Ringing in the New Year!

New Years was Brazilian this year.  Brazil narrowly beat out Russia, for those who are curious! LOL  We did some research, and our meal was pretty delicious.  We did Brazilian bean croquettes which were so good we will definately make them again--Brazilian rice which was only so-so, and Brazilian sweet muffins for dessert. That recipe is a keeper too!  We finished reading our memories of the year.  We did our trivia game and had a blast.  (I tend to do a lot of true false type questions and do the how many think true vs false which evens out the odds of getting something correct for the littles.

The bottom picture is the paper boats with white flowers that we "set sail" with our wishes for the new year.  Brazilian legend has it that if the boats sink our wishes will come true.  Small people keep anxiously checking the boats to see if they need to be helped along to the watery deep.

No New Years celebration is complete without fireworks, right?  So we save up our bubble wrap and the kids jump on it wildly (heavy emphasis on WILDLY) making lots of fire work type noises.

Happy New  Year everyone!

Preparing for New Years Eve

I was unexpectedly lucky and got out of work early today. This meant that the kids and I could go to the library mid afternoon instead of after supper which was a huge boon.  They are less able to handle such  things in the evenings. Or maybe I am. LOL  Playing Wii Fit in the evenings lately has been what we do for an hour or so after supper.  It gives them enough energy burn and we can swap around between the games easily enough that there is something everyone is good at.  Well, except me.

But I didn't really plan to write about my lack of prowess with the Wii.  Rather it was my lack of prowess with paper.  As in the folding of paper.  See we are "travelling" to Brazil this year for New Years Eve. We will be feasting on Bean Croquettes served on buns, Brazilian style rice, and having Brazilian spiced muffins for dessert.  We will play Brazilian music on the computer. I am counting on pandora or slacker to help me out there.  I have a lot of latin music of my own but really nothing Brazilian.

We will play a trivia game that will hopefully teach the kids some fun facts about Brazil.  I will leave 3 easy to read books in the living room during the day and if they avail themselves of them, they will have an edge. LOL 

But there is a custom in Brazil of placing  white flowers in a boat and setting it out to sea. If the boat sinks your wishes will come true.  I have a truly gigantic punch bowl that was my grandmothers.  My thought is to fill it with water, tint it pale blue green with food coloring and float small paper boats in it. I can get some white daisies at the grocery store tomorrow to put in the boats. 

So in my mind, I see this little paper boat.  I google how to make a paper boat.  And I get a 31 step instruction from a university in TX.  Yup, a university had info on this.  Except that this is one area where I have always been weak.  Well, inept is probably a more honest assessment. So I have thus far a bunch of smushed papers and no boats.

I am going to ask Robbie tomorrow morning!  Somehow or other, there WILL be a paper boat.  Hopefully one for all of us but I'll settle for one communal boat to sink with our dreams for the new year.

The Santa Key

This Christmas Eve Santa rather zealously threw the magic key that opens our front door on the front porch during his leave taking.  LOL  Well very cold temps and ceramic hitting the porch had their inevitable result.  Santa left a note explaining he had used all the magic up in the key (we don't have a chimney) and would send a new key.

Said key is on the way.  I found an Etsy shop who makes keys that are, incidently NOT ceramic!  When I ordered it I wrote the saga of why we needed the key and explained that it would really help if instead of her return address she would put that it was from the North Pole.  Not only did she amazingly agree to do that but she went and bought Christmas stamps for the mailing instead of the usual metered mailing that her Etsy store does.  I love Etsy shops anyway, there are so many creative people out there!  And I especially love Lori of MellowMermaid!

Kids Say the Oddest Things!

This was KC and Lissa's conversation while I made dinner tonight:

KC:  I'll be the puppy and you be the kitty.

Lissa:  (moany sound)  KC. . .

KC  C'mon Lissa

Lissa:  (suddenly happy voiced)  Oh, cuz your nose looks like a puppy's right? 

KC  Yup, and yours looks like a kitty.

Except they didn't have masks on while they had this little discourse.  Hours later I am still chuckling. But we have all determined that I am very easily amused!

