Tortellini.

If you're visiting from SITS and wanted to read "Open Adoption Chose Us" the link is wrong!  Oh no! But you can check it out here!  But....you can....of course keep reading here and learn about my grandmother's amazing tortellini too!  

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We called my dad's mom Nini.  That's some version of grandma in Italian, although it's more the result of four grand-kids who couldn't say the Italian word Nonna (the real word for grandma in Italian) correctly when we were learning how to talk.

 How adorable was this woman? 

Nini knew how to cook like an Italian grandma should.  She made her own pasta, all forms of it, and I am not lying or exaggerating when I say I was never served a noodle in her house that was not home-made.  Her basement was littered with clothes drying racks strewn with long strands of spaghetti, fettuccine, and vermicelli.  My cousins and I would eat untold amounts of tender dried pasta off those racks--because even dried--it was delicious. She had hand-crank pasta makers clamped to the edges of multiple tables and she had an entire second kitchen down there where her and my grandpa would make their own sausage, stuffed artichokes, spaghetti sauce (which no one can duplicate, I'm sure of it), canned figs, bagna cauda (check that out if you're not familiar with it--and then never make it--unless you're going to make it outside), pizzelles, flan, and tortellini.

And did she make tortellini.  She'd grind up the veal and prosciutto herself, cut uniform squares of pasta dough, put the exact right amount of filling in the middle of them, and fold them up perfectly into little belly button shaped dumplings.  And she'd have bags and bags of tortellini in her freezer at any given time.  It was the first course of almost every meal that she made.  Perfect tortellini's bobbing around in home-made chicken broth topped with generous scoops of parmesan cheese.

She really wanted to teach me how to make tortellini.  She'd ask me all the time while I was in high school.  But I didn't really want to learn.  I wasn't that interested in cooking while I was growing up and I think that because she was so relentless in her asking I was equally relentless in my saying no.  And I'm pretty sure it hurt her feelings.  Cooking was her thing.  She loved cooking for her grand-kids.  She would have made every single person's favorite dish for dinner even if it was seven different things if our parents would have allowed it.

Every time I'd say no, she'd just shrug and say, "Maybe another time.  It's okay."  And you can guess......that 'other time' never happened.  I went to college, and I still loved eating the tortellini she'd make and bringing bags of it back to college with me, but I was even "busier" than I'd been in high school and.........Nini wasn't feeling as good as she used to.  She was sick.  The only time that Chris ever met her was before we were even engaged and about a week before she passed away. She didn't  really know we were there.

And I never learned how to make tortellini.  
And that makes me so upset.  With myself.
It would have been so simple to spend an afternoon in my Nini's basement with her folding pasta and it would have made her year.  But I didn't do it.  I just didn't do it.......for selfish and ridiculous sixteen....and seventeen......and eighteen year old reasons.

I still love tortellini.  I buy the pre-made beef tortellini and boil it in chicken broth (not home-made) and I think about Nini every time we eat it. It's actually, ironically, one of Georgia's favorite things to eat.  She cheers when I tell her it's what we're having for dinner.  A dinner that took so much work on Nini's part because it was made from scratch......and love, takes me about ten minutes and I consider it one of my, "I forgot to think about dinner so this is what we're having," dinners.  But Georgia loves it.

And I know that would make Nini so happy.  She would love Georgia and all of her gregarious energy and zest for life.  She'd think it was so amazing that Georgia was adopted......and Italian.......and ours.  Because she loved what her grand-kids loved.

Even if her grand-kids didn't understand and place enough value on what she loved.

So when I'm dumping a plastic tray of tortellini into a boiling pot of chicken broth I think about spending time with people I love.....and who love me.  And I think about how important it is to be with them, really be with them.  And to do with them, what they want to do with us.......because they want us to understand them better; they want to give us a part of who they are.

And that means our own parents, our spouses, our best friends, friends that we're just making, mentors........our kids.

Don't be too busy to make tortellini with someone.  It's probably just one afternoon of your life......and even if it's more...........who cares?

Love you Nini.  You were an amazing grandma.  A really amazing one.

When did you know?

"So, when did you know you were ready to stop infertility treatments and pursue adoption?"
"What does it feel like to be sure you want to do the adoption thing?"
"How will I know I'm ready?"
"I just don't feel quite ready to jump into adoption even though I'm so frustrated that we haven't had a baby yet."
"My husband is really ready to start adoption stuff, but I'm not really there yet."

When did you know? 

Yep.  I've heard all that. I've probably said all that.

