Skiing, China, June, & Lots O' Snow

First and foremost, I wanted to update you on June’s(Jo’s mom) health, for those of you new to the blog. Jo lost her dad somewhat unexpectedly this August. I say somewhat because we new he was battling liver disease and we new time was limited but it came on a bit unexpectedly. It also came during a time that June found out her cancer was back and the outlook was not positive. Jo has been going home the past few weekends to try and help out her siblings who have been caring for June. Her brother Pete stops by daily to see June and her sister Dawn has delayed starting her job to move in with June. They all want to be with June as much as possible as we get near the end of June’s battle. And a battle it has been! June has not just lain down and taken this. She’s fought it and I know her children are proud of her for fighting. I know Dale would be proud too. We are all hoping that we can see this thru one more Christmas and then move forward from there. It might not happen but it won’t be for lack of effort. Hang in there Who-neigh(nickname for June)!
China – I believe all of you know that we are adopting a little daughter from China. We received our LID (LogInDate) on June 13 2007. Put simply, that is when you ‘get in line’. The line however is currently 24months to get your referral, and you will typically travel 6-8 weeks after you accept your referral. So, we are roughly ¼ the way through our wait. Recently though I have gotten on Bethany’s(Adoption Agency) web site and joined their web forum. I did this for many reasons but maybe the most driving reason was that we needed to be focusing on the great events coming in our lives yet. Everyone has ‘the worst year ever’ at some point in there lives, and I think that year is 2007 for Jo. It’s hard to see another year worse than this. However it hasn’t totally been down. After all we did get thru the primary paperwork portion of our adoption and getting the word from Belinda our Adoption Specialist(Sorry if I got your exact title wrong Belinda) that we had our LID was equivalent to finding out you were not just pregnant but pregnant with the daughter you always wanted. I can’t imagine how empty this year would have been without this event happening in our lives. So as I was saying I got on this forum where we could find others going through this and various other stages of the process. As I understand it anyone else who’s paperwork went to China(DTC-Dossier to Country I think) on the same day ours did is now grouped with us and we will travel together to China. So I thought it might be nice to contact these people and also it helps me keep track of how the timing is going for other families adopting. I found one couple with our same DTC/LID. I’ve sent them a message but have not heard from them yet. They may not be interested in chatting at this point and that’s fine. We’ve found it an odd emotional trial with the waiting process. I know I’ve had to keep my excitement tempered because I’d be burned out by the time the actual adoption was here if I didn’t. That’s been the hard part, you can’t help but feel guilty that you don’t hang on to the ultra-high excitement of adopting a daughter the whole time you are waiting but we realized pretty quickly we’d burn-out if we tried. So, with that in mind I am now trying to start to slowly ramp my brain back up to this event. I am still learning Mandarin in my car on the way home from work, and we are finding ourselves drawn to anything and everything Chinese. I truly can’t wait for our daughter and more so I can’t wait for Jo to have the daughter she truly deserves.
I don’t know where all that was going other than you will probably be hearing more and more about China in these blogs and I have had many disconnected thoughts swirling in my head the last week or so about this. So now they are swirling in your head…..have fun with them, believe me we are!
We got our first real snow storm. Sunday morning we woke up to about 8 inches of snow from the first wave of the storm. We shoveled out and ran down to Costco realizing we probably weren’t going to ski as I don’t think the boys were thawed from Saturdays skiing. It was also going to be a slow agonizing drive so we just got some groceries and things. We happen to make this run between the two primary storm waves and then came back home to settle into the Patriots game. I think I’ve mentioned how nice it is to root for a team that wins. The second wave of snow came that afternoon and dumped another 10 inches. The wind was really not much and drifting was at a minimum but this morning the wind is whipping. We did have school but probably shouldn’t have. The roads were still icy. They would have been better leaving a thin layer of snow instead of scraping it all off to expose ice. The Mini Cooper looked like a big snow drift. Maybe more like an igloo, pretty funny trying to find it this morning. From what everyone is saying this much snow at this time is not normal for here. It’s sure is making our season passes to Smuggs worth it. I think we only have to go a couple more times before they pay for themselves.
