Fostering: the baby has landed!

We have a baby. She's a month old. She arrived at 8 p.m. on Thursday, four hours after we found out we were getting her, and will be here until at least Thursday, when there's some sort of court date, and at which point we'll probably find out if she's leaving soon or will be here a while.

She is two weeks younger than we initially said we'd take, but I'll work from home and stuff for the next two weeks, until she's old enough to go to daycare. Because we weren't expecting to take a baby so young, most of the clothes we have are too big for her. And because she's extra small - she weighs 7 pounds, 10 ounces - even the limited amount of zero-to-three-month stuff we happened to have is huge on her. Thankfully, we are friends with an extended family with lots of small kids, so I activated the phone tree and will have warm newborn-sized clothes pouring in soon. In the meantime, we have enough for a few days, and also it's a great excuse to snuggle her a lot.

Things I have learned in thirty-eight hours of parenthood:

• Babies this young have no pattern. The first night, I was up with her for an hour and a half and Andy was up with her for an hour. Last night, she was up for half an hour around 2 a.m., then she slept until 7:30.
• Having a baby in your house means there will always be a million baby-related things laying around everywhere.
• You will always need to be doing a load of laundry.
• Baby formula is pretty disgusting and turns white things tan and also costs two million dollars.
• It is possible to love a baby with your whole heart immediately.

So, posting will probably be sort of light for the next little bit (till Thursday, at least). When she's sleeping, it seems more important to do laundry and take a shower and hang out with the dogs (who are confused by this new toy, to say the least) and stare mindlessly at the wall because I'm so tired. Thanks for understanding!

Overheard at work

Bald, good-natured manager: Hey! Love the short haircut! Maybe go even shorter next time, so I won't be the only bald one in the office! Ha! Ha!
Very quiet, mild-mannered twenty-something who just cut his hair: [quiet agreement, haha]
Two loud, bossy, middle-aged crones: LOUD DISCUSSION ON THEIR PREFERRED HAIR LENGTHS, BOTH IN GENERAL AND ON COWORKER IN PARTICULAR.

I haven't dyed my hair in, like, a year - this is an incredible thing for me - and I can honestly say, while I miss having blue hair, I do not miss the monthly inane conversations like this.

Is every job like this? Isn't there anywhere I could work that doesn't have these people?

Food!

Like everyone else in America, Andy and I are trying to get back into our regular eating habits now that the holidays are over. Today I brought all the last of the candy from our stockings to put on the free table at work, so we don't find ourselves mindlessly snacking on it, and we're working on planning meals again so we don't fall into a don't-know-what-to-cook-so-let's-go-out rut.

We are starting to work on eating some of the awesome excess stuff our CSA provided all summer, which will be helpful because our freezer is so full I couldn't fit ice cream in it the other day. We're also planning to get an additional freezer - the stand-up kind - so we can freeze more of our CSA stuff instead of letting it get icky on the counter or in the fridge, and also so we can buy better-quality meats and stuff when they're cheapest. (Regarding meat - here's a confession: we usually buy those giant bags of Tyson's poultry-internment-camp-plus-unnecessary-antibiotics chicken breasts from Sam's. I know. I've seen Food, Inc, and I know how terrible Tyson's is. But they're fucking cheap, and one breast is three servings. I'm working on remembering that paying more is worth it when it comes time to check out.) Anyway, eating veggies we got from a local farm, and the million soups we made from them, is an awesome way to spend the winter.

I have also faced the fact that I don't like eating cold cereal in the winter, so I'd been making excuses to take too long for a bowl in the morning, which always meant stopping somewhere and eating something bad for me. I'm not a morning person, so getting up earlier to cook myself something isn't happening. Enter the best solution ever: baked oatmeal! With recipes for a pumpkin pie version and a gingerbread version too! I made the gingerbread one and have been so happy about eating it every morning.

I'm guessing you, too, have been eating delicious and healthy things, so lay 'em on me! What delicious, healthy recipes can you share?

Fostering: adoption credit

Today's post is a serious one. I'm reposting an eloquent, thoughtful post by an awesome, experienced foster parent about an important issue. Here's the scoop on the situation with the adoption tax credit from Teresa at Foster Care: Our Love Story:

There is a tax credit available for people who adopt. It is intended to offset the cost of traditional adoption and provide incentive for perspective parents to adopt special needs children from Foster Care.

When adopting from foster care, almost all of our kids qualify as "special needs". Some of the qualifications for that are sibling groups, minority children, a child that has been in care over 1yr, or children with medical or developmental disabilities. If you adopt a special needs child, you are eligible for the entire adoption tax credit.

In years past, this credit could be used against your income tax. So you would get a bigger return, but the benefit was linked to your income and how much you pay in taxes. So for Middle class families, it could take years before you saw the full benefit of the tax credit. If you were a Grandma on Social Security who adopted 3 of your Grandbabies, you would never see this money because you don't owe taxes.

