Logan the Great

Tonight Nick and I decided that we need to get really into RC airplanes and model airplanes. As we were driving out to our friends house on Clinton Lake we passed by the RC airplane flying park and there was the big huge plane flying. It made me think of all the rockets I built growing up and how much pleasure I got out of them. I think that I actually got more pleasure out of making them with family, the actual art of building it with parents and siblings at the kitchen table, then the flying of the rockets. So I'd like to issue a challenge, the Logan Airplane/Rocket Challenge. For Logan's first birthday Nick has said that he does not want to have a big party. I, of course, would like to. The compromise is that we are going to have a party but a little one and I think that it needs to be RC Airplane / rocket flying themed. If you can make it the first weekend in May 2009 to Lawrence, Kansas bring a rocket to fly. If you cannot, fly one in your little corner of the world. Just be sure to build it with someone you love at the kitchen table.

This little maricle

It's been such a long time since I've written in this little blog of mine but then again I have had a huge learning curve. Can it be true that Logan is already 2 months old? Can it be true that he can smile independently of bodily functions and purely as a reaction to someone interacting with him? Wow.

Yes, It's true. I made a rad happy baby who smiles and laughs and enjoys everyone . Having him up at Balsam Lake for 10 days was a big challenge and an even bigger joy.

Everyone was wonderful and helpful. The best thing was having Sammy meet Logan: this was absolutely priceless. Having them enjoy each others company was even more priceless. Sam at first seemed a bit confused and befuddled by this little lump of baby. But as the week progressed Logan began to eye Sam with those twinkling blue eyes and pretty soon Sam was as infatuated as the rest of us.

To see the child that I 'gave up' for adoption (such a cold term) interact with Logan with such ease and willingness was beyond my comprehension at times. Sam's desire to connect was evident. However, the only person that could have outdone Logan in coolness in Sam's eyes was Nick. Nick will, I fear, forever be the raddest in Sam's eyes. This makes me a bit jealous but very happy at the same time.

Eureka!

Nick had a huge breakthrough on the waterlogged basement issue. Last night in the rainstorm he went outside to get a break from our never ending stream of visitors. In his hiatus from the house he had a discovery, a eureka moment.

The lot behind us is a school that has a huge hill perfect for sledding in winter or rolling down in summer. Nick noticed that that all the watershed from the school drains down this hill and then into a ditch that runs along the bottom of it. This ditch then empties directly into our yard. Wowza. So he called the school district and they are going to come out and fit it.

Me = Crazy

It might just be the hormones or it could be pure exaustion but I have not been feeling totally myself lately. I've not been particurally kind to Nicholas and everything about everything grates on my nerves these days.

The little man

He is here! After weeks and weeks of waiting, Logan Elliot Miescher-Lerner has arrived. Yesterday was a day of wonder and pain, though with just four hours of labor I should not complain. However, to have this little man in my arms I would go back and have 24 hours a labor. I am overwhelmed with complete glee.

Maybe baby?

All day I've felt a bit ill, like I need to vomit but can't. My gut has been making crazy sounds and my whole body feels off.

venturing downstairs

Lately I've been considering venturing downstairs into the basement. Not that I want to- I'm a bit scared of what it will be like. Today I finally did it an it's dry!!! Whoooo-ho.

To write or not to write

I decided a year or two ago that I was going to go back to school and become a teacher. It seemed quite simple a decision at the time but I never really acted on it until this semester was starting. I went ahead and enrolled in a class I would need to get my certificate and figured that taking one class while pregnant would not be too exausting. I was wrong. However, I will have an A in this class if it kills me.

Dinner Time at the Nightengale

The typical routine is that at 5:00 I get home and feed the dogs. Monkey ignores his food and begs for his 'rub down' and Goose devours his food so fast I almost can't remember if I even fed him. I cook something for Nick and I then it's a free for all for the rest of the evening. Dog walks, homework, work related work, errands to run and whatnot are all options depending on what we need and want to do. Lately I've wanted to do nothing, so when I started to come home feeling so exhausted that I was not even feeding the dogs I wanted Nick to pick up the slack. He could cook for us and I'd feed the dogs. He could do the dishes and I would put them away- that sort of thing. Is this too much to ask?

