Calling all friends to please help put pressure on your Senators and Congressmen to support making the adoption credit permanent. As it stands now, the tax credit put in place in 2001 will expire in December 2010. For those of us who expected to be waiting no more than 12 months for our children but now are looking at 4 years (yes FOUR YEARS!), this could be another slap in the face when it comes to our adoption process.
Right now, adoption costs likely exceed $20,000 for each family. That is pretty tough for most people and the credit is how most people can manage to make this work. Right now the credit is $12,150 with certain limitations based on salary.
So could I ask that anyone who has come by this blog take a minute to help? We need people to write to their representatives to ask them to co-sponsor the bill that will make this credit permanent.
Here is a step-by-step guide of how to help:
1. Find the name and Washington, D.C. mailing address of your Representative and Senators at www.congress.org. To find e-mail addresses, click through to the Senator’s or Congressperson’s Web site.
2. Next, log on to http://thomas.loc.gov/ to find out whether your Congresspersons are already co-sponsors of the legislation. On the thomas.loc.gov opening page, under “Search Bill Summary and Status,” search by bill number for H.R. 213. Then click on “Bill summary and Status.” On the page that comes up, click on “Cosponsors,” “Text of Legislation,” or “All Congressional Actions” to follow the progress of the bill. (FOR ANYONE IN MA - OUR REPS ARE NOT CO-SPONSORING SO PLEASE WRITE, WRITE, WRITE!)
3. If your representatives have not signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, send them your request that they do so. Tell them how important the tax credit was to you when you adopted your children, or how much you and other families you know are counting on it to be available in the future. Emphasize that the tax credit truly results in more children finding homes. Tell them that this is so important to you that you will be following the bill’s progress through Congress.
4. INCLUDE A FAMILY PHOTO: While e-mails are valuable, a written note with a picture of your family or your children will be most effective. If sending e-mail, you’ll actually want to avoid attaching a photo; the large size of the message and the attachment could, potentially, mark it as junk or harmful e-mail.
5. If any of your Congresspersons are already co-sponsors, write them a thank-you note. Again, letters sent by snail-mail with photos of your children will receive more attention.
Here is a sample letter I found online along with the information above. If you are not a family adopting, please still write and include that you know people who are adopting and would like your representative to support giving children good and loving homes through adoption.
SAMPLE LETTER TO YOUR SENATOR or CONGRESSMAN:
The Honorable FIRST NAME LAST NAME
U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives
OFFICE ADDRESS
Washington, D.C. ZIP CODE
Dear Senator LAST NAME:
My family and I are your constituents in NAME OF TOWN. We request your support of The Adoption Tax Relief Guarantee Act of 2009, H.R. 213
The adoption tax credit that this legislation would make permanent is very important to my family and me. Without this significant financial help, we would not have been able (or would have found it very difficult) to adopt our beloved son (or daughter), NAME. I include a photo of my son/daughter.
As you may know, adoption expenses can easily exceed $20,000, a significant sum to most families. (Or, if your expenses were more, say so.) Without the adoption tax credit, we would probably not be able to adopt another child.
I truly believe that the adoption expense tax credit results in many more children without homes finding new, loving families like my own.
I urge you to co-sponsor H.R. 213. This legislation is so important to me that I will be following its progress through Congress. Thank you in advance for your support of this legislation that truly serves children who need new families.
Sincerely,
YOUR NAME
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Friday, April 03, 2009
Sisters
I am crying tears of joy for a friend in bloggityville who just got her referral this morning. With a 3/7/06 LID she like the rest of us 2006ers has been waiting for what feels like an eternity. I am happy to say that she got the call today and she has a baby girl and her boys have a sister! Go visit her at Adding a Sister!
Monday, March 30, 2009
The Contraditions of Life: This Diehard Apple Girl HATES the iphone!
So we are a blended family. Well, no, not that kind of blended family. We are a blend of computer platforms over here. It is very he said, she said when it comes to computers. I am a diehard mac girl. My boy, well he is a PC. We get lots of humor out of those mac/pc commercials. He hates that the mac guy is so much cooler than the pc guy but since I am so much cooler than SJ it makes sense to me.
