Major developments

Yes, it's true, it's been a while. Life has been a bit fuller of late, so the updates, they have been not so regular. I hope what is to follow makes up for it, a little bit.

Work has been very full over the past month. I began working with a family in mid-July that consumed much of my time, culminating in a placement into foster care, complete with a petition and report to the court, at the end of August. For six weeks, I spent I don't know how many hours working with the mother to try to remedy the chronic problems she's been struggling with for decades: mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness. After four weeks, it was clear that she was going to need a bit more, um, authoritative intervention, and we planned to go to court to see if the court would order Family Maintenance services. After I wrote the court documents, one week before the scheduled hearing, things got a bit out of control, and law enforcement ended up placing the kids into protective custody, and we removed them from mom and placed them in foster care, and moved up the hearing a few days.

Having spent so much of my working life with one family that consumed my time, it has been disorienting and strange to shift gears and begin moving at the different pace of more typical investigations. I still think about them often, but it does seem to be subsiding. I feel proud of the work that I did, and I feel good about the outcome. I hope that the mom is able to pull things together and reunify with her kids, because she loves them and they love her, and of course they all miss each other. But there were -- are -- serious problems that need to be addressed, and the outcome for the kids would have been worse, I think, if we had not taken the actions we took. Ultimately, my goal with every family I work with is to leave as few traces as possible that I was there; when that is not possible, I strive to leave the situation a little better than when I came on the scene. I think I did that over the six weeks with this family. I'm looking forward to a time when weeks will go by without thinking about them.

The other thing that has been disorienting and strange is that we made an offer on a house, and it was accepted! My goodness, I can hardly believe how fast it's all happened. It's not far from where we live now, and I feel pretty good (in theory) about the schools we'll be in if the whole thing goes through. Escrow is expected to close on October 9, and our contingency/inspection period ends next Sunday (September 13). It's an older home, built in 1954, and very small -- just 2 bedrooms and 1 bath -- but the lot is huge, with tons of room for gardens and for Kid A to play. It's on a quiet street that dead-ends; we're in about the middle of the street. We've had a number of preliminary inspections this week, and things are looking great, so our full home inspection will be next Saturday, at which point we should be full steam ahead!

It's crazy, because we only went house-hunting on two consecutive weekends, and this was the first house we saw on our second outing. Everybody's said that "when you know, you know," and several people have compared it to finding the perfect wedding dress (an apt analogy). TM and I spent a lot of time in it the first time we saw it, and have gone back twice (with my mom, and with his parents), and have liked it just as much each time we've seen it. I spent about three hours there yesterday with my realtor, for the inspection of the septic tank, and it felt just great to hang out there. I haven't been sleeping very well, because I'm thinking about it all the time, and it has definitely affected my ability to fully focus at work. But I think once the inspections are done and the lending has been secured, I'll be able to focus on other things again.

I'm 36 years old, and just entering the world of home-ownership for the first time. It's funny: for having spent my teens and twenties being so parentified and mature, I'm certainly a late bloomer in many respects: just starting my grown-up career, first-time mom of a toddler, and first-time homeowner. I wouldn't trade it for anything, though (well, maybe more traveling during my teens and twenties); I did get to do so much as a result of being somewhat fancy-free for all those years. And TM and I really got a long time to get to know each other and work out the kinks before throwing all these stressful and highly-charged components into the mix. Seriously, how do newlyweds go through all these things together, while they still hardly know themselves and each other? I feel so very grateful, and lucky, that these transitions have been so manageable, and I attribute that in large part to having this super solid foundation with the spouse.

Speaking of, our 11-year wedding anniversary is this month. Eleven years. That means we've been together now for 15 years. (That anniversary came and went with both of us forgetting about it! It was last month. We both just acknowledged it and kind of did a little "Wow!" thing, and now we're both back to doing what we were doing just seconds before.) We don't have anything planned, and if the house is going to go through, it's probable we won't do anything beyond toast one another over dinner on the night of the anniversary. But that's kind of my favorite way to celebrate, anyway.

Now for the Kid A developments. She's walking! It started for real the week before last, although for months she'd been walking well with assistance. She's getting to be a real pro at it. I bought her shoes last weekend, and "shoe" is one of the three or four words she can say, which is hysterically funny to me. Dear god, I hope I don't have a Carrie Bradshaw-type shoe nut on my hands. Her other words are "dog" (actually, "doh") and "duck" (see "dog"). Occasionally, she'll make some "mama" sounds, that these days do seem to be aimed in my direction, but usually only when she's super tired and about to go down for a nap. She's also lately saying something that sounds like "H" or "itch," and I have no idea what she's trying to say. She babbles beautifully, and often, and I would love to know what she's trying to tell us. I'm super surprised that it's taking her so long to talk, because we talk and sing and read to her all the time. I attribute it to the steady stream of Spanish she gets, as well.

I'm trying to speak Spanish with her at home, in addition to the full-time Spanish she gets at Carmen's during the week. I went to a bookstore last weekend, in our old neighborhood in Oakland, that carries a great selection of Spanish-language children's books, and bought six. I've been reading to her in Spanish at home, and it's helping my Spanish improve. I also regularly practice my Spanish with some of my co-workers, and of course with Carmen. I'm hoping to raise Kid A to be fluent in both languages. I think that might take some work as she gets older, but I hope that she and I can help each other improve our understanding of Spanish together. When you're born and raised in California, there's no excuse for not being bilingual, and I wish the public schools in our area had Spanish-immersion options for grade school. Anyway, I think it's taking her longer to speak because she's busy processing two languages.

Unfortunately, I don't have any recent pictures uploaded. Maybe I'll get a chance before my next post ... but frankly, I doubt it! Wish us happy escrow, and happy moving!!