So busy and important.

UPDATE: I fixed all the weird busted links. Sorry about that. But no, really, try the corn fritters.

Tuesdays are the new busy day, so you’ll probably get a little less awesome from me on Tuesdays in the next few weeks. I have to leave work around 4, drive half an hour to get our CSA share, drive half an hour home, feed the dogs and let them out and give them a little love, and drive fourteen minutes to our classes, which start on 6 on the nose and which include having to go through a security checkpoint. So, you know, a little rushed for time. If I were a better blogger, I’d have posts set up ahead of time, but you all know that ain’t me.

Today the coworker who sits in the cubicle right next to mine spent, oh, four and a half hours scrolling slowly through pdfs. I am not kidding. I already had a headache, and my passive aggressive response of eating a box of strawberry Nerds as loudly as I could just made my stomach hurt too. Ugh. Teeth on edge all day.

But! I’ve been spending some slow moments reading the last year’s worth of posts from Stephanie at I Need An Adult (http://haygirlhay.tumblr.com/!) and can happily point you towards three recipes she has linked to, all of which I need in my life:

Thai-style corn fritters (I need instruction on when to put Sweet Chili Sauce on things, so this is helpful).

Mushroom, spinach, and asparagus pasta (I don’t even mind that the sauce is basically cream cheese thinned with milk) (ugh, and when you’re done with that, drool over the homemade ricotta. I don’t even care about making homemade ricotta but this looks so freaking good.)

Oh, and for those of you with a sweet tooth, I’ve got you covered too: S’MORES COOKIES. Not kidding.

Oh, and I just got home and discovered that the shirt I'm wearing should only be worn with a skin-tone bra (NOT WEARING ONE) and also that bending over to pick up the car keys I just dropped makes me feel like my head is broken forever.

Please, for the love of everything holy, share something delightful with me.

Recap: First foster class

We are two of a group of 24, but only 22 showed up last night. The class was led by two caseworkers and an experienced foster parent. Two of the three leaders are not terribly skilled facilitators, and my teacher brain kept urging me to redirect things so we could keep moving, as it became evident pretty quickly that we were going to run out of time. We got through about two-thirds of the stuff we were supposed to, but none of the leaders seemed to think this would be a problem down the line or anything.

We are the youngest people in the class (but only by a few years). We are the only married couple who have zero children between us, I think. I was relieved that quite a few of the people in the class aren't sure if they want to just foster or are hoping to foster-to-adopt, because we haven't made up our minds 100% yet on that one.

Basically, the biggest thing I took away from the class was this: Fostering is not an easy life to live, and the ten weeks of classes are designed for you to discover if it's right for you, and if it is, to give you tools to make it somewhat easier. If it's not right for you, that's okay. It's not for everyone, and it's way, way better to "select yourself out of the class" (caseworker's language, not mine) than have a child placed with you and be indifferent or regret it.

There is a guy in the class who is only going through the system to become the legal guardian of his niece, who he has raised almost since birth (she's just over a year, I think). I think the dude is not totally in control of his mental game, and he took up a lot of the class time pointing out that shit they were telling us about meeting with birth parents didn't apply to him. He did not take a single hint that maybe he didn't need to keep bringing it up. I am really hoping that he can chill the hell out so the rest of us can hear information we might very well need, but I'm not going to be surprised if he drives me crazy for ten weeks.

Overall: Lots of review of shit I read in the reading everyone was supposed to have done but probably only four of us actually did; hoping the nine classes left feel more useful.

Tomorrow I'll post the recap of my fight with Andy. It's a fun one.

Any questions for me about the foster stuff? I'll try to answer anything I can!