When it comes to cellular devices we are absolutely on the same page. The blackberry rocks and the iphone is for people with too much time to diddle around. We have had an iphone since last October and we both have refused to use it. Don't get us wrong, we tried but it was so user unfriendly for us that we both went back to our blackberries. All I want out of a phone is for it to tell me where to go, what I need to do, and who is trying to contact me. While I love toys, and yes that is what an iphone is, I would love to have the toy aspect of the phone in the background as opposed to the functionality of the phone in the background. I hate that I have to click through 3 or more screens to get to my email. I hate that my homepage can't just tell me briefly who are the last two emails from and what are my two next appointments.
So I trotted off to the Apple store today convinced that I was just using the phone incorrectly. The answer to ALL of my questions was "sorry that is beyond the capabilities of the iphone." My absolute favorite stumper for those Geniuses was the following:
When I put something in my iCal on my laptop I usually invite my husband so he can then accept the event and put it in his calendar and I invite myself so I can accept the event. Viceversa. When he makes travel arrangements he invites me so I can plug it into my phone. So this morning I plugged something into iCal on the computer, put myself in the attendees box and sent the email. When I got the email on my phone the text said to open the attachment to add it to your calendar. Yeah, all is well until I tried to open the attachment on the iphone. It wouldn't open it. When I presented this problem to those people at Apple they were puzzled and then one of the Geniuses went in the back to further investigate this problem. She came back with this:
"While the blackberry is able to open .ical files, the iphone is not currently set up to open .ical files." My response was, I hope the irony is not lost on you that ical is an Apple program used on both Apple computers and phones. The real reason....is that Apple wants you to pay for mobileme service which does all this for you. Yep, for something like $99/ year. Well next time I feel like dropping $99 to solve my problems I am going to be buying a new Blackberry Curve since it seems to work better with my mac computers. If anyone out there has any constructive advice for me I'd love to hear it...
When it comes to cellular devices we are absolutely on the same page. The blackberry rocks and the iphone is for people with too much time to diddle around. We have had an iphone since last October and we both have refused to use it. Don't get us wrong, we tried but it was so user unfriendly for us that we both went back to our blackberries. All I want out of a phone is for it to tell me where to go, what I need to do, and who is trying to contact me. While I love toys, and yes that is what an iphone is, I would love to have the toy aspect of the phone in the background as opposed to the functionality of the phone in the background. I hate that I have to click through 3 or more screens to get to my email. I hate that my homepage can't just tell me briefly who are the last two emails from and what are my two next appointments.
So I trotted off to the Apple store today convinced that I was just using the phone incorrectly. The answer to ALL of my questions was "sorry that is beyond the capabilities of the iphone." My absolute favorite stumper for those Geniuses was the following:
When I put something in my iCal on my laptop I usually invite my husband so he can then accept the event and put it in his calendar and I invite myself so I can accept the event. Viceversa. When he makes travel arrangements he invites me so I can plug it into my phone. So this morning I plugged something into iCal on the computer, put myself in the attendees box and sent the email. When I got the email on my phone the text said to open the attachment to add it to your calendar. Yeah, all is well until I tried to open the attachment on the iphone. It wouldn't open it. When I presented this problem to those people at Apple they were puzzled and then one of the Geniuses went in the back to further investigate this problem. She came back with this:
"While the blackberry is able to open .ical files, the iphone is not currently set up to open .ical files." My response was, I hope the irony is not lost on you that ical is an Apple program used on both Apple computers and phones. The real reason....is that Apple wants you to pay for mobileme service which does all this for you. Yep, for something like $99/ year. Well next time I feel like dropping $99 to solve my problems I am going to be buying a new Blackberry Curve since it seems to work better with my mac computers. If anyone out there has any constructive advice for me I'd love to hear it...
