Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Moving On...
I have been meaning to write this post for a while but every time I thought about it I just couldn't do it. It sends me to tears which is very annoying for me. (I know, it's healthy and normal.) I'm just so sick of crying.
It's three weeks today since we said goodbye to our boy. I don't know how I expected to feel. It feels like a death even though he is quite alive. We have known since the court date on Valentine's Day that he was going to leave us. It seemed surreal, though, until his aunt and uncle came to get him.
We honestly could not have asked for better people to take him. If anyone had to I am glad it is them. The transition was as smooth as possible. They spent five days with us, one night at our house, while the baby got used to them and being taken care of by them. He was clearly confused when we left him for the last time at the hotel. He was a trooper, not crying or getting visibly upset, though he was clinging to both of us. They said he was the perfect baby on the flights home and charmed everyone. I would expect nothing less of him and those of you who know him I'm sure are not surprised.
We have Skyped with them twice since he left which is extremely difficult, but also good and helpful. He still remembers us and gets excited when he sees us. He seems to be settling in and is especially interested in following his new big brother (actually cousin) around. We have to cut it short when he gets upset because he can't climb through the screen to get to us. We are still trying to decide if going out to visit him is a good idea. We want him to know that we love him but are afraid that he will think we have come to get him and we will have to go through that horrible separation all over again.
These are some of our favorite pictures of him that don't show his face. Since he is still in foster care we have to continue to be careful about the identity protection policies.
We aren't sure what the future holds for us with regard to other children. It seems certain that we will not do foster to adopt again because of everything that happened surrounding us getting him, thinking we would keep him, but ultimately leaving. For now we are moving through each day one at a time and looking ahead to better times.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Trip to the Olympics
We spent last week at the Olympics with my best friend from high school and his wife and one-year-old son. We had a great time, although most people immediately think we were in England when in fact we were visiting the Olympic Mountains and Olympic National Park in far western Washington. We were watching the Olympic Games on television like everyone else.
We stayed in a vacation rental home on Lake Quinault, inside the national park, at the end of a dirt road about fifty yards from the lake, complete with a wraparound deck, grill, and hot tub. The house was mostly childproofed and allowed pets, which was more important for our friends than for us, since we boarded our dogs and our baby is still blessedly immobile, but it was a wonderful and relaxing place to stay.
Olympic National Park is most famous for its temperate rain forests, with a few locations receiving over 200 inches of rain a year. For as much rain as Seattle notoriously gets, it's actually in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. We spent one day visiting the Hoh Rain Forest, which has a "Hall of Mosses" trail including some thousand-year-old trees. Something like five species of tree have their largest known example in this national park (including Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and red cedar). The visitor center has a few tree-trunk cross-sections showing off their quarter-inch annual growth rings, meaning that some trees gain half an inch in girth every year -- a lot, if you think about it.
The park also includes large sections of Pacific beach. We took the baby down for his first experiences with sand and with the ocean, and he absolutely loved it. He wanted down into the sand and loved the feeling so much he immediately started eating it. Then I stood him at the edge of the surf and he squealed and jumped as the waves washed over his feet. He wanted down into the water, too, but I thought better of letting him get salt water splashed in his face. He could have stayed there a long time, but we weren't really dressed for the beach and it was getting toward time for his dinner. (He was also willing to sit on a log at the edge of Lake Quinault for 15 minutes at a time, just watching the water. I think trees and waves are much healthier entertainment for babies than mobiles with flashing lights and annoying songs.)
There aren't any roads through the park, so on our last day, we drove home the long way, five hours around the park. The road is US Hwy 101, the other end of which is in Hollywood, near where we used to live in Pasadena. This northern end of the highway is about as non-Hollywood as you can get, but it also passes through the town of Forks, Wash., the setting for the Twilight books. We didn't stop, but we did see (and ridicule) cars full of middle-aged women doing Twilight Tours. We drove up a steep road to Hurricane Ridge, at about 5000 ft. elevation. From the alpine meadow on top of the ridge, one can see Mt. Olympus (the American version), the park's highest point at nearly 8000 ft.
On this day, Hurricane Ridge also had views north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Victoria, BC, and the Cascade Mountains on the British Columbia coast behind it. To the east was Puget Sound and then Mt. Baker, a conical volcano in the Washington section of the Cascades. We couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather for this trip. The finale for the day was the ferry ride from the Olympic Peninsula back to Seattle, returning us to our home in this amazing city.
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We stayed in a vacation rental home on Lake Quinault, inside the national park, at the end of a dirt road about fifty yards from the lake, complete with a wraparound deck, grill, and hot tub. The house was mostly childproofed and allowed pets, which was more important for our friends than for us, since we boarded our dogs and our baby is still blessedly immobile, but it was a wonderful and relaxing place to stay.
Olympic National Park is most famous for its temperate rain forests, with a few locations receiving over 200 inches of rain a year. For as much rain as Seattle notoriously gets, it's actually in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. We spent one day visiting the Hoh Rain Forest, which has a "Hall of Mosses" trail including some thousand-year-old trees. Something like five species of tree have their largest known example in this national park (including Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and red cedar). The visitor center has a few tree-trunk cross-sections showing off their quarter-inch annual growth rings, meaning that some trees gain half an inch in girth every year -- a lot, if you think about it.
The park also includes large sections of Pacific beach. We took the baby down for his first experiences with sand and with the ocean, and he absolutely loved it. He wanted down into the sand and loved the feeling so much he immediately started eating it. Then I stood him at the edge of the surf and he squealed and jumped as the waves washed over his feet. He wanted down into the water, too, but I thought better of letting him get salt water splashed in his face. He could have stayed there a long time, but we weren't really dressed for the beach and it was getting toward time for his dinner. (He was also willing to sit on a log at the edge of Lake Quinault for 15 minutes at a time, just watching the water. I think trees and waves are much healthier entertainment for babies than mobiles with flashing lights and annoying songs.)
There aren't any roads through the park, so on our last day, we drove home the long way, five hours around the park. The road is US Hwy 101, the other end of which is in Hollywood, near where we used to live in Pasadena. This northern end of the highway is about as non-Hollywood as you can get, but it also passes through the town of Forks, Wash., the setting for the Twilight books. We didn't stop, but we did see (and ridicule) cars full of middle-aged women doing Twilight Tours. We drove up a steep road to Hurricane Ridge, at about 5000 ft. elevation. From the alpine meadow on top of the ridge, one can see Mt. Olympus (the American version), the park's highest point at nearly 8000 ft.
On this day, Hurricane Ridge also had views north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Victoria, BC, and the Cascade Mountains on the British Columbia coast behind it. To the east was Puget Sound and then Mt. Baker, a conical volcano in the Washington section of the Cascades. We couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather for this trip. The finale for the day was the ferry ride from the Olympic Peninsula back to Seattle, returning us to our home in this amazing city.
Mt. Rainier to the south
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