The Plight of a Stranger

A few weeks back I saw a blog on my mom's computer.  She told me the author was adopting a baby and hadn't posted in a week, so Mom assumed the baby had arrived.  Being that babies are in the forefront of my mind these days (go figure) and that the site came with my mom's recommendation, I copied down the address to look up later.

The bustle of Thanksgiving got in my way, so I didn't check again until the weekend after Thanksgiving.  And when I did, it broke my heart.

The author and her husband had arranged to adopt a baby girl at birth, but the day after she was born a father came out of the woodwork, wanting to claim custody.  They had the baby for eight days before the DNA test came back confirming the relation, so they had to surrender the baby.  There are a lot of details in the post that I won't relate here, but suffice it to say that it made me cry.

A lot.

My initial reaction was to think how cruel it was for the father to let a couple get emotionally involved with his daughter--letting them believe that she would be their daughter and loving her already--only to take her away.  It would have been far gentler and much less of a loss if he'd declared his intentions before the baby's arrival.  Before they had a chance to hold her in their arms and fall in love with her.  Perhaps it's just the fact that I have a baby right now, but I hurt for them.

When I summarized this for my husband he, being a father himself and liking to think well of fathers, pointed out that hopefully this means the baby will be in a loving home.  After all, if he didn't want a baby, what better way to be absolved of all responsibility--no one would ever come after him for child support or anything else.  So hopefully that means that the baby will at least be wanted and loved.

The more I think about it, the more I also realize that the guy might not have intended to hurt anybody.  I'm aware of the emotional involvement of adopting from the various parenting resources I've consulted in the past three years--but if he'd never put any thought into adoption he might not have any idea of how much of an emotional roller coaster it can be for hopeful parents.  He might not have been callous at all--just oblivious.  We can hope, and hope that he's being a good father.

All this introspection isn't necessarily worthy of a blog post by me, but the thing is, I haven't been able to get this out of my head.  We hear bad news all the time in our society--it's on the news every day.  We note some things more than others, but since we get so inundated with it, and since there's so much of it, we tend to dismiss bad news as our minds move on to other things.  But this woman's plight has been in the forefront of my mind for almost two weeks now.

Could it just be that having my own children (and a vivid imagination) makes this speak more truly to me?  This isn't the first time the story of a newborn baby has gripped me.  The Safe Haven laws, in particular, grip my mind and my imagination.

*As a side note, in case saying this does someone a service someday, the Safe Haven laws make it legal to give up a newborn infant anonymously and without fear of prosecution provided the infant is unharmed and given to the proper authorities.  Laws vary in the maximum age of the child and suitable locations, but hospitals are pretty much standard--and every state has a Safe Haven law.*

Or is there another reason I can't get this failed adoption out of my mind?  Is it the impact of how beautifully she wrote her sad story?  (It is beautiful and full of grace rather than anger.)  Is there some other connection the universe has in store for me, that I have yet to realize?  Perhaps it's all three, but whatever it is, my mind has worried at it to nearly the point of obsession.

The only thing I can sanely do when something like this grips my mind is focus the energy into my writing.  This, combined with a few other elements that have been floating around in my head for months, may be the ingredients necessary to save a story I wrote several months ago but set aside because it was a great premise with no real plot.  I've worked on it for a few days, anyway, and it already feels more promising than it did before.  I also began one other story inspired by this, but it may never see the light of day or even get finished, depending on whether I can develop it into something more than raw feelings.

I never expected, when checking out this blog, that I would spend so much time and energy focused on the plight of a stranger--but it spoke to me, and perhaps it will speak to others, the more it is shared.

Posie Gets Cozy

Merry Early Christmas to Me

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I'd like my work to be more portable.  My laptop's battery isn't worth much--not to mention the hooks holding it on broke so it slips off easily--so it's basically a desktop computer these days.  That's fine most of the time (even though the basement is freezing,) but there are plenty of times that I wish I could bring word processors with me on the go.

Tablets are all the rage these days, but I know I'll never be a tablet person.  You can't type anywhere near fast enough on those things even if you could manage to hit the right part of the screen every time, and the keyboards you can hook into them aren't very good, in my opinion.  Yes, tablets will never be the tool of choice for writers--at least not without DRASTIC improvements to design.  That doesn't stop me from having a tablet, but only because my father has decided that they are his new hobby--he buys them broken, voids their warranties by taking them apart and moving parts from one to the next, and puts together a smaller number of working ones.  Mine is one of his refurbishments.

I've been liking the idea of netbooks, though.  I particularly like how small and light they are--perfect for taking with me while the boys go to storytime or lessons or something.  I can sit and work while they have fun, and my computer won't weigh me down at all--not at 2.7 pounds!

Hubby liked this idea too, so we've been researching them.  After we decided on ones we liked, we kept an eye out for sales.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, since I don't like crowds, lines, or shopping) the Black Friday deals were all for models that didn't perform as well as we'd like.  We did find one on sale, though, and so we decided to get them now.  Our original plan had been to ask for gift cards for Christmas so we could buy our new toys, but now we'll need that in cash, to reimburse ourselves.

We didn't wait until Christmas to open them and start playing (can you blame us?) but we did open the boxes in front of the Christmas tree!