Stripping of the membranes

So what actually happens when you have your membranes stripped. This lovely procedure involves the OBGYN placing their fingers inside your cervix and swishing them around to break the membranes that reside between the bag of waters and the wall of the cervix. It is supposed to lower the bag of waters and put pressure on the cervix assisting in ripening and hopefully initiating the start of contractions. It feels only a bit more comfortable than it sounds and the worst part is that it does nothing if your body if not ready to give birth. It does not induce labor if the baby is not yet ready to be born. After she stripped my membranes (which ironically enough every time I say it makes me think of the term screwed ones brains out which is exactly what Nick and I did in order to get me into a position where having stripping my membranes was even an option) I thought for sure that I had lost my mucus plug - that lovely bloody snot like plug I've been looking for weeks for. Alas, 8 hours later still no contractions and no other symptoms.

Talking myself into it

I woke up with such a horrendous backache I was positive it was the first signs of labor. However, now I realize that when you run a verticut machine over 3 lots, rake the yard a few times and throw grass seed on everything in sight it's likely to cause a backache, especially when your body has an extra 30 pounds strapped to the front of it. I've been searching for signs of labor so meticulously that all I'm doing is making myself more and more paranoid that it will never happen. Other than very explainable backaches there have been no other symptoms. I'm starting to get very discouraged.

Lessons learned

A few thoughts about renting heavy equipment when your 9 months pregnant, it's very early in the morning, your husband is not a morning person, and you both really have no idea what your doing: don't do it.

This morning we woke up to head to the local hardware store. I'd called yesterday to reserve a verticut and seeding machine so that we could plant grass in our great mud pit. Once we got the machine home Nick got behind the wheel (so to speak) and I got the rake to rake over seed after he had passed over the earth. Now for those of you that don't know a verticuter is like a rototiller but it's does not turn over the ground, instead it has dozens of sharp knives that cut into the dirt to provide aeration and allow for better ground penetration when seeding. So when one is using this machine the last thing you want to hear is them screaming. I heard screaming because Nick was cursing like a sailor and I was positive his foot was gone or at least a finger or two. As I rushed over to him and didn't see pools of blood forming around him or arteries squirting his life onto our yard I realized he was not hurt, just pissed at it being before 9:30 on a weekend and the machine not working the way he wanted it to.

This was, to say the least, the wonderful start to a very long morning.

Waiting and wanting

It's almost 10pm and I cannot help but hope I'll wake up tonight with the most painful contractions ever. God I'm ready to have this baby.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Yesterday Nick and I played good cop bad cop. Not in a bedroom banter sort of way but with the man we had hired to regrade the yard who appeared on our doorstep about 42 hours after he had told me he would arrive. I knew it was him when the doorbell rang because not three hours before I had come home from work to find a new tractor [by new tractor I mean not one of the two tractors that had been sitting in our yard for the last month] in our yard, running and keys in the ignition, but no yard man around. Nick was kind enough to go outside and talk to him and I stayed inside and thought evil thoughts. Nick was nice to him whereas the last time I talked to him and he tried to small talk with me I said "I don't want to talk to you about that, I just want you to finish the damn yard."
Today I am proud to announce that we finally have our yard regraded. Maybe next week I'll venture into the basement.

The Great Mud Pits and the Magic Rings

Five years ago I bought this house in hopes that someday I would be able to make some money off of it, that it would be a good investment over the long run and that in the meantime it would provide me with a roof over my head. That and that I did not want to move again - I hated moving.

Shortly after I signed my name on the dotted line I realized that I'd purchased a home with a wet scary spider basement in a mediocre neighborhood. The neighborhood was improving steadily as time passed but unfortunately the basement was just getting worse. When Nick moved in and saw the mess that I had made of the basement he was shocked: it was at this point a realm of what seemed at first glance like hundreds of standing pools of water much like the world described in the Magicians Nephew by C.S. Lewis, the world that with a magic ring you could jump from pool to pool, world to world, and experience something new.

We quickly started working on the basement. We patched holes, we chiseled out cracks and filled them in, everything was cleaned and etched, Drilock was applied, the basement was dry, then we waited for the rain to come. It came with a vengeance and the pools of water reappeared.

Our next step was to have dozens upon dozens of contractors come out to tell us what they would do if they owned this house. They came and they told and everyone had a different story. The most outrageous of all the plans started with knocking a huge hole in the basement wall and building a conveyor belt. His bid was about three thousand dollars more than any of the other bids. All of the bids however started with one suggestion - regrade the yard.

So we did. Or we tried to. We hired someone to come and regrade the yard, to put in a few swales and to remove the 70 years of dirt that had accumulated on the sides of the house and had built up over the siding and were causing some (in my hopes all) of the water to get into the basement. He came and starting digging and then he disappeared leaving his tractors and tools strewn around the yard. Our beautiful grass was gone and The Great Mud Pits appeared in its place. Our dogs were regaled to a tiny corner of the yard and mud began to rule our lives. For the next 3 weeks it rained almost daily and the the tractors sat. And sat. And sat.