On the subject of Skiing….We went Saturday and it was about 8deg. We dropped Jo off at the airport went to get the car battery looked at and then to the ski shop. I wanted to get some face coverings so the guys wouldn’t have any exposed skin. I also had to buy some goggles and then a harness/leash thing for Sean. I wanted everyone to go to the top of the mountain but didn’t dare without having control of Sean. So I got on the chairlift with Sean and BJ and Zack got on the one behind us together. I was a bit nervous as this was only the second time BJ had ever gotten on a chairlift but they did awesome. So did Sean, his first time, and he was amazed! We went to the top of Morse mountain which is Smuggs smallest of the three. There is a nice long easy run that we could take. They did great!! BJ and Zack got ahead of us at one point and I hoped they made the right choice of trails because if they didn’t they’d wind up at the wrong mountain base. They made the right call and all was good, but by the time we got back down to the bottom we were all frozen solid. Seany had cold enough toes and fingers that when we got in the warming hut and started to warm up, he got that burning feeling and cried for a few minutes. Have no pity for him…..it was his idea ten minutes later to go back out and do it again!!! We just went halfway up this time. That’s one of the nice things at Smuggs, most if not all of the lifts let you get off halfway up. So we ran down the mountain a bit faster this time and this time Seany was finished. It was half hour before closing anyway. Oh yeah, the harness I got for Sean. This is very odd, it works really well but I felt like I was driving a lone little pony or reindeer the whole time. It’s got two clips on each end of the strap and you connect both ends to him and that way you have two straps and you can kind of turn him based on where you want him to go, just like reins on a horse. They also clip at his front which is nice for being able to pull him on flat areas. What a great idea. It really enables us to go anywhere we want the older two boys to go. The other weird thing is that I can’t use my poles! I can’t tell you the last time I went down a ski hill with no poles. I also had to snowplow all the way down. Talk about thigh and quad burning! Anyway, BJ wanted to do a few more runs on the kid hill and Zack said he wanted to go halfway up the mountain again. So it was decision time. Zack has shown so much responsibility and determination skiing that I found it was an easy decision. I let him go solo on the mountain as long as he only went halfway up. I told BJ he could go with Zack but had to stay with him the whole way. BJ just wanted the kid hill though. So Sean and I walked into the warming hut and got our regular boots on and warmed up. It was only about ten minutes and I see BJ with skis in hand walking to the chairlift. I know he’s distracted enough and single-minded enough to ride it by himself. He’s not trying to defy me he’s just hyper focused on riding the mountain and how much fun it is and has apparently forgotten the rules. So I decided to go intercept him. To my surprise he stopped short of the lift line and looked up the mountain waiting for Zack. This was a very welcome display of discipline on his part and I was pretty proud that he was going to follow the rules I laid out for him which was only to go up the mountain with Zack. When I got to him I told him what a good job he had done. He decided he was too cold and was going to call it a day. That’s when I new it was time to call it a day. That boy would never come in out of the snow normally. Zack showed up a minute later beaming about his independence to make a mountain run on his own. I told him he had time to make one more run if he wanted but he too had enough. I forgot to mention, Zack also was running through a real basic kids slalom course that was set up on the kids hill. For only the fifth time being on skis I was pretty impressed. He’s really worked hard on learning how to turn. So I thought it was time to have him take the next step. Poles! Yep, we got him a set of ski poles, and he promptly tried to start a sword fight. Well, I think we all did that too when we got our first ski poles. I have this Friday off and will hit the slopes most if not all day. Jo and the boys have half a day and provided there is not an urgent need to get home for June, she is finally going to join us on the mountain the second half of the day.
Well, that’s it for today. I didn’t proof read this so sorry for any errors or hard to read sentences.
Catch you all later,
Jim