In which Dad crosses the Rubicon.
There is a topic that Robin has forbidden me to write about and, mostly, I've acquiesced. After tonight, however, I feel I have no choice but to share.
Before that, though, a more enjoyable subject: Birthdays!
Our good friends Lisa and Tad Schroeder celebrated their daughter Holly's first birthday on Saturday and Owen brought his parents along to party. It was a tremendous event with crowds of friends and family and stacks of gifts.
Like us, the Schroeders adopted. Holly came to them domestically and they maintain a wonderful relationship with her birth mother who, along with Holly's birth grandmother, was also on hand for the event. Tad opened the luncheon with a few words thanking Sarah for the wonderful gift she'd given them in Holly.
For a festive event the man sure had a lot of people in tears.
Two weeks younger than Owen, Holly still beats our boy for size. That's all right. At his last check-up Owen progressed to the 9th percentile in weight and the 20th in height. This is up from the 5th percentile when he arrived in country. He's gaining!
And, speaking of growing up, here's where we get to the Rubicon.
It begins with a prophetic word (although I didn't realize it at the time). I've taken to listening to satellite radio's comedy station on my drives to and from work. A comedienne this week told the story of getting to know her adopted son:
"You've never known love," she said, "until a child enters your life. You've never expressed love until you've fished another person's poop out of the bath tub."
Owen allowed me to express my love for him tonight.
I thought he was just making bubbles but then, no, something that wasn't a bath toy came floating to the surface. Fortunately I was done with the scrub down and could just pluck him from the water. Unfortunately he wasn't done and all I had to catch it with was the wash cloth.
And apparently this is the evening of a thousand scooters. Not only had I previously changed Mr. Owen's fully loaded britches at dinner, but, in addition to the Tub Incident, another load appeared at bedtime followed by the discovery that one of my furry babies was baking pies of his own on the floor downstairs.
One bottle of bleach later and everything's back to normal.
In other news, we've been enjoying watching the newest additions to the family learn to fly. A couple of cardinal chicks hatched in a nest outside our dining room window and Robin spent the weekend spying on the mother and father cardinals trying to coax their babies from the nest.
One of the poor things never made it. Toonces ate him.
Wasn't that crappy?
