First this then I'll get to the good stuff...

We have had a lovely few weeks since Thanksgiving with us first being in birthday mode and then Christmas mode. Usually I find this time of year to be totally hectic and nearly impossible to manage as I said here last year, but for some reason things this year seem to be joyously under control.

Before I share all that other good stuff, I'd like to start with a quiz.

Based on the following 3 pictures, can you guess what happened last night at our house?








Yep, L tossed her cookies at 11:15 pm last night a swift 60 minutes after my eyelids closed and proceeded to puke every half hour until 6:30 am today. SJ and I sat with her in shifts but really the only one who got any sleep was her brother B. I am now waiting for the other other shoe to drop...who's going to get it next????? Much to SJ's amusement I greeted the morning by walking around the house humming Christmas songs and liberally spraing this....





I have mixed feelings about who will be next in the house to fall victim b/c I could stand to lose 5 lbs but really hate throwing up. We'll see what the fates have in store for us!

Tagged!

The lovely M over at Chinese Take out tagged me a few days ago so here goes...

8 Random Things About Myself....

8. I have small feet for my height. I am 5'7" and wear a size 6.5. In college people poked fun asking if I had trouble balancing on my feet.

7. I have been accused of making funny faces a lot. Of course I can't exactly verify this as I don't have mirrors everywhere.

6. I have a stutter in my sneeze. Meaning, when I sneeze, I "achoo, choo, choo choo". It never ceases to amuse my husband.

5. I have a purse that I named. I have always been a handbag whore until I found Priscilla. She is a Michael Kors bag that I fell in love with last winter and have found myself to now be a monogamous handbag owner.

4. I have had arthritis since I was a teenager. It is only getting worse.

3. When my husband and I first moved in together we lived across the street from the USS Constitution. It resides in the Charlestown Navy Yard and there are a few apartment building there too. It was fun to drive home every day and see those tall masts.

2. I did three terms abroad in college. Sophomore year I went to Florence, Italy to study art history. Junior year I went to DC (okay so it wasn't abroad but it was a term away) to work at the National Endowment for the Arts in a division of the NEA that no longer exists. It was the same division that funded Robert Mapplethorpe so being amongst the controversy was fun. Then Senior year I went to Rennes, France to study french.

1. At the age of 9 I started going to French Camp. It is actually part of a group of summer camps for kids run by Concordia College in Minnesota. They are now called the International Language Villages and have something like 11 international village summer camps. You do all the regular camp stuff like archery and canoing but you do it in a foreign language. You get new name and you eat food from the country you are supposed to be in. For instance, my names at French camp over the 5 years I went included, Paulette Chateaubriand & Angelique Belgique. Now of course those sound like stripper names to me. You could always tell when it was close to meal time b/c the whole camp smelled like freshly baked baguette. Yeah, not bad for summer camp. Two summers I did additional sessions at Chinese camp and German Camp. The best things about those camps were a) learning how to use chop sticks like a pro and b) eating damn good gummy bears every day. Now these camps offer family weeks where you can go with your kids to introduce them to another culture. I have often considered going back with my kids. Here is a link if you are curious....

Tickled Pink Talk... tag...you're it.

How NYC are you?

I am a born and raised Boston Girl so it amazes me how much I connect with NYC (except when it comes to baseball). SJ and I lived there for 3 years after we got married and it is in my blood. Here is what the blog quiz told me...

You Are 72% NYC

You are probably a real New Yorker, though there's a good chance you really live on Long Island.

How NYC Are You?

Which is funny b/c I am not in NYC any more so the LI thing made me laugh!

Smile and this too shall pass...

Yes, admittedly I am very grumpy. I actually have a few things to be grumpy about other than the adoption timeline. However, no one is in harms way so I'll just have to deal. Luckily for me, my mother came to the grumpy girl's rescue tonight with these very funny ads:

Deutsche bank
Ikea and the vibrator
Jenny Stripping
You could jack your car up with that.
Snoring Spouse

Bone me.

I'm in a mood. I'm in one of those don't f*ck with me moods. My USCIS paperwork is up for renewal as my 171H expires on 11/30. CCAA continues to match 1 week of referrals each month and I made the mistake of counting how many weeks there are between 12/8/05 (where they are now) and 7/6/06 (my LID). 33 weeks. Which at this rate means roughly 33 months. From now. I am so in a lapel grabbing mood. The kind when you just want to grab someone's shirt, shak'em up a bit while shouting "what the hell's going on????" On Monday we had to make the decision to meet with our social worker to update our homestudy for hundreds and hundreds of dollars so we could go waste a day of our lives getting refingerprinted and re-file our I-600A. "Bone me" is all I could think to myself. Even better, lets take about a grand - for fun, how about in all singles- ball it up - stick it in the fireplace and light it on fire. Cuz really? really? CCAA you gonna get to us inside of 18 months?? Really??? Yeah, I thought not! So what, I spend all this time and money on paperwork only to have to re-do it 18 months from now when it expires YET AGAIN?!?

Here is my plan: Tom Cruise is the CCAA and I am Cuba and you'll need to subsitute the words "speed up" for "money"...



We are letting our freaking shit expire and when the CCAA shows me a speed up, I will hop, skip, and gleefuly jump over to our USCIS office with my wallet open wide!

More comments on the B.S.