Thursday, March 19, 2009
A tricky fit
Okay so with summer approaching I am once again deciding that this year I will finally have a swimsuit that fits. I have a disproportionate body so I need to buy separates. Ideally I need to find tops that come in bra sizes to accommodate what God has given me. After searching online endlessly last night I found that women like me are best served in the UK and Australia. While I don't mind paying for shipping for an international order, I wonder if it will be a problem if I need to return it. As we all know, finding a swimsuit that fits is like a needle in a haystack. For what it is worth, all I can seem to find with US online retailers that comes in bra sizing is stuff like this....
and frankly I am just not that kind of girl. Any suggestions out there? I am sure I have missed something major. Please help!
and frankly I am just not that kind of girl. Any suggestions out there? I am sure I have missed something major. Please help!
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Food
I am crazy about food and what it does for us not so much nutritionally but emotionally. I could consider food to be the core of my universe. I use it to show love. I use it to broaden experiences. I use it bring back the past. I can't get enough of it. I found a post today from a London pastry chef that nearly moved me to tears. She wrote it December 1, 2005 and I am going to link to it here. It is a short blog post but is worth a read. It is exactly how I feel about food.
So who's coming for dinner?
So who's coming for dinner?
Friday, February 20, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Warning: Rated R for foul language
Okay so I am blindingly pissed off. We are in Vermont on vacation. The children are on vacation from school so we decided to take the economical route and spend the week up here where we already have ski passes and can cook our own food. Well I say we when referring to the vacation which technically means the taking of time off. Wait, here let me go get the proper definition of VACATION...from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (which by the way has an advertisement for Arbua built into the dictionary's definition of Vacation - seriously - no joke)
1: a respite or a time of respite from something : intermission
2 a: a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended b: a period of exemption from work granted to an employee
3: a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation
Yes, I whole heartedly agree with M-W in their description of the word. That is what three of the four of us are one. Yes one person in our family still has yet to embrace the term VACATION. So the three of us who are on an actual vacation went skiing today for a few hours and arrived home in time for lunch. The local weatherman (who should be shot) forecasted this morning a storm coming in this afternoon which would last throughout the day tomorrow and would accumulate to about 2" inches of snow but could be rain. So at lunchtime I left the children with the one who is apparently NOT on vacation to run to the grocery store 20 minutes away. Not that I asked the one not on vacation to stay with the kids but I simply said aloud that I needed to run to the store to buy provisions for our Fondue dinner and none of the other three people I call family offered to join me. So off I went. I secured most of the provisions at the local store but they were out of Sterno. At the registers I noticed out the big pane glass windows that it had started snowing. It wasn't much and was falling into wet puddles on the ground. Wet snow most likely going to turn to rain as the weatherman predicted. So I drive to the hardware store which is on the way out of town to see if they have sterno and luckily enough they do. I grab the sterno and a few other kitchen items and get in the mini-van. I start the hike out of town and literally, the minute I start even the most minute bit of incline I realize the snow is sticking to the ground and is coming down at a pretty scary clip. So we all plow up the hill trying to stay in the tracks outlined by the car ahead of us. The road out of this town to the place where I need to go is all hill. One long climb out of the valley. So we are all plugging along until some shithead, who has pulled over, decides he is going to get back on the road an cuts in front of me. I hit the brakes and lose my momentum and traction. GAME OVER for this SPY girl in her fucking mini-van. I could not regain traction and ended up having to pull over. So while I am pulling over I get caught in a snow drift which tosses the whole car a little too close to the edge of the road which consists of a cliff with no guardrail. I get the car stopped with the ass of the vehicle still in the road and call back to the house in a frantic panic. We call AAA and then I call the police because it is clear to me that one little tap from another car will send me right over the cliff. I will not lie. There was lots of yelling and crying going on as I was completely unsure of what to do. My mother was telling me to stay in the car with my seatbelt on and my husband was telling me to get out of the car. What kept going through my head beyond just trying not to get killed, was why in the hell do I have to make the trek down here to buy food for everyone all by myself. Why is it that when I said I was going to the grocery, no one offered to keep me company. Why? BECAUSE GOING TO THE GROCERY STORE SUCKS! But this sucked even worse.
