We got a letter from the birthmother

I wanted to post a couple of days ago because we got a letter from the birthmother (but I was REALLY busy this week / preparing to go out of town for a work trip - so it had to wait 'til now).

I'd lost touch with her again for awhile. My cell phone texting was all wonky. I tried customer service a couple of times to fix it, but had to go into an actual store / have them do some things to the phone. It works now, and I texted Danielle several times to let her know that I was back up-and-running, but never heard from her. She emailed last week and said that her phone was on the fritz again and she'll get it fixed soon. WHEW! Todd and I just didn't want her to think that we were not in communicato on our end.

When she emailed she said she dropped a card in the mail. It was really sweet. If I may, I'll share with you what she wrote (and - yes - it did make me a little misty-eyed).

"Hello, I just want to say Hi. I love all of the photos you guys have been sending. He is getting so big. I'm glad he's doing well. I couldn't have found a better home for Mercer than you guys. He means the world to me and I'm thankful that you & Todd are taking great care of Mercer. Please continue to keep me updated. I'm doing well and I hope you, Todd, and Mercer are doing well. Talk to you soon. -- Danielle --"

Even typing it out now (after having read it several times) still "gets me." : - )

I think it's pretty cool.

"P.S. I sent some of his hospital pictures for you."

She did. She included some copies of a photo taken in the hospital. I'm not sure if he's 1 day old or 2 days old in the picture. I'll try to scan it over the weekend & post it -- but he looks SO DIFFERENT!!!

Last weekend, I went all the way back to February's blog posts and copied all of the entries / put them on our computer hard drive to save. Looking back to those early days it's so amazing how little he was, how different he looked, how much he has changed in the past 7 1/2 months!

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Ok. So you may notice what time this blog post is. Yes - I'm up in the middle of the night. Ugh. I am exhausted, and I desperately need sleep, but I woke up a couple hours after going to bed, put a heating pad on the area where the surgery was, took a couple of Aleeve, but... 3 hours later... no good still.

I guess I over-did it this week? I worked late on Tuesday (I went to an "Earth Faire" for teachers and school principals / sat at a booth telling people about how to save energy and water in their schools to [thankfully] VERY interested attendees - you'll understand this comment if you read the whole blog). I went out of town on Wednesday for work. Worked until about midnight on a powerpoint. Presented it on Thursday with a group of my co-workers at an all-day meeting in South Carolina. Rode home. (I didn't drive at all or lift my luggage or anything. I sat down during the training when I felt tired (which was only about 1 hour off-and-on, honestly) so I'm not sure why I'm feeling some pain tonight?) With the exception of some time yesterday morning (and some Aleeve), I felt great all day. Had a lot of energy. Was up-beat.

I have a speaking engagement (a short one) on Saturday. And one next week in Colorado that's another all-day one. I'm somewhat bummed that the recovery is taking longer than I expected. It's been 3 1/2 weeks... but we were sold on that "2 week recovery" time. I do think that I hit it hard after 2 weeks going back to work (again - mostly from home) but my hours were pretty high last week. They'll be very high this week. And pretty high again next. Higher than my "part-time." I do have a light at the end of this tunnel. I can scale back and take a bit of a break after Colorado!

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One final thing, then I'll wrap this blog post up.

I'm not too happy about this, but as Todd says: welcome to "school."

Mercer's day care (a Montessori school) sent home a form this week for a Cookie Dough Fundraiser.

[Major Side-track: For my "green-building" work that I do, I went to a PTA leadership conference a couple of years ago (we were given free registration and asked to set up a booth / provide info to the PTA folks across the state on green schools). I was actually excited -- get to to a little outreach... talk to people... get out of the office.. sit in a booth at a trade show (I had never done it / I thought it may be fun?).

My co-worker and I were so turned off by the number of booths there pushing stuff for sale... basically... fund-raisers. There were maybe 80 - 100 vendors at the trade show and only about 5 or 6 of us were there with any substance. The rest - literally - were "bribing" the attendees with cookies, pizza (for dough sales), candy, flashy sparkly light-up toys (ugh), wrapping paper, etc.

We were there ALL DAY, but after the first 1/2 hour, we were both ready to leave because we were so over-run with visual bombardment (and amazed at how the attendees were "trolling" for all of the free stuff they got). It was really traumatic!]

So, with that, I will ask if anyone is at all interested in buying a tub of frozen cookie dough. This will be my only sales pitch (wow - following that paragraph above... I'm really bad at sales)~

There's Chocolate Chunk, Macadamia White Chip, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk, M&M, Oatmeal Raisin, "Monster" which has a combo of chocolate and PNB, Snickerdoodle, and one called "Fun Dough." They show a blue happy face with red hair and smile / yellow & red eyes / green nose. They show a colorful sail boat cookie too. I guess the "Fun Dough" is a colored sugar cookie dough and the kids can make what-ever they want out of it before baking? Price ranges from $13 - $16 a tub. (Cookie orders and $$ are due by the 21st of Oct.) Looks like there's enough dough for 8 dozen bite-size or 4 dozen medium cookies. DON'T FEEL OBLIGED at all. I am just doing my "parental" duty by asking, I suppose.

But... for each kid who sells over 5 tubs... they get to participate in an ice-cream party. (What peer pressure - who wants their kid watching as everyone else eats ice-cream?!)

OH WAIT! MERCER CAN'T EAT ICE-CREAM. HE CAN'T EVEN EAT THESE COOKIES!!

oh - I'm SOOOO not going to enjoy this fund-raising stuff in the coming years, I can tell already!! Maybe I should work on finding a more meaningful fund-raiser for next year for the school?