And I'm going to be extremely honest when I say, I don't think you need to be one hundred percent ready to embrace the reality of adoption in your life to get started on the adoption process. I don't think it needs to be your final answer just because you fill out paperwork.  I don't think you should be all that worried if when you sit through adoption education classes at the agency you've chosen you're still having doubts about what you're doing. I don't think it should scare you more than anything else that you do that might be a bit scary if when you turn in your adoption scrapbook you have a hard time actually letting your social worker take it out of your hands.

Because the thing is........are we really ever one hundred percent ready to do BIG things?  Are all of the stars and details always aligned and perfectly in place? Are there always some lingering doubts?  Of course.  It doesn't mean we don't do those things.  And we do them because we've spent time weighing out the pros and cons of the situation.  We do them because we know what we want the end result to be even if the path to that result is a little scary......or a lot scary.  We do them because so often at the end of great risk is the greatest reward.

So when people ask me, "when did you know?"

"Was it when you wrote that first check?"

"No," I say.

"Was it when you got your finger-prints done?"

"Not then," I'll reply.

"For sure then when you filled out all the paper-work."

"Not even then."

"How about when you mailed everything in?"

"I was getting closer.  But I still wasn't one hundred percent there," I'll admit.

Even in this picture that Chris and I took of ourselves after we'd turned in our very last thing that our agency needed to put us on the official "waiting" list I had a nagging feeling like, "I don't think I can do this."

Because apparently, I had a deep, deep love for Sparrow and I couldn't imagine loving something more than him besides Chris.  I literally must have been psychotic four years ago and Georgia is what I needed to jolt me back to reality.

So when did I know?  I knew when I met Georgia's birth-parents.  When my social worker opened the door and they were sitting at the table; the same table we'd sat at for all of our adoption education classes, the very classes that made me question whether adoption was for me more than anything else I encountered through the process,......I knew.  I knew I was ready to pursue adoption.  I didn't have one doubt left in my body.  Not even the slightest hint of one.

So, it's okay.  To not know.  When you need to know, absolutely need to know.  You will.

It's just another one of the ways that God works incredible miracles through adoption.  One.  Of trillions.

Don't let the logical need of "having to be sure" stop you from pursuing something that could be the greatest decision of your life.  If you know where you want to be and there is a road that will take you there......even if it's a dark and twisting and turning road.........get on it.  You'll have enough light to get you to the next part.  And one day.........you'll turn a corner and you'll be in a parking lot full of flood lights and street lamps and huge blinking signs that say, "You made it."

And then.......you'll know.

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Knock Knock Wednesday.

I was in the middle of writing a serious, mature, intuitive, post about adoption......but then Georgia and I started telling knock knock jokes.  She's just starting to actually get them.  My youth pastor while I was growing up taught me this one.  It's high brow.  But......it always gets a laugh......especially from three year olds! Even three year olds who get the punch line when someone else delivers it, but have no idea how to deliver it themselves!  

So anyway.......no serious post.......just us.  

Happy Wednesday!  Loads of great premiers on tonight.  Have a good one!  

(And I have no idea why this video turns sideways once you hit play!  If you've got a laptop turn it sideways.  If you're on a desk-top.....you're out of luck. It doesn't do that on my phone or on Vimeo and I've never had any issues with this before on Vimeo.  Any ideas?  Anyone?  Bueller?) 

Home.

Georgia and I went to down to visit my parents this past weekend.  We hadn't been there since 4th of July weekend and going home in the fall is one of my favorite times to go.  Maybe it's because the fall is when I usually left home growing up as school would start or I'd head back to college--so it feels good to do the opposite, maybe it's because I just love everything more in the fall--how can you not?, or maybe....and most definitely....it's because, my mom, who excels at making home a haven hits a grand-slam in this department when it comes to the fall.  Her mums on the front porch look cozier than anyone else's, she has cinnamon candles burning in the kitchen, she has vases of yellow and orange leaves on the counters, she'll have my dad build a fire in the fire-place before anyone else does it, and a pan of baked spaghetti in the oven on a rainy night.  It feels good to go home.

And what I love, is that Georgia can sense how good it feels to go to Gaga and Pop Pop's house too.  Every fifteen or twenty minutes on the two and half hour ride down she'd shriek, "We're going to Gaga's."

I didn't grow up in this house.  My parents called me about two weeks before Thanksgiving break my freshman year of college and told me they'd sold my child-hood home and we'd be moving into a new one when I was home over Thanksgiving.  I might have been a little sad.....sure, but I know I wasn't devastated in any way.  I knew it would be fine, I knew that the new house they'd bought would feel like home in no time, and more importantly I knew that it didn't matter where we lived, my mom could make it feel like the most welcoming, comfortable, lived-in in the best of ways, you-never-want to leave places I'd know. Just like good moms do.