Remembering 2010

Saying goodbye to 2010.  Doesn't seem possible really that the year has flown by as rapidly as it has.  But here we are, planning our New Years Eve festivities and looking back nightly on the "events" of 2010.  All during the year we have a pocket hanging on the wall where we write notes of things we want to remember.  Some are simple. The fact that our hydrangea had a spectacular season for the first time ever. Some mark kid milestones, like the kids starting an activity or taking initiative in something in a new way.  Some are football scores of Rob's favorite teams. (giggle)  Tonight I took out the slips of paper and there were 63 of them.  So we have decided to read some each night through New Years Eve.  K is at work tonight and Lissa can't read, but everyone else took a few and we read them.  Suddenly the Whale Watch was fresh in our mind, our evenings at the local tot park were warming us despite winters chill.  We remembered KC's home made summer carnival, and Rob's week at away camp.  The cold sub zero winds faded for awhile and by the light of our candles, we remembered.

Finding Family

I read a fairly diverse group of bloggers.  There are foster care and foster to adopt blogs that I read, because I have adopted through the foster care system. And because I think the system is broken I kind of "keep tabs" as I wonder how and what I could do to be an agent of change at some point in my life when the wee ones are less wee.  I read blogs that deal with kids with issues--disabilities, mental health issues--things that may not exactly mirror my situations with some of my kids, but have enough similarities to have a resonance in my spirit. I read blogs of adult adoptees, knowing that I need their wisdom as my children grow.  I read first mother blogs, knowing that I need to never forget all of my kid's family. I read several blogs of people who aged out of foster care--if you really want to know how broken that system is, I recommend reading a few of those.  We should be so ashamed as a country at what we allow to happen to kids in foster care.

 I read cooking blogs because I enjoy both the preparation and the consumption of good, healthy (vegetarian) food.  I read decorating blogs because I am all about decorating on the cheap.  I read about black hair care.  I read my artist friend's blog and my writer friend's blog and other friends blog.  I am nosy I guess.  LOL

Tonight I read that one of the adult adoptees whose blog I enjoy is now in dialogue with her natural father.  I am excited for her.  And it made me rather wistful and selfishly weepy at the same time. 

I have no relationship other than biology with my father. But it isn't one of those situations where he walked out of my life early.  He stayed there through age 18, making virtually every holiday and special moment memorable only in the ways he could find to mar it.  Then he divorced my mom and moved on to wife number two and her two children by her first husband. 

He kept in relationship with my sister  though.  In fact when wife number three passed away  recently and the memorial service took place in a far away state, he paid to have sis fly out and speak at the funeral.   If I had moved to some far flung part of the world, or wasn't on the internet, I could understand his lack of communication.  His lack of presence in my life.  But I live in the house I grew up in.  I am on the net.  My sister is my FB friend as well as our father.  So he could contact me if he wanted to. 

But he won't.  Because I was never quite good enough.   I think maybe the reason I read some of those adoption blogs is because I do feel some of the same issues of abandonment--though then I feel guilty because I wasn't in foster care.  I didn't ever have to worry about my physical safety or where my next meal was coming from.  But feeling loved?  Feeling connected?  That lack can happen even in a birth family and it is still so painful. 

Blog Tinkering

I have actually had time to tinker a bit with the layout of my blog. This is something I almost never do.  Partly as I am such a dunce with computer stuff I worry I'll accidently screw it up so badly that I can't fix it.  Partly cause i don't usually have unprogrammed time.  Today, having a bit of free time and an excess of technology courage, I changed things up a bit.  I listed a blog roll of the blogs i customarily read.  I hope no one minds being listed.  After I did this, I wondered if I am supposed to get permission from the blog authors?  Some parts of the new internet etiquette I am still unsure. So if you read my blog and I read your blog and you don't want to be on the blog roll, let me know and I'll take you off. 

Then I deleted my A to Z book list for 2010.  Because in all reality, 2010 is drawing to a close really fast and since I only managed 15 books and no where close to one for each letter of the alphabet, it was just too sad to leave it up! LOL  Though despite the fact I did not meet the challenge fully, I think I read more for pleasure this year as a result of taking on the challenge.  I worked really hard at taking 30 minutes for myself most nights to just read. Not always a book, sometimes just Down East magazine or Natural Geographic magazine, both of which I love.  And I think that this habit will go forward with me into 2011.  My goal will be to improve on it.  I wonder what else the new year will bring?