I went trolling and didn't get very far. However I did stop by Brian Stuy's site and there was an interesting but depressing read about how the wait times are going to increase over the next 12-18 months. There are facts, figures and graphs all supporting his theories. He is very conclusive that there just simply are not enough children to fill the waiting parent files and thus the wait increases. He even goes as far as to say that he does not know of a single NSN child under the age of three who is not already in the IA system. He even challenges anyone to tell him of a NSN child under three who is not yet in the IA system. So here is this....during our wait we have been sponsoring a child through HTS. She was born February 2006. Last February I sent her a birthday cake along with a box of toys and clothes. Each time we are about to get a progress report for her I expect to hear from HTS that she has been adopted. I just got one last week and as of July 2007 she has not yet been adopted. As of then she was nearly 18 months and clearly adoptable. Why???? Why???? WTF. I know of a beautiful little girl who would probably love to find her forever family and here I am aching every day that my daughter is so far away. Don't freaking tell me there are not enough children when I know of a little girl that I would have be MY DAUGHTER in a heartbeat and she continues to live without a family. Per HTS I cannot inquire about adopting this girl b/c it could jeopardize the HTS program in China. I will respect that but it really pisses me off when people like Brian Stuy infer that all the children in China's orphanages are already placed either domestically or internationally. LOAD OF FREAKING CRAP!

B.S

That is to say that this is.....B.S and I am B.S. You can use the phrase how ever you want and it will apply. Or you can say this is a load of crap. Rumors out there are stating that April 2005 LIDers got referrals. Yep. April. No the CCAA has not officially made it into December of 2005 but apparently there is an entire travel group of April 2005 people who just got surprised with referrals. I am heading out into the wild wild west of the internet to troll for info on this rumor. Who knows what I am going to find but I am PISSSSSSED.

Education and the Future

Education. It is something I am so incredibly passionate about. I believe that all children are born with talent and the ability to succeed and the single factor that can either squash or foster that talent is the educational environment they are subjected to which includes both the institution they attend by day as well as the home they return to in the afternoon. I will admit to having been given, over the course of my life, a pretty fabulous education. I was given a private education from 2nd grade through my BA. Private school means different things in different places. In some places it is a punishment for ill behaved children. Where I grew up it was considered a privilege. I was nurtured and well educated and went off to college with a strong ability to succeed. And I did. I graduated Magna Cum Laude, first in my division, and Phi Beta Kappa. But for all my success, I still found myself on the other side of college wondering what to do. Do I get a job or go back for another degree? If I get a job, what should I do? What are my talents? I have a BA in Art History and French but really what are my skills? My even brighter brother went pre-med and never had to face these questions. He graduated, got into a top med school, got an internship and residency at probably the best hospital in the world and is now a fine young radiologist. So why am I telling you all this? Well because my daughter, my eldest child, has started kindergarten this year and I am forever worried about the educational environment that will surround my children in their formative years. Will they grow to be life long learners? Will they learn to work hard and succeed? Will they respect the classroom and their education? WILL THEY KNOW WHAT TO DO WHEN THEY GET OUT OF COLLEGE???

My husband and I believe that traditional education is NOT the way of the future. We believe that by the time our children are entering the workforce for the first time our world is going to be a very different and much smaller place. Things change rapidly now and we feel that in 15 – 20 years it is going to mean NOTHING to say you are a US educated person. As we can plainly see now, there are plenty of people around the world who can do our jobs as well as us for cheaper. I don’t want my kids to grow up thinking they can do anything they want because they are lucky enough to be Americans but I want them to think they can do anything they want because they are talented. I want them to be prepared for a more global focused world and be able to speak other languages or know other cultures enough that they can work together with the people of other nations.

Part of our decision to move to NC last year was for my children to attend a unique private school down there. It had all the wonderful attributes of the private schools I went to up here but had this Global Curriculum that knocked my socks off. I feel that this school offers a program that will really provide children with ALL the tools to succeed in the world they will be facing in 2025. Unfortunately, life threw us a curve ball and this move did not happen and we had to withdraw from that school. I still have mini-breakdowns every once in a while about that. My kids are enrolled in the public schools now mainly because the private schools up here are insanely expensive and we just can’t do it for three kids and none of the private schools up here seem to address the global issues with which my husband and I are so concerned.

Last night I went to our PTO meeting at which the new Superintendent of our school system spoke. He is a man who spent 6 years living in China as an educator and superintendent. He spoke of his belief that the old ways of educating our children will not truly prepare them for the world they will enter after college. He is over hauling the curriculum from K-12 to incorporate a stronger focus on critical thinking, creative problem solving and innovation. He believes these are the needed tools for the future in our rapidly changing world. My husband and I could not agree with him more. He is also going to spend the next 3 years developing the IB (International Baccalaureate) program at our high school and we will be one of the first in the state to offer it. I nearly cried at the meeting. I was so willing to do anything for my children to get the kind of education I wanted them to have and when all seemed to be lost, the education came to us. This is a sign. This does help me feel good about the life choices we have made. Thank you universe for sending me this peace of mind.

Here is a passage from a letter this new Superintendent wrote to the community and a link to a 20-minute video of Sir Ken Robinson that is funny and moving. If you have the time, please watch it is captivating.

“Our children are facing a different world; one that continues to rapidly change. Today, it is not one's nationality, or where one may live that will be the predictor of success; it is what you know and your ability to adapt, think, innovate and create that matters. Thomas Friedman in his book "The World Is Flat" describes this new world. Bill Gates expresses the aforementioned new world environment in the following quote from Friedman's book. Gates says:
"Thirty years ago, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, and so many people can now plug in and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography. Now, I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie... We're going to tap into the energy and talent of five times as many people as we did before."

Although there remain solid reasons for us all to want to live in the United States and preferably in [our town], our students must understand the world discussed above and more importantly, prepare for their ultimate entry into it. Please "click" on the link to the left entitled "Sir Ken Robinson", to hear his thoughts on this subject, as well as his views on creativity, philosophy and a child's need to think and be innovative.”