First of all - now I know the key to getting lots of comments! You have to be mysterious and cryptic!!! I'm sorry, I hadn't meant to be either but I did enjoy the comments :-) So now you all have me convinced that this is the way to go. Maybe I'll leave every post with a tiny mystery!

I don't have any referral news, I don't have any agency news. I don't know where my dossier is. I don't know when I'll get a referral. I don't want to share more than I know is fact. And I promise you that this info really is trivial to anyone but me and my grasping-at-straws need for ANY news at all.

I am still not expecting a referral for at least another week or two. I have secret fantasies that our facilitator, who is traveling to Vietnam next week, will be able to pick up referrals and take pictures of our daughter. I would be so happy! Of course I think he won't be home for weeks - not great. But I might take that trade for some of those great agency photos that I've seen in the past! So now you all know how shallow I am - I want good referral photos! But no, it isn't a deal breaker :-)

Today is rained. All day. Storms constantly rolled in and