If you are like me, you are watching the weather and reading the political blogs, interchangeably. Sweet fun, I must say. I know how to live it up. But also? I did some labor which might be ironic seeing as how completely lazy I am the rest of the year. Maybe Labor Day will officially become my day to work every year?! ha. I wasn’t the only one with the labor bug. Teegan woke up and cleaned up the playhouse (no easy feat – you coudln’t even see the floor in there!) and then helped Noah clean up his entire bedroom. They worked for hours. I’m not sure why. But it sure was a nice surprise! I picked up where Teegan left off and reorganized the play kitchen (again, no easy feat – at least I know it was all being used all this time!).Yesterday the kids cleaned out the van from our vacation and I cleaned up our bedroom and reorganized Addison’s entire dresser AND her closet (always sad to say goodbye to outfits I just adored). I also built a new desk for Noah and Tony rebuild his old computer for Noah so now he has his computer in his room.  We’ve been super productive!

So why aren’t we out partying and enjoying our last hurrah at the neighborhood pools? Well half our family is sick. More than half.  Everyone but me and Dalton – the lone standouts. Just your average head cold but it is still a bummer. We’ll do your usual grilled kabobs later today but right now Tony is taking what might be the only nap I can EVER remember him taking in our decade together. He must feel really bad. Oh well, at least Dalton got to sleep over at a friend’s house last night. One of us should have some fun!

For those of you who engaged me in my little political rant, you all rock! Especially my conservative friends who saw my title and my warning and read anyway and STILL commented. You guys are nuts to wade into those waters. But never have I let religion or politics come between a friendship and I really respect those of you who will engage in a little healthy debate once in awhile. It may not change any minds but it sure does help clarify for both sides what the issues are that are important to us, doesn’t it? For the rest of you, I have one phrase for you today my friends:

Abstinence-only education does not work.

As for Gustav, its still too soon to say definitively but it is likely that we will get a little rain and maybe some light wind and that will be it. The hurricane is already burning out and after it plows through LA it will probably be reduced to nothing more than a tropical storm as it approaches the Texas coast. We’ll be on the “gentle” side of the storm regardless but we are far enough off the coast that I would be surprised if we see anything other than your typical rainy weather we get anyway. We didn’t do much by way of hurricane preparation. We filled up our gas tanks and figured if we lose power (the real risk here) we’ll just grab the pets and head to Austin for the duration. No big deal. But I am keeping a close eye on NOLA and Baton Rouge and things aren’t looking great but I think they’ll pull through.

I can’t wrap up without mentioning the significance of today. Aside from being Labor Day today is also September 1, the day the bilateral agreement allowing adoptions between Vietnam and the US expires. Today hundreds – maybe thousands – of families’ hopes to adopt a baby from Vietnam will be destroyed. Today we worry about the legitimate orphans left behind. Those of us with children already home are greiving for the histories we don’t have for our children and for the concern that corruption touched our own adoptions in big or small ways. We have the challenge of raising children who we will have to look at one day and explain that they were adopted during a brief 2.5 year period filled with corruption and unethical actions, arrests and human trafficking. It won’t be easy. I wrote more about it here in a post that started out as an insanely long novella (who me? yeah I know) and eventually ended up as the first part of a series that will aim to answer so many questions we all have. So today is a symbollically sad day for adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents alike.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under All The Rest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.