The past couple of days or so I haven’t wanted to write about adoption or other heavy issues much. Or think about it all very much. We have our appointment with the Adoptive Health Center in 7 days so I can try to put my heavy deep thoughts about adoption-related and other things into that — label a box in my brain for that, for next Thursday, keep a list in my purse for next Thursday, compartmentalize as much as I can because God knows my brain needs all the space it can get to just BE a mother, wife, librarian, friend, away from adoption, loss, acting out, as much as I can. I want to breathe. I want to slow down. I want to give my mind and myself and my family a rest.
Last night Nate and I made brownies together. Not from scratch, mind you. No, when I say made brownies together, this is the drill: pick up brownie mix box from store, put brownie mix and a total of three ingredients into the bowl with the mix, mix the ingredients together, pour the mix into a pan, and cook the ingredients for the set amount of time. When the brownies come out of the oven, eat when still warm with vanilla ice cream on top.
Martha Stewart I’m not.
It was fun. Nate may not know until he’s older that things can actually be baked without first coming out of a box from the grocery store. 
I’ll never forget the time he saw an ironing board and an iron — he must have been about 3-years-old — and he said, “What’s that?” HAHAHA!! That’s right; Mama doesn’t iron. Nate and I were recently at a party for a little girl who turned 2-years-old and one of the ladies there who’s somewhere in her fifties, I think, was talking about making pastry crust from scratch and all other kinds of domestic things and I guess she didn’t notice that my eyes were getting glazed over and I had this confused look on my face and then I told them the story about Nate’s ironing board confusion and she didn’t seem at all amused. She didn’t say “It’s a good thing.” Imagine that. I call myself Domestically Impaired yet I’ve never once seen a parking sign for people like me with a mop and a circle with a line crossed through it, not once. Not even at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. *shakes head* I feel so alone in this.
And as I’m writing this, at the computer and not at the side of my son, he’s in the living room in his sing-songy way making up a song that goes “I wish I had a mother, I wish I had a mother,” (*sigh*, is he too smart or what?!) and instead of it making me go into The Pit of Despair as it otherwise would have, I realize that my Very Smart Boy is simply trying to make me do what he wants me to do, that he knows how he has and could wrap me around not just his little finger but every finger and toe on his body, that at age 5, he is indeed so smart that this has either worked before or has elicited guilt to come out of my very pores. That and saying “you’ve been in there for hours” (try 20 minutes) has done pretty much the same. Who, my friends, becomes the parent and who the child? That’s not to say that I’ll simply ignore his needs and stay at the computer, but also that staying here for a few minutes longer is probably not going to do him irreparable damage in the great scheme of things.
I’m learning. I’m learning. I live with two males in the house. If I came every time each of them called, I’d have zero time for myself. Truly. Young or adult, it’s a similar thing at different levels.
Anyways. A brief break in this post to take a phone call and we now have a playdate for Sunday. We’ll go to a wonderful park that Nate and I have gone to the previous two or three summers — it’s an amusement park for kids — it has kids’-sized rides, and he loves it! And it’s inexpensive. We’re going with his friend Johnathan and his mom, Kim.
Should be fun. And you know I’ll take lots of pictures.
Hereby ends the day-to-day post. Toodle-ooo.
