So where is everyone today?? Did I scare you off? Offend you? Or do you guys have (gasp!) "real lives"?? Tsk. Don't you know that reading my blog should take precedence over everything? My real life today has been: 1. Laundry 2. Cleaning house 3. Working on the dotter's Lifebook 4. Watching OmegaDad's "get everything absolutely perfect for the Betsy" perigrinations with bemusement We now have wooden paddles for the Betsy, including a cute little one for the dotter. After much hairy-eyeballing, I got it through to OmegaDad that, no, we don't need $60 wooden paddles when we first take her out. We now have red, white, and blue PFDs for the Betsy. We now have some type of contraption on the Yakima rack that consists of U-bolts carefully dunked in plastic coating. We now have ratchet thingies to attach to the U-bolts to tie the Betsy down. Maybe we will have good weather tomorrow? It would be nice to take the Betsy out on a spin. If the weather today holds out, we can do it; if the weather is like it's been all this week, we will be huddled inside our cozy log home, wincing at the crashing and banging of the Thunder Gods, who have dumped--in small, isolated spots in the area--up to 6 inches per storm over the past few days. The construction of the dotter's Lifebook owes a great debt of gratitude to Chicago Mama, who has been doing a series on what to put into a Lifebook over the past month or so. For those not in the "adoption know", a Lifebook is a book about your child's life before you met him/her. So dotter's, for instance, contains info about China, about the city where she was born, about what birth is like, about what we think her birthparents might be like, about the whys and snippets of info about her abandonment, about life in the orphanage, and then, at the very end, how she was adopted. The idea is to help the kid realize that he had a life before adoption, that she's got a heritage all her own, that he was actually born (yes, some adopted kids get a big jolt that they didn't come into life magically at age 1 year old, like some type of Venus on the halfshell). It also specifically mentions birthparents, and is used as a way to allow the child to realize it's okay to think about birthparents. I've been noodling this around in my head for a couple of years now, and Chicago Mama's series just gave me the push to finally get it done. So, with the help of liberal photo-nabbing from the Internet (for use only in this one, highly personal book!) and a morning's peace and quiet, I got all the ideas down on paper and printed out. We'll give it a whirl this weekend, along with the Betsy. Just FYI, I'm adding a list of links to Chicago Mama's Lifebook entries: The Lifebook Post (well, actually The Story of You) Opening Thoughts on Lifebook Toddler Story Lifebook: Introductory Page, Country History, Personal History Lifebook: First Parents, Birth Parents, Mother & Father Lifebook: Birthday/Labor & Delivery Lifebook: Miscellaneous Administrative Stuff Now, go back to your real lives!