About 25 minutes into the ordeal, a tow truck arrived and two toothless wonders told me they would tow me about a mile to the town line but that was as far as they could take me. Yes, this was a AAA response team. So I pile into the middle of the front cab of a tow truck (a first for me) and at that moment I had a cerebral clashing of the titans. As I took my seat between the two grubbiest guys I have ever seen, I felt an instant wave of relief to be out of my fucking car and into what felt to be the safer option. Until I realized that a) I did not have a seatbelt and b) they had not shown me anything indicating that they were the tow people from AAA. Then that instant wave of relief turned into stomach churning fear as the tow truck pulled out onto the road.
A mile later they drop me off at apparently the town line where I usually take a right hand turn off this road to the one that takes me home. They dump me in about as much snow as I was originally stuck in and say have a nice night. I call my husband to tell him of my progress and he is pissed off that the tow won't take me home. Yeah- join the club! So I start the car, clean off the windshield wipers, defrost the window and pull into the road. Half way across the road all my dashboard lights go on as if I have stalled the car but it is still moving. Then the steering wheel goes. It will turn in one direction but not the other. I get stuck again. I restart the car. Dash lights all still going wacky and the car is now reading out of gas. But a minute ago I had a full tank. I cut the engine again and restart this bitchy whore of a car and now I read half a tank of gas but still all the warning lights are on including the break light. I must reverse myself out onto the road with blind faith because I can see shit and then miraculously start moving forward. I get back on the road and start the second half of my journey home. Immediately a GMC car is on my tail and is riding me pretty hard. My hazards are on indicating that I am in mini-van hell so back the fuck off. But he does not. So if you drive a GMC and were in Vermont this week behind a mini-van clearly in peril, I say to you - you suck, get a life, have a heart and fuck off! You followed me all the way home not letting up on your eagerness to drive me off the road. My steering was off, the car was sliding all over the place and there were at least 5 instances where I nearly went careening off the road or into oncoming traffic.
Finally 2 hours later I pulled into our driveway and just sobbed on the steering wheel. Adding insult to injury, no one was seemingly waiting with baited breath for me to get home because I was there for 10 minutes before the one NOT on vacation appeared at my car door.
I am now sitting at the dining room table with a screwdriver a little off its usual ratio. I have told those three people with whom I am vacationing, that I will not be making dinner nor will I be all that helpful tonight. My husband is now getting a crash course in making rice and roasting carrots.
*****UPDATE***** The storm that was forecasted to bring maybe 2" of snow and possibly rain, actually dumped 9" of snow in about 7 hours. I would never have left the house if those moron meteorologists could EVER get it right around here.
1: a respite or a time of respite from something : intermission
2 a: a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended b: a period of exemption from work granted to an employee
3: a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation
Yes, I whole heartedly agree with M-W in their description of the word. That is what three of the four of us are one. Yes one person in our family still has yet to embrace the term VACATION. So the three of us who are on an actual vacation went skiing today for a few hours and arrived home in time for lunch. The local weatherman (who should be shot) forecasted this morning a storm coming in this afternoon which would last throughout the day tomorrow and would accumulate to about 2" inches of snow but could be rain. So at lunchtime I left the children with the one who is apparently NOT on vacation to run to the grocery store 20 minutes away. Not that I asked the one not on vacation to stay with the kids but I simply said aloud that I needed to run to the store to buy provisions for our Fondue dinner and none of the other three people I call family offered to join me. So off I went. I secured most of the provisions at the local store but they were out of Sterno. At the registers I noticed out the big pane glass windows that it had started snowing. It wasn't much and was falling into wet puddles on the ground. Wet snow most likely going to turn to rain as the weatherman predicted. So I drive to the hardware store which is on the way out of town to see if they have sterno and luckily enough they do. I grab the sterno and a few other kitchen items and get in the mini-van. I start the hike out of town and literally, the minute I start even the most minute bit of incline I realize the snow is sticking to the ground and is coming down at a pretty scary clip. So we all plow up the hill trying to stay in the tracks outlined by the car ahead of us. The road out of this town to the place where I need to go is all hill. One long climb out of the valley. So we are all plugging along until some shithead, who has pulled over, decides he is going to get back on the road an cuts in front of me. I hit the brakes and lose my momentum and traction. GAME OVER for this SPY girl in her fucking mini-van. I could not regain traction and ended up having to pull over. So while I am pulling over I get caught in a snow drift which tosses the whole car a little too close to the edge of the road which consists of a cliff with no guardrail. I get the car stopped with the ass of the vehicle still in the road and call back to the house in a frantic panic. We call AAA and then I call the police because it is clear to me that one little tap from another car will send me right over the cliff. I will not lie. There was lots of yelling and crying going on as I was completely unsure of what to do. My mother was telling me to stay in the car with my seatbelt on and my husband was telling me to get out of the car. What kept going through my head beyond just trying not to get killed, was why in the hell do I have to make the trek down here to buy food for everyone all by myself. Why is it that when I said I was going to the grocery, no one offered to keep me company. Why? BECAUSE GOING TO THE GROCERY STORE SUCKS! But this sucked even worse.