In 2010, however, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which had some small print that made this Adoption Tax Credit a refund. This means that for every child adopted from foster care through 2011, their adoptive parents would a receive a $13,170 check regardless of their income or taxes owed. This was great news for people who got to adopt in these past 2 yrs. Granny gets the money she needs to move to a bigger apartment or start college fund for her kids.

Unfortunately, this refundable credit went away on December 31, 2011.

The plan for people adopting in 2012 is that you can get credit up to $12,170 for each adoption against your income tax. However, the remaining amount can not be used in following years. You'll get a bigger tax return for this year, but not the check for the credit amount and there is no benefit beyond 2012.

In 2013, the Adoption Tax Credit goes away all together.

There is a petition going around to try to get the Tax Credit extended. I signed it, and I hope you will too. The financial incentive shouldn't be the reason people adopt, but hopefully it helps keep siblings together or keep higher needs kids in stable homes.

Click here to sign the Adoption Tax Credit Petition

This is a form letter you can send to your State representative

Me again: It takes, like, less than a minute to sign the petition, and the form letter is already written for you. Maybe take a second and do something good? Thanks!

Baby names

Fact: "awkward baby names" is the most common search that brings people to this blog (I just tried it, and somehow I'm the first three links). I'm guessing they mean names like "Drew Peacock" or "Ima Hogg" or whatever instead of just the dumb stuff people in my city name their kids, but hey, it's my blog. So, here's a fresh batch:

- O'neil as a first name
- Si'ryii (pronounced Siri, at a guess. Maybe they're Apple fans)
- Dino as a first name
- J'dyn
- Merve
- J'Anna
- Madisyn
- Madelynne (why?? She will never not have to spell this out for people.)
- Quanta'z
- Ahlaea (again with the spelling)

Andy and I officially laid claim to a family name when we were visiting cousins last week. Turns out most of my cousins thought we were weird for considering it. The name is my grandma's maiden name, and we're thinking of some way to combine it with Andy's grandma's maiden name. I'll let you know if and when we do anything with that.

Resolutions or whatever, 2012

So here's my list of goals for this year. None of these are revolutionary, and some of them are repeats that I should have done in 2011. You'll note there are fewer goals than last year. I think it's reasonable to note that we could end up with a foster kid at any minute, so I didn't want to add a whole bunch of stuff we'd like to do but isn't crucial. Anyway, here they are:

1. Get our kitchen knives professionally sharpened.
2. See a dermatologist (bonus points if he/she uses primarily natural stuff).
3. Take a picture of every item I knit (I give away most of the stuff I knit, and I have a terrible memory).
4. Knit myself a sweater.
5. Take at least two overnight trips with Andy (this is a repeat, even though I accomplished it last year, because it was so awesome for us).
6. Get tattoo (and artist's mockup, for customized stationery, because that's so badass).
7. Take multivitamin, fish oil, and Vitamin D supplement at least five times a week (because I feel a lot better when I do).
8. Find some sort of health/fitness class to do at least once a week. I need to spend more time keeping myself healthy, but I know myself well enough to know that I am not interested in going to a gym. I need some sort of scheduled workout that involves learning, so I'm looking into yoga, or tai chi, or maybe some sort of noncompetitive martial art or something that fits with my schedule and isn't outrageously expensive.

So! I think these are doable and reasonable, and they're all things that I feel good about getting done. Here's to a productive, healthy 2012!

What are your goals for 2012?

Lovely little evening

I'm still working on perfecting this year's list of goals, which should be up tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm making this soup for dinner, using this awesome immersion blender I got for Christmas, waiting for Andy to get home so we can enjoy the hell out of it. To be honest, I saw "carrot soup" and went, "Meh," but then she said she was inspired by that awesome carrot-ginger dressing you get a Japanese restaurants, and I was back in. But hey, it's not like Smitten Kitchen ever steers me wrong, so I shouldn't have been a hater. Fact: just so you know I'm totally faking it when I act like I have it all together, I knew I had ginger in the fridge so I didn't buy any for the soup. Turns out the ginger left in the fridge was just about petrified it was so old. I couldn't even grate it. Basically, I tried to grate it, then just threw the whole chunk in the soup and decided our soup will be fragranced with ginger instead of full of it. Oh, and the onions I used both had green sprouts on the top, so I chopped the weird parts off and used them anyway. Nice.

I just discovered that Hulu has all of the current season of Parks and Recreation, so I think Andy and I will be hooking his laptop up to the tv and spending the evening on the couch with some dogs and some knitting. I'm still trying to finish my mom's sweater - but I've decided when I'm done I'm going to knit myself a badass hat and scarf set to go with my new winter coat, so I'm feeling more motivated!

How are you spending your first week of the new year?