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Daphne and Delilah were all ready to ring in the new year…

But Delilah was excited and running around all evening and is now in her mother’s pocket, nearly asleep, I don’t think she’ll make it to midnight.

Yotsuba used her ice cream bar to bribe a ride from a fancy bird.

(Ed made the playdough bird)

Rebecca got a Yotsuba! for Christmas, we’ve been taking photos of her, she’s lots of fun!

Yum!

Studying to be a slayer.

Oops. Wrong vampyre, actually.

Personally, my favorite toy that Rebecca got for Christmas is the RC Bumper Cars. We’ve had LOTS of fun with them. Basically, you have these little round cars, each with a little dude in the seat, and a button on each side of the car. You drive around trying to bump into the buttons on your opponent’s car, ejecting the little dude and then it makes this funny cackling noise. It’s funniest when you bump into your opponent’s button with your own button and both little dudes going flying in the air with the cackling. Hehe, very cool toy. Doesn’t seem to eat batteries too quickly, either, we played with them for a long time before the cars seemed to be slowing down a little.

I had to go to the pet store for cat food today. I picked up a pack of Emily’s favorite rattly mice, it was a “Christmas” pack, so on big sale. I put most of them in a bag of catnip to soak up stony goodness, but I gave her one of each color. In almost no time, we found them here:

There’s almost always at least one toy in the cat’s food dish. For the longest time we thought it was Emily putting them there since she’s the only cat who really plays with toys. The other cats will play with a string or a feather, but Emily plays with anything and she loves these mice, she carries them around, bats them around the kitchen floor, the bath tub. She tosses them in the air and chases them. She also plays fetch with them, which is cute. So really, it was an easy guess it was her putting them in the food. But one day I watched Mister, curmudgeon cat extraordinaire, pick up a mouse Emily had left lying around, and carry it it to the food dish, dropping it in. He then searched around for another one, put it with the other. It’s pretty funny. Anyway, Emily has the attention span of a, well, a mentally-challenged kitten on speed (never mind she’s 3 1/2 years-old), and she played with these new mice for approximately one second, give or take, but a little while later, Mister had done his thing.

Well, your fingers weave quick minarets
Speak in secret alphabets
I light another cigarette,
Learn to forget, learn to forget,
Learn to forget, learn to forget.

As awesome as this song is, I think I might drive my family (and possibly the neighbors) nuts if I don’t stop hitting “replay.”

I’m not pimping a product, they didn’t give me anything, they didn’t ask me to write about them, I just *heart* these little books.

I have no idea where I first heard about Field Notes, someone’s flickr stream, maybe? Something about them attracted me and then I surfed around and found a lot of people who loved them a lot and I love little notebooks and so it wasn’t long before I ordered some. I carry one with me everywhere now, seriously, I’m more likely to forget my house keys than my Field Notes when I go somewhere.

These are a few I’ve used. One of them isn’t a Field Notes Brand notebook, I’ll write about it later. I stuff these in my pocket, in my purse, my backpack, my grocery bag, wherever. Just for the record, I have a slight addiction to putting shiny metal tape on everything, Field Notes don’t need reinforcement, I just like the tape! What do I use them for?

Lots of this. To-do lists, grocery lists, or I jot down shit like “don’t forget your head, it’s not screwed on properly today, might fall off.” Honestly, this is what I do with them a lot. I’m lost without lists. I forget everything otherwise. I used to jot down notes and lists willy-nilly all over the place and it was terrible, I never kept things straight, I’d lose the fucking lists. Keeping them all in one place, with pages that don’t come out, it’s just the only thing that works. I like the small size. They fit in back pocket of my jeans, the chest pocket of my favorite jacket, and take up no room in my purse.

Other lists. I was reading a book about books and I jotted down ones that I thought I’d like to read.

Sometimes I write down ideas for things I’d like to blog about, or just general journal entries, whatever. I’m never without paper, and (god, knock wood) I’ve never lost my Field Notes, so these little random musings that hit me on the bus or something, they don’t get lost.