After the sun came back into our lives the mud dried up leaving behind fossils of our former yard; remnants of grass pushing up through the cracks in the earth, parts of daffodils and tulip bulbs never to bloom again, and limbs of the four trees that had lost their battle against the dozer. The job still is looming over us and I'm in hopes that it will be done soon. I want to see what will become of our CS Lewis world in the basement and refuse to go downstairs again until the job is done. The truth is that I now want to move, I want to experience something new, but I don't have a magic ring to transport me into the next world, to the next house. For me, the magic ring will come when we have a dry basement and a buyer who really wants what I wanted: a good investment over the long run that in the meantime would provide them with a roof over their head.

I'm ready

Today I tried to do a little forced nesting to get the baby to come but to no avail. I've eaten the spicy foods, walked my legs off, tried raspberry leaf tea, eaten pineapple, had sex, and pretty much done everything that seemed healthy and was suggested for natural home inductions but for Castor oil. I really don't want to feel more miserable than I have to and all the symptoms I heard re: the use of Castor oil make me hesitate to try it. It seems that the baby should be here by now. . .

Not on my side

Sleep does not come easy any more. I'm not supposed to sleep on my back, I can't physically sleep on my stomach and when I sleep on my left side like 'they' tell me too sleep comes in bursts of time that last for a few hours if I'm lucky. Last night I was able to sleep for about 5 hours which was like eating a little bit of heaven and tonight after less than three I was up. I'm so ready to sleep on my stomach again.

My sinfull pride

Maybe I am a snob about adoption. I certainly have pride over my relationship with Sam and his family and wish that it was more common to have the level of openness that we have between birth and adoptive parents. I know that this type of relationship is not for everyone, it was difficult at first to move past thinking of myself as a parent and mold my role into what it is today. It hurt the first time he said mom and I knew for a fact that he didn't mean me and hurt even worse six years later when he asked if he could call me mom and I had to tell him no, that we would have to pick a name just for me but that it couldn't be mom. But does pride in what I have mean that I think it's best for everyone? I don't think it does. Just because I know how rewarding it is to have Sam and his family* in my life but this does not mean that I think that they type of relationship that I have would be best for everyone.

A few weeks ago someone approached me saying that something I had said months before hand had been grating her mind. She had asked me what I thought of the movie Juno and I had said something to the effect of "I was upset that it had been advertised as a movie about open adoption because it was not. I thought that it was a good movie but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who has given a child up for adoption." She interpreted this as me saying that the movie was not good because it was not about open adoption.

Admittedly, this converstation was started with her saying that she was probably drunk enough to talk to me about this now (possibly this should be an article about the lack of interpersonal communication skills between the two of us and not about adoption?) but it really bothered me that she thought what I was saying was that open adoption is the only acceptable form of adoption. In fact, while it was the only option acceptable to me at the time, but I don't believe that everyone out there contemplating adopting a child out or adopting as a parent would benefit from it.

*It should be noted that I believe that open adoption that it only works if there is a mutual understanding about what the level of post adoption contact is going to be. If the desire on part of the birthparent is to have an open adoption they need state clearly what that means to them, weather that means visits once a week or once a month or a letter a few times a year the birth parent needs to address this in the early interviews and both parties need to be on board about what level of post adoption contact they are comfortable with. When interviewing adoptive parents I was lucky enough to meet Steve and Dianna when I did, they had a preexisting open adoption with their older son and happened to be a perfect match for what I was seeking.

The view from here

So it's 3:40 am and I've been up for what seems like hours wondering if there is any chance that we might have figured out the date of conception incorrectly and that maybe, just maybe, this baby is actually due any moment now and not the nearly three weeks that it is in reality. I know that I've been asking the baby to come early for a few months now but it's starting to sink in that this might not happen. I guess I'll have to just come to terms with it if it does not work out the way I've been planning but I'm still going to put hope into the power of positive thinking. I'm sure this baby wants to come early. . . because I'm at a point in this pregnancy where I'm just so excited to meet the little bugger and want it to come and it feels pretty mutual to me. However, if Baby Miescher-Lerner is as stubborn as both Nick and I are (OK, I am) it might come two weeks late.

