Char's snack on my cell phone camera lens part.

I wiped it off and got this one of Charlotte pretending to be a giant who's going to eat me:

Starting Over?

Look around. If you have a calendar on your wall, glance in its direction. Does it have 4 very large numbers on it? Perhaps 2-0-1-2? That's because it is now the year 2012! Seriously, it really is!

The new year was the time frame Alan and I gave each other to start talking about adopting again. If I'm being honest, I hadn't hoped it would come to this point. I know it's wrong, but that doesn't stop me from wishing that Charlotte's birthparents would have another baby; if they did, the state would step in and, theoretically, we would get the call to foster and eventually adopt the baby. And since Charlotte is INCREDIBLE, soooooooo much of the unknowns would be... less unknown. And less scary.

BUT it didn't happen that way. And Charlotte turns 3 this year and we turn 37. Which is OLD, dammit! Twenty years ago, you know, more than half my life ago (!!!!!), I really believed I would have my first child LONG before I was 30, if not be done having kids by then. At the very latest, I wanted to be done having kids by 35. I also felt like I was meant to have a lot of kids, and there was NO WAY I was going to have an only child. Well, tell the universe your plans and it laughs in your face. In my case, the universe spit on my plans.

At some point, I have to feel done. And honestly I'm getting closer to the point of being okay with the idea of "one and done". I'm not saying I'm there, but I don't think it would feel like a tragedy. It would have been tragic to me to live without kids at all, but having an only child is less tragic and more mildly disappointing.

Anyway, Alan and I are starting to research domestic adoption. Foster adoption was so difficult with the state that we don't really want to go that way again (unless a biological sibling of Charlotte's does pop up), and international adoption has never really felt right to us. So we're investigating domestic adoption. Back before the state approved us, when we briefly looked into DA, I felt drawn to either private adoption with an attorney or Catholic Charities. As luck would have it, Catholic Charities has an info session on the 23rd. If I remember correctly from 3 years ago, they only accept a certain number of potential adopters into their pool at a time and let them get matched with birthparents and adopt babies until there are only a few couples left before they add people. So (since I know their fees are reasonable, they are very ethical, and we should qualify) the big question will be when can we expect to be in the program and ready to be shown to expectant parents?

Internally, I need a limit. And I think that limit is 2012. If we can start the process in 2012, and by start the process, I mean start the homestudy (which should only take a few months for a private adoption, at most) and be ready to be shown to birthparents within or shortly after 2012, then I feel like I want to start down the road. If there's a 2 year wait to get in the program, though, I feel like this may not be the path for us, and perhaps we'll have a meeting with an adoption attorney in the area (who charges $250/hour to meet with her even the first time, so we'll definitely wait until after the Catholic Charities info session).

But... I'm still holding out hope of a phone call... (Can the easy thing EVER happen for us?)

Balloon Mania

Aside from some cutting, pasting, and tracing (which, by the way, is a TOTAL FAIL at this stage, the tracing part anyway), the only new fun activity to note happened tonight in the bath. We'll call them "sensory balloons" (once again stolen from playathomemom3.blogspot.com, best blog ever). Tonight we used 4 balloons: one filled with hot water, one filled with cold water, one filled with green food coloring water, and one filled with yellow food coloring water. Thank goodness I didn't overdo the dye!

I think I will definitely do this again someday soon, only maybe put small items in the balloons if I can manage. Perhaps a letter-shaped sponge, or some jingle bells, or if I'm very brave, some water beads; I just have to make sure I get them all out so none go down the drain. Thankfully somewhere I have a fish net :).

Here are some of the PG-13 pics. Sorry the quality is poor; I didn't feel comfortable bringing the good camera into the bathroom, so husband took them with his phone:
(Seriously, how stinking cute is this???)

I had to do the first one, and it was pretty cool!

I just held the others in place.

New Year's Goals

I won't exactly call them "resolutions" because I have no belief that I'll succeed completely, so I'll just call them "goals". The first is to not go overboard for kiddo for birthday and Christmas this year. My mom was a stay-at-home-mom, but she did some work on the side cleaning houses and things like that, and every penny she earned went to our Christmas and birthday gifts. It ended up being, in my opinion, excessive. Even as a little kid, maybe around 11 years old, I knew it was excessive, and yet here I was at Christmas with more wrapped gifts than she could even open in a sitting. Sigh. Must do better this year!

The other goal is to do more activities after work/daycare on weeknights and do less "sit in front of the tv like mindless idiots". She still watches less than most kids, but it's still for a bit nearly every night, and I think most mornings too. Her newest obsession is "Spy Kids", which is just weird considering her age, but she wants to watch it ALL THE TIME. And I was very sick last week so we watched it, or half of it at a time, every day.

So my goal is more fun learning/experiential activities, and I am also going to do my best to log it in my blog. Tonight's activity: Water beads! What are water beads, you ask? They're tiny little beads that expand to hold water. Really they're used for flower arranging and things like this, but they're non-toxic and a lot of fun for kids. They are not to be swallowed (despite being non-toxic, they do absorb water which makes me nervous) and are not to go down the drain as they can clog plumbing, but they are a lot of fun. I read about it on my favorite website, Play At Home Mom.

This activity certainly didn't have to be done on the DIY light table, but I find a lot of great activities seem even better when there's light involved, especially when it involves colors. And light (when not flickering or flashing and when not accompanied by electronic music and laughter) is very calming, so it makes for a nice end of day activity.

See how tiny the water beads are at first:

It took quite a while for the beads to absorb water, so we checked on it a few times over the course of an hour or so. Meanwhile we played dress-up and "put EVERYTHING and EVERYONE to bed". And, sigh, watched just a few minutes of "Spy Kids"...

While we checked on the beads, we discussed how they felt. Were they hard or squishy? Were they large or small? What happened when you squish them in your fingers? "Mommy! I popped it!"

And finally, since I discussed with her a few times that she cannot put the "colors" in her mouth, she naturally really wanted to put something in her mouth. So we both compromised on a colorful pipe cleaner.

(Yes, she got semi-nakey by this point. The better to play dress-up!)