About 25 minutes into the ordeal, a tow truck arrived and two toothless wonders told me they would tow me about a mile to the town line but that was as far as they could take me. Yes, this was a AAA response team. So I pile into the middle of the front cab of a tow truck (a first for me) and at that moment I had a cerebral clashing of the titans. As I took my seat between the two grubbiest guys I have ever seen, I felt an instant wave of relief to be out of my fucking car and into what felt to be the safer option. Until I realized that a) I did not have a seatbelt and b) they had not shown me anything indicating that they were the tow people from AAA. Then that instant wave of relief turned into stomach churning fear as the tow truck pulled out onto the road.
A mile later they drop me off at apparently the town line where I usually take a right hand turn off this road to the one that takes me home. They dump me in about as much snow as I was originally stuck in and say have a nice night. I call my husband to tell him of my progress and he is pissed off that the tow won't take me home. Yeah- join the club! So I start the car, clean off the windshield wipers, defrost the window and pull into the road. Half way across the road all my dashboard lights go on as if I have stalled the car but it is still moving. Then the steering wheel goes. It will turn in one direction but not the other. I get stuck again. I restart the car. Dash lights all still going wacky and the car is now reading out of gas. But a minute ago I had a full tank. I cut the engine again and restart this bitchy whore of a car and now I read half a tank of gas but still all the warning lights are on including the break light. I must reverse myself out onto the road with blind faith because I can see shit and then miraculously start moving forward. I get back on the road and start the second half of my journey home. Immediately a GMC car is on my tail and is riding me pretty hard. My hazards are on indicating that I am in mini-van hell so back the fuck off. But he does not. So if you drive a GMC and were in Vermont this week behind a mini-van clearly in peril, I say to you - you suck, get a life, have a heart and fuck off! You followed me all the way home not letting up on your eagerness to drive me off the road. My steering was off, the car was sliding all over the place and there were at least 5 instances where I nearly went careening off the road or into oncoming traffic.
Finally 2 hours later I pulled into our driveway and just sobbed on the steering wheel. Adding insult to injury, no one was seemingly waiting with baited breath for me to get home because I was there for 10 minutes before the one NOT on vacation appeared at my car door.
I am now sitting at the dining room table with a screwdriver a little off its usual ratio. I have told those three people with whom I am vacationing, that I will not be making dinner nor will I be all that helpful tonight. My husband is now getting a crash course in making rice and roasting carrots.
*****UPDATE***** The storm that was forecasted to bring maybe 2" of snow and possibly rain, actually dumped 9" of snow in about 7 hours. I would never have left the house if those moron meteorologists could EVER get it right around here.
Monday, February 09, 2009
just saying is all....
Read a quote by Fellini today ..... yes, Federico Fellini the Italian movie genius. He was quoted as saying he loves zaftig women because a woman who doesn't love food isn't good in bed. I am pretty comfortable with what that says about me. Plus, I am Italian ; )
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