Plus, I just love the way these little notebooks feel. The covers are cardboard (there’s probably an official paper word for what it is), flexible and smooth. The paper inside is sturdy, smooth, the lines are just the right width (I’ve only used lined and grid so far, but I have a blank one), they don’t bleed through even when I use an inky pen. They’re just… pleasant little books. Plus they have cool stuff printed on them. My favorite is the list of “Practical Applications” from the inside back cover, ideas for uses for your Field Notes, which include Shoddy Sketches, Small Schematics, Hate Mail, Escape Routes, Gambling Debts and Tall Orders, among others.

I also have one set of Scout Books. Mine are from The Black Apple. You can see one of them in the photo above. It’s a bit smaller than a Field Notes. I like my Scout Books very much, but maybe not quite as much as the Field Notes. I adore the designs, but I prefer the feel of the paper of the Field Notes. The difference is pretty small, though, and unlikely to prevent me from buying designs I adore, heh. Because, of course, I now have a problem restraining myself from buying more more more Field Notes (and the like), thankfully my (tiny tiny) budget is a good restraint.

The other two in my Black Apple set of Scout Books.

We love the lyrics :)

I feel sort of stifled. I have a lot of feelings about adoption but don’t feel able/willing/something enough to write them all down, let alone here in public. I read a lot of adoption-related stuff on the ‘net, though, blogs written by people who were adopted, parents who adopted children, and mothers like me who, under a variety of circumstances, lost children to adoption. I can relate to so much of what I read but sometimes, you know, I read something that strikes a chord in a powerful way. I’ve been introduced to many amazing blogs by Dawn (whose own blog I love big big time!).

This entry from Adoption Truth really spoke to a lot of my feelings.

There is a change, a shift, I believe happens, even today, to women who are led to believe, whether through so-called counseling or the message from society in general, that they are not good enough mothers for their children. That another woman. Someone better. Richer. Married. More successful . . . is the one who deserves to raise her child.

It’s so true for me. I really don’t feel like the person I was before my son was born. Like the author of the blog, I have looked at photos of myself from before I was a mother and I can’t fathom who she was or what she believed her future would be, or she came to be me today. Sometimes I look at my daughter and try to figure it out, either with myself as her mother, or her as a daughter who will one be a teenager who might become pregnant. It makes no sense.

I’m sure many first mothers can relate to the worry that our children’s adoptions might have harmed them. I knew my son’s parents, and although our adoption was closed and I never saw them until our reunion, I never worried about my son’s whereabouts or anything like that. I knew they were good people, I knew they loved our son, I knew they were going to love him and raise him well. More, I worried just the fact of his adoption would hurt him in some fundamental way. That he would feel I didn’t love him, that his father and I didn’t want him, that we discarded him without a thought. The fact that we were so young when he was born didn’t seem like much of an excuse to me, that emotionally, our youth wasn’t a good enough reason, I couldn’t imagine it would be much of a comfort to him. I worried he would feel disconnected from himself, like a stranger in his family, in the world, without roots.

Most people don’t understand how debilitating it is sometimes, being adopted. We have no anchor, no roots, no way to ground ourselves to the world around us.

I have never been particularly interested in genealogy, but then, I can take my own family history for granted, my mother and father were there to tell me where my great-grand-whoevers came from, England or Ireland, wherever. There were scrapbooks of old photos, people I can’t name, but I can look at them and find bits of my own self in them in the shapes of their faces and bodies. I can see how they lived and dressed, how I might have come from them. I was already firmly grounded in my roots, no wondering needed.

My daughter at the dentist:

Dental assistant: Are you off school today?
Rebecca: I don’t go.
DA: Why not?
R: I prefer not to.

It’s true, I’m a dork and a geek. I am a sucker for things that are cute or clever or silly. With one exception, I love the holidays in WoW. Christmas starts in a couple of days, wheee! I saw this video on WoW Insider today, it’s silly, I love it!