Mommy Monday

Today the babes and I met our permanent caseworker and I like her a lot! We'll call her M :) M is a parent herself and she was so easy to talk with. The babes interacted with her very well and were on their cutest behavior :) She'll be coming out here once a month to make sure that the babes are okay, I'm okay and to check to see if we need any support services.

I filled her in on their last doctor's appointment, the speech therapy referral and my relationship with their birth mom (my SIL). I also talked with her about how well they have adjusted, especially our niece SB. We talked about SB not being in play therapy and how I have not seen a need for it.

All in all the visit was about 40 minutes and was completely stress free. We have set an appointment for next month and I actually look forward to seeing her. I almost forgot-she also mentioned that in April, SIL's caseworker will looking at starting the process of terminating SIL's parental rights.....that's only 2 months from now. As much as I know that she most likely will never be able to parent due to her paranoid schizophrenia, my heart hurts for her.

So, to my adoptive parents/foster parents/guardians/potential adoptive parents-how do you handle caseworker visits? Do they stress you out? Do you get along with your caseworker? What do the kids think?

Mommy Mondays (a new idea for this blog)

I want to start Mommy Mondays on this blog, in an effort to blog regularly again and in an effort to reconnect with my blogging friends :)

Having recently become a Mommy via guardianship of the sis in law's kids, I have a full appreciation of how difficult parenting is...especially when doing it alone (P won't be back until the summer). I love the children and the bonding is going MUCH better but wow, there are definite challenges. On Mommy Mondays I want to focus on all things relating to parenting. I am thinking that I will obsess write about one parenting "thing" (sorry, I am too exhausted to think of a better word) per week on here. If there's ever anything that you want to see me write about or that you just think would be a good topic, please comment on any post and let me know :)

I want to share a bit about the bonding/attaching that we've been working on here in our home. As y'all might remember things were rough here in the beginning. I am happy to report that things are MUCH better around here, I think due in a major way to my no longer being on the evil lu.pron. We have a night time routine now-15 to 30 minutes of cartoons while I make dinner; eat dinner; take baths; read a story and then bed time. That routine works 90% of the time, though sometimes SB (2.5 yr old niece) still has a meltdown when she gets in the bed. J (1 yr old nephew) rarely cries at bed time any more, unless he decides that he wants to stay up and play with the furbabies :)

SB is also seeking me out for hugs and sitting on my lap during Friday Night Family Movie and Pizza night. Her newest thing is to blow kisses to me or just come up to me for kisses <3 She also runs to me when I pick her up from preschool saying "Mommy hug"....yeah, she's a charmer :) J's face lights up when I come into his classroom and he immediately wants me to pick him up. He has also started having baby nightmares which is awful but he *does* calm down when I comfort him.

For the past couple of weekends, we haven't really done anything fun because I have had IVF appointments, which for me are 2.5 hrs of driving round trip. This coming weekend I have decided that we will go shoe shopping for all 3 of us, walk around the mall a bit and then go see my friend, S, at BWW on her lunch shift :) We are also going to go to church which is sure to be an adventure ;)

So what to you do to promote bonding/attachment in your children?

And then there were 6

I had my egg retrieval this morning and the RE got 6 eggs. P's swimmers looked great after thawing and the embryologist was optimistic. My friend, Brittany, took me for the ER and watched the kids....yeah, they had to come with us since we got some snow and the preschool had a late open of 8am. She took them to McD's to play while I was there. From the time I got there until I was released was about 90 min. I do very well with the twilight anasthesia :)

So now we wait and pray that they fertilize and that we end up with a healthy baby. I cannot thank y'all enough for all of the support through out all of this....seriously, I could not do it without y'all.