Starting again

I decided I'd create a new blog. Got a few others along with Twitter, facebook, googlewave, myspace et al. Can you tell I'm a social network junkie? lol

Anyway - this blog is going to be about adoption through my eyes and my experiences of it.

I'm mother to two children through adoption and it's been an interesting and rewarding journey so far. I'll maybe start from when I got married so you can follow the whole journey. It's long, it's sometimes sad, so be prepared :) The first post about my journey is dated November 21 2009 so go back to here if you want to read from the start.

Please leave a comment even just to say Hi :)

Coincidence?

Mr7 is intrigued by death. Not so unusual I think. He began to understand his own mortality a year or two ago and it's driven in part by the deaths of my bio children. Both the kids know of them, see photos of JC around and we talk about it when they feel like it. Mr7 has asked some fairly interesting questions in his time but this morning was a curiosity.

He asked if I would grave him or burn him when he dies. I said I hoped that would be many years in the future but if he did die before me I'd cremate him. Then he asked if he would be alive in heaven with JC. It's the anniversary of JC's death tomorrow and it struck me as an unusual day for him to ask. Was it just a coincidence or are there vibes he's picked up on? He hasn't mentioned JC in ages until today. Odd isn't it...

The gutwrenchingness of being shy

I was invited to a school mum dinner for tonight. I felt like I wasn't really who they wanted there. One afternoon at school a mum invited another mum to this thing while standing about five feet from me. They chatted for a little while and the one who had invited the other turned to me and said "Oh, would you like to come sat 3rd..." So even though I felt like an afterthought I had been invited and I don't want to be thought of a snob or anything I figured I'd go.

What's 30 years or so?

This is the day, 30 years ago, that I sat in a hospital bed, confused, bemused, besotted... At 1:49am on August 10th 1981 I gave birth to JC. Some 6 weeks premature, very small even for that gestation & with a fighter's strength he hung on to life with a determination belied by his size. He was delivered naturally, suddenly and still in the amniotic sac. The nurses wrapped him up in a warm blanket and then silver foil. They held him out to show me with the words "here's your son, you probably won't see him again". These are not words you want to hear when you've just given birth to your first child. These are actually words you just never want to hear.

They were wrong though.

Things aren't always what they seem

I have a friend who lost a whole year of her life. She'll never get that back. The physical reminders of that year are a tracheotomy scar and the weight she still needs to lose. The emotional ones are harder to spot.

The story of how she lost a year of her life is amazing, scary and almost unbelievable.

She contributed to a radio program about the condition that caused her illness. You can listen to it here, there's also a transcript of the piece. It's fairly long but worth listening to.

I rang Ros for her birthday a few years ago and was told she wasn't well. Within a couple of days she was in the psych ward of the local hospital supposedly suffering a nervous breakdown. Within weeks she was fighting for her life in an Adelaide hospital. Who would have thought a little, benign tumour could wreak so much havoc...

Happy places

I was replying to a comment on this post and made a reference to when I used to pick JC up from creche. I can't recall having blogged about it so I decided I would collect some of the happiest memories I have of JC's short life and post them here. As an antidote to the sadness of his death.