Email saves the day again

I was having a hard day at work yesterday. It was one of those days like Alexander has in Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day when out of the blue I received a email from Sam's mom. In it she said that she had gone to Sam's old school to pick up his workbooks and belongings to take them to his new school. One of the things in his desk was a notebook with each page corresponding to a letter from the alphabet. She said that she was reading through it because the goal of the notebook was to see how many works each student knew for each letter and she wanted to see what words he knew. On the B page it said birthmom and on the J page it said Jessica and on the K page it said Kansas. After telling me this she went on to say that Sam is very open about his relationship with me and that he loves me and that he talks about me often. She said that this makes her happy and that she loves me too. And after reading this, there I was, at work having a wonderful day and bawling over the nicest email I'd received in ages.

And the friendship remains intact

Last week I emailed one of my favorite best couple friends in utter defeat. I felt as though our friendship was altered somehow, like we had been distant for so long that it might have been too difficult a rift to mend. It's possible it was just the 37 weeks of pregnancy talking and not my real feelings but regardless, I missed them. I told them that lately I've felt as though life has gotten in the way of some of the little things I need to do. Things like sending Gran Fran a birthday card that I should have sent in August, visiting my parents who live less than 3 hours away - I have not been home to visit since right after Thanksgiving, and calling some of my friends who live far far away. And in telling them it made it all seem better to me, it made it just like I'd talked to them yesterday or had a hot chocolate with them last week.

I realized in writing them that I had been so caught up in my own life that sometimes I was forgetting about others, or maybe not forget just put them off (not that this would be more acceptable). It's like cleaning the house - I put it off for as long as possible until either N or I get so fed up with the mess we break down and have a marathon cleaning. Then the slippery slope starts again with the first dirty dish or dirty shirt on the floor. It's like that with contacting those I truly care about- it's easy to put of that phone call or email because I know that no matter how long it takes me to call that relationship is going to be intact with the first renewed contact. I'm positive that when both parties have time to talk or visit again I'll laugh until I either pee my pants or snort out loud. And now that I think about it, I'm OK with that.

The long bus home

Years ago I took a bus from Lawrence to Wichita. I can't remember now the reason for the trip or why driving was not an option, it's all lost to a dozen years of other facts and figures, but the fact remains that I took this trip. After the "should have been a three hours trip" turned into five and then seven it was overwhelming to finally arrive. I remember that Dad picked me up from the bus station and I was so glad to see him, just standing there like scene from a movie, wearing those jeans with the perpetually ripped belt loop and a blue (always blue) shirt. His Santa white hair was flying about in the wind and he had a jacket tucked neatly under his arm. Dad's clean figure contrasted with all the grime and dirt from the station and made me glad to be home despite the long drive.

Sleepless nights/one day at a time

It's getting early, almost 2:30 am and I've been up for hours. It's the third night in a row that my body has forced me awake and my mind is spinning faster than Lance Armstrong could peddle. I'm simply exhausted but my mind can't stop. And it's not as though any of these thoughts trucking through my brain are important ones- they are seemingly random pieces of information that have been driving in circles for hours, days even, that I can't seem to let go of. I've started to think that this pattern I seem to be setting up for myself is natures way of getting me ready for parenthood, a way of kicking me in the ass now to prepare me for long nights of feedings and diaper changes to come. However, there is a huge part of me that wonders if I'll ever be ready and if there is a way to prepare for this or if it's something I'll have to take one day at a time.

What you leave behind you

Eight years ago I had a baby and an adoption in one moments time. I told myself then and remind myself now that I made this decision because I had to make the choice between being a very good friend or being a very mediocre parent. I choose to be a very good friend and with that choice to have a very open non-traditional adoption. In a way, with the situation/type of adoption I choose, I get to be a bit of both. Not that I'll ever be mom to Sam, I'm more like a really fun young hip aunt or a fairy godmother than his mom. I'm not the one who wakes up in the middle of the night when he is sick or the one who has to stay up late at night helping him with homework, or the one who is there on a daily basis for hugs and kisses and all the bumps and bruises in life. Rather, I'm the one who sends packages of books and candy, calls every few weeks to be regaled with stories of hilarity and horror, and the one comes to visit every few months for a few (always to short) days. I'm also the one who now, eight years later has made the conscience decision to bring another child into the world and to raise it.

In 400-something BC Pericles said "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” and for years I've thought of this quote often. I mean, what exactly is it that we weave into the lives of others? As a birthmom am I just responsible for what I wove into Sam genetically or what I continue to weave into his life by being a part of it? And now, as a very soon to be parent of child number two, what will I be weaving into their life?