zach n kali

My cousin and her husband have spent the last year teaching in Thailand. I've been following their blog, and their stories are amazing - the food, the traveling, the adventures! As I read their last post, I thought to myself, "I have adventures, right? I'm fun, right?" You better believe it! Let me tell you about my latest adventure: I am an introvert. I value my alone time very much and am a better person for it. When you have a little one, the idea of alone time needs to be modified. So for me, it has meant my time in the bathroom. In our small home, Zach and I have a closed-bathroom-door policy. We (really it's me) just can't do the comfortable open-door-share-the-bathroom-shower-and-use-the-toilet thing that many people can. I have been told that I have issues. But it is the one place in the house that is not over-run with baby stuff. It's quiet. The fan makes a nice white noise. And no one judges you for going in there. But then it...

I've been meaning to write about this for a while now, but somehow time just flies by! About a month ago I got the call to take Baby M to our agency for his first visit with his bio mom. My stomach dropped. He had been with us for two weeks at that point and we were completely in love with him. But the reality remained that he still had biological parents out there who were hopefully working on getting their lives together so that they could be reunited. It was a gut check reminder that Baby M was not going to be with us forever. I spent the rest of the morning feeling anxious and even a little hurt. I wanted to protect M, and these were the people who couldn't take care of him like we could. Why couldn't life just stay the way it was? I checked the mail when I got home and I found a letter from our agency. In addition to the monthly newsletter there was an insert with a letter from a mother who had been reunited with her children after completing the court requ...

It's been an “extra-grace-required” sort of day. I'm tired. Baby M is tired. I don't feel well. M doesn't feel well. I'm cranky... you get the idea. It's on these days that I really have to stop and go back to basics. I have to get up and do something I love, which today means baking. I'm not the creative type, but I love taking other people's ideas and transforming them. Starbucks has a new amazing Cononut Mocha and I decided to try to make a cupcake out of it. With a little one crawling around, I won't type out the whole recipe, but I'll tell you what I did and if you would like the recipe, let me know and I would be more than happy to give it to you. I started by making a coconut flour chocolate cupcake. I then added instant coffee and shredded coconut. I then made a chocolate-coffee glaze. I cooled the cupcakes then dipped them top-down into the glaze, twirling them a little to keep the glaze from going everywhere. From there...

Seeing someone play with a child is incredibly therapeutic. Seeing a grandpa play with his foster grandson with absolute adoration and abandon, with no reference to "foster", that's the kind of love that makes you tear up. Yesterday I was incredibly blessed to see love freely given. My father-in-law is an incredible example of what it means to love like this. He showered M with hugs, kisses, "I love yous", and smiles. He is giving this little boy something he desperately needs - love and a strong loving male role-model. My sister-in-law put it into words well: she said, "It's amazing how I can just love him so much, yet I didn't even know about him a month ago!" Many people have said to me that they don't know how we are able to do this; they would get too attached. In a way, they're right; attachment is hard. To be perfectly honest, I cannot picture giving my sweet baby back to his family. I become physically ill when I pict...

Dear Baby Boy, I cannot believe you've been with us for over a month. I am amazed at the things I have seen: you sit up on your own for the first time, your smile that lights up the room, the laugh that can lift the world off my shoulders in an instant, your developing attachment to blondes, your introduction to solid foods, your dislike of peas, the way you babble as if it makes perfect sense, the way you've begun to crawl... Oh baby boy, I may not hear your first words, or take you to your first day of school, or see you make the football team, or walk across the stage during graduation, but I am seeing today. I am seeing you bounce around, scoot across the floor, and give face-planting wet kisses. I get to read you bedtime stories and go with you down the slide. It has been my privilege to witness these precious moments, and I will treasure them forever. Thank you for lighting up my world. I love you. Love, Mom

I hate laundry. To me, it is the most depressing chore. You spend hours sorting, pretreating, lugging, washing, drying, folding, and putting clothes away only to have the hamper full again. It's like dark magic. And with a baby, the amount of laundry has doubled. Maybe tripled. So it's little wonder that one of the new cries in the house is, “Save the onesie!” as we carry a stinky or spitting up baby to the changing table or bathroom. While it rarely works, I'm sure it's very entertaining to see one of us spring from our seats, baby held out like a bomb, running into another room, trying to somehow keep whatever is coming out from getting all over Baby M's outfit. If we fail, but only mildly, out comes an arsenal of cleaning products – water, shout, oxiclean, washcloths – to try to remove the offending material. If we fail colossally, then into the hamper it goes and a new outfit comes out, only to repeat the cycle an hour later. Sigh.

I have decided that we have been groomed over the past two years to raise a child. Ever since we brought Belle home, we have been learning valuable lessons about child-rearing and I thought I would share some things that Belle has taught us about children: - if it's important, they want to put it in their mouth - books on the shelf are meant to be pulled off - water glasses are for knocking over - they become very persistent (or in Belle's case, obnoxious) when they are hungry - they love waking you up in the early hours of the morning before the alarm goes off - they think all visitors are there to see them - grown up people food is much more interesting than their food - they do not like to be dirty and they like it when you clean up after them - if you do not clean them, your home will smell - you cannot control their behavior - they look at you like you're the crazy one - they both like to have staring contests - they both adore books, though not for the...

A few months ago, Zach and I took a spontaneous trip to Vegas. I mean, we just grabbed our bags and went, arriving at about 1am. It was incredible. We had the most fun and we loved that there was no planning, no schedule, and no responsibilities. Fast forward to the present... traveling is, well... different. It's all about planning and scheduling, and responsibility. Last weekend we joined Zach's family in Cayucos for a beach vacation. There was nothing get-up-and-go about it. There were lists and text messages and grocery trips and online searches about traveling with an infant. And there was definitely a lot that we forgot. Fortunately none of it concerned the baby, but neither or us remembered to grab our own jackets or socks. We have decided that between the two of us, we have about three braincells left, so we must choose how to use them wisely. On our way to Vegas we stopped for In-N-Out. On this trip we stopped to change a diaper and feed Baby M. Not n...