All He Wants for Christmas are his Two Front Teeth

My baby is unhappy.  My baby is in pain.  A few nights ago he only slept for about 90 minutes before waking up and screaming.  I'm not talking his normal "feed me" cry--he was shrieking fit to wake the dead.  I hadn't even made it to bed yet, although I'd been headed in that direction.  When I picked him up, he subsided to a pathetic-sounding whimper, obviously uncomfortable.

I tried to give him my fingers to chew on, but he didn't like that idea.  I offered a teether from the fridge, but he wanted none of that.  He wanted nothing to do with just rocking and lullabies either.  Eventually I fed him again, even though it was less than three hours since he'd last eaten.  That calmed him, although after every few sucks he would stop and whimper, so I knew it must hurt him just to suck.  Poor little guy.

He fell asleep nursing, so I tried to transfer him back to his crib.  Unfortunately, I still hadn't made it into my own bed before he was shrieking again.  I couldn't give him any tylenol because I'd given it to him right before bed and four hours hadn't passed yet--and drug overdoses are something you don't want to mess with in infants.  I couldn't pack him into his carseat and drive him around the block a few times because the temperature was in the teens and the roads were treacherous.  At that point I decided just to bring him into bed with me, which I haven't done in a few months.

But even that didn't help as much as I'd hoped.  I started out with us both on our sides, his back to my tummy, trying to cuddle him like a teddy bear.  He shrieked and wiggled.  I offered him a pacifier.  He screamed and arched his back.  I tried to latch him again (against my better judgment because I don't want him to associate food with comfort, but I was getting desperate) but he still wiggled and cried.  Hubby's only thought, apart from the options I'd already exhausted, was the old-wives rum-on-the-gums trick, but I wasn't comfortable with that one (see the above overdoses comment.)  Finally I just cuddled him, stroked his hair, and sang him lullabies.  He shrieked his way through the first, got a little quieter during the second, and finally fell into an exhausted sleep by the end of the third.

I hate to see my little guy in so much pain, especially when even my cuddles aren't enough comfort.  Fortunately, subsequent nights haven't been as bad, though the teeth have yet to emerge.  Kal'El may want his two (or four) front teeth for Christmas but for my part, if he doesn't get them sooner, I may not make it.

Kid Crafts - Letter G and miscellaneous

"Five Little Pumpkins sitting on a gate..."  This is the only Halloween craft we did this year, due to long periods of inactivity again.  We did this on the fly, on Halloween itself.  Thankfully, it was easy to cut the shapes out and let him have at it.  We pasted them to a paper gate when they were all "carved."

Hubby painted a pumpkin to look like the superhero (villain?) Rorschach, and Zaxxon was fascinated by this, so I showed him how to make his own inkblot pictures.  He used eyedroppers to drop watered-down paint onto a paper...

...folded them over...

...and looked at the finished product.  He sees butterflies.

After Halloween, we briefly got back into the alphabet by introducing the letter "G."  He already knew this one because of Grammy, Grandpa, and Great Grandma, but now I've formally introduced it, along with a slew of other G words.

G is for Grapes.  I don't quite remember where I originally saw this craft.  It might have been Diapers to Diplomas.  At any rate, he painted a cut-up egg carton purple, and we made it into a bunch of grapes.

He cut out the stem himself, and insisted on using his zigzag scissors for it.

G is for gorilla.  I had it in my head that the letter G kind of looks like a squatting gorilla, so I tried to help Zaxxon recreate that.  I did several things wrong--I should have altered the shape of the G somewhat, and reversed the gorilla body parts before printing them.  Oh well, he still enjoyed it.



I've finally caught up on our backlog of crafts, therefore if we don't do any crafts this week, I won't have anything to report next weekend.  (Perhaps that will encourage me--although Christmas activities are already encouraging me.)  I'm linking up at tot school again.

November Stat Check and Six Months Old!

During the month of November, I wrote on all 30 days!
I spent most of the month editing my novel, though I also wrote the beginnings of three new stories
I made 9 submissions
I received 3 rejections
I declined to have a story published in a token-paying anthology after the semi-pro contract fell through, and resubbed that story
I queried a market (twice) as to the status of a story they've had forever, though I've not heard back yet.  In December, I shall have to decide how much longer to let them be silent before declaring them as non-responsive
I got caught up on submissions for the first time since mid-May (except for the fact that one came back two days ago, and isn't back out yet)
I have 8 stories currently in slush pile circulation (9 if you count the one that hopefully will be back out tomorrow)
I made 13 blog posts
I took no days off

Analysis
I had a very productive November.  I'm very happy to have gotten caught up on submissions, and I'm also pretty caught up on blog posts, photos, and various other odds and ends.  On the other hand, many of my writing days have only met a bare minimum of writing time.  That's unfortunate, but at least I haven't stopped.  There's only so much time in each day, and the boys like to use it all up.  So do holidays.

My goals for December are to keep up with photos and blogs, continue editing the novel, and continue writing the new stories to see where they take me.

Oh, and sleep.  Did I mention sleep?  No?  My goal is to get enough sleep again.  Kal'El has ceased sleeping through the night, whether because of teething or hunger or fighting off a cold, I don't know.  But it's been hard.  However, news!  He's exactly six months old today!  How did that happen?  Has he really been around for half a year?

Six months old means solid food, and solid foods might bring the promise of a return to nighttime restfulness.  We can only hope.  He'll have to take in a little more than he ate tonight, though.

The first bite.