Sometimes foster care is hard.

If you read any other blogs by foster parents, you've probably seen at least a few posts about how visits suck. That, friends, is because visits suck.

The baby's dad is still attending visits, but not with any regularity. The baby cries - screams - for most of the visit, then passes out from exhaustion. The dad didn't come to either visit last week, and today the baby cried so hard she puked all over herself and him. (I can't pretend the "and him" wasn't the tiniest bit satisfying.)

Her dad has been told that it's bad for the baby to see him only sporadically. She has not developed any sort of a relationship with him, because she's still not comfortable with him. The baby sees the worker with us at least once a month, when the worker comes for home visits, so she trusts the worker and tries to cling to her throughout the visits, still sobbing. Hearing all of this kills me. I asked the worker today if there's ever a point when they can ask the judge to change how this is going, on the basis of it being actively damaging for the baby, and the worker said, basically, that she's only ever seen the courts go for no visits in cases of sexual abuse. If the parents want visits, they get them, even if they only bother to show up occasionally. Our next hearing isn't until February, so this will probably continue at least until then, and nothing will happen at that hearing, so it will continue through April, when they can begin the process of filing for termination of parental rights (if things keep going the way they are), but then the judge can give an extension if he's feeling generous and so I can't really foresee a time when my baby girl won't be regularly subjected to hysterical sobbing on her dad's whim.

The evening after a visit the poor kid is all out of sorts. She doesn't want to be put down, but she is super whiny even when we're holding her. She holds on to us like she's scared of being put down. It's heartbreaking. Today is one of the days when being a foster parent is fucking hard.

Subject change! In other non-news, as far as we know things are still going fine with NewBaby. I'm ten weeks pregnant now and still worrying pretty much constantly, which is exhausting. We have an ultrasound scheduled for December 3, which feels like FOREVER far away. I am still totally exhausted - like I'm staying up late to write this and it's only 8:39 right now - and I get waves of nausea, which I find incredibly reassuring since I didn't feel crappy for most of the last pregnancy. I told NewBaby that it is welcome to make me feel as crappy as it wants, even if it means I can't eat a single bite on Thanksgiving, as long as things are going okay in there.

I've got two Tollhouse Cookie Pies in the oven right now, but honest, for the first time in my life I am too tired to stay up for pie. This is crazy. Tollhouse Pie is my very favorite and we're bringing one to Andy's cousin's Third Annual Night-Before-Thanksgiving Pie Party tomorrow, so I made an extra for me.

What's your very favorite Thanksgiving dessert?

On rememberances

Oatmeal-Chocolate-Chip Cookies via

We don't know most of our neighbors. We've lived here for over three years, and I don't know the name of a single person who lives in the house across the street and over one. It's kind of sad how insular the suburbs can be.

But we do know the neighbors to the south of our house pretty well. They're some of those genuinely great neighbors that we feel lucky to have. When we moved in, there were four of them (mom, dad, college-aged son, middle-school-aged son), but, sadly, the mom died of cancer two years ago this week.

This lady, whose story is not mine to tell so I'm not going to tell you her name, was a dynamo. She was funny and clever and generous and an incredible cook. Her sons certainly know how to have a good time but she raised them to be polite, respectable, nice dudes (remind me to tell you about her older son at our Halloween party sometime).

Every once in a while, a few times a year, I'll bake something and send it over to the boys. I know that their mom used to bake like whoa, but that it's unlikely they make themselves many cookies, so it's a little something I like to do to remind them we're thinking of them. The last time I brought something over (it was a batch of pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies that were still warm), the younger son, who's now fifteen, dragged his friend over here to hug me and say thank you.

So today I'm making them a batch of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies. I know this week has got to suck, and cookies aren't going to do much, but at least they'll have something delicious to eat while they're thinking of their mom.

What do you do to remember lost loved ones? What would you suggest I bake for my neighbors next time I'm feeling bakerly?