Now that I'm raising my own daughter I appreciate home more than I ever even knew that I did........and I've always appreciated it a lot.  I want our home to be a place that Georgia....and Chris want to rest in--both physically and mentally, I want home to be a place that is easy....and not easy because hard stuff never gets done there.....but easy because the end result is growth and love, I want home to be a place that is cathartic, comfortable, welcoming, familiar, and remarkably part of who Georgia becomes.....how she identifies herself.

And the thing I've always realized about home is that it's about the people who reside there; have resided there,  more than it's the walls that enclose those people.  Because no matter where my mom and dad's home is, there will always be..........

'Fairy Toast'..................

playing Annie and Christmas carols (no matter the time of year.....it's just that I can actually remember how to play a pretty good Winter Wonderland) on the piano.........

Gaga's bath toys..........

rainy day trips to the Henry Ford museum.......or just anywhere really...........

And I just love this picture of my mom and Georgia that I caught through the curtain of a photo-booth so I had to include it.  

..........the fact that my mom lets us just trash the house with toys, and books, and suitcases because she really just cares that we're there, my dad taking Georgia on walks around the neighborhood with the dog, the room upstairs with all of our family photo albums that I look through almost every time I'm home, the little jars of candy that you find hidden in different spots each time you're there (and they're usually Rolo's or tootsie rolls--keep that up mom), the softest sheets on the guest beds, my dad begging me to go to the basement and take something home with me, music playing all the time, little cozy lamps lit in remote corners of every room, and.........just.......my parents.....being my parents.

I know that not everyone has the same nostalgia about their own homes for various reasons......but what I also know is that we can vow to create that for our own kids no matter what we've come from.  It doesn't take money, a beautiful house, fancy vacations, gourmet food, and certainly not perfect people.  It takes parents willing to work hard to make simple things, amazing things.........cold nights, warm nights........crazy lives outside the home, calm nights in the living room.........the routine, the definition of safe........and our kids, the most important thing to ever cross our paths.......really and truly the most important thing.

So thanks mom and dad.....for living out the definition of home.....

So.......this happened.

It's uncanny really.  How when Chris goes out of town for an extended trip it's like someone flips a switch and everything kind of falls apart........

In order.......since Chris left Monday morning:

His car gets dropped off to get new tire seals.
I fill up my car with gas.
The gas gauge is clearly broken as it's flying up and down like one of those love-meters at bad restaurants.
I call the mechanic to see if Chris's car will be done later that afternoon so I can drop mine off in its place.
It will--but it actually needs new brakes too, so it will be three times as much as we thought it was going to be.
But it's brakes.  They have to get fixed.
The neighbors behind us put their house up for sale.
For $20,000 less than our house is listed for. Helpful.  But actually not really.
I drop my car off.
Tuesday is fairly normal. However, Georgia is clearly sick when I get home from work.
Wednesday--Georgia is sicker and sleeps through the first 1/2 of ballet class.  No big deal.
I drive to ballet where my friend Rachel is going to help me do this ridiculous car switcheroo at the mechanics.
I do the whole car seat wrangling bit and I'm back in business with my car.
Rachel takes off.  I head to Goodwill where I need to drop some things off.
The car isn't right.  I can feel it.
I get to Goodwill and discover gas gushing out of the bottom of the car.  Gushing.  Like Old Faithful.
The Goodwill guys let me know what they think of my mechanic. I'm inclined to agree.
Georgia and I hang out in Goodwill (and it's not a good one) while we wait for a tow truck and the rental car the mechanic is going to get me.
The tow truck arrives.
As does the mechanic in an 1820 Lincoln Continental. I think Lincoln might have actually owned it.
He says he couldn't find a rental car.  Really?  Cuz there's an Avis about half a mile away.
I drive home in the grossest car I've ever been in.  Georgia asks me why I'm only using one hand.
"Some people don't take care of their things."  I'm not ashamed to sell the mechanic down the river like this.
Chris drives home from Chicago for another family emergency that's come up during the afternoon.
He brings the horrible Lincoln back to the mechanic and says, "Think again giving my wife that car to drive."
He gets them to reimburse us the labor costs.
He flys out to Germany this morning.

I'm going to my moms tomorrow so she can babysit G and I.  
And crossing my fingers we have an uneventful week ahead of us.
Come home babe.  We miss you.

Have a great weekend!  And if you feel your car surging like someone is pushing on it.......you might have gas gushing out of the bottom of it.  Pull into a Goodwill and they'll confirm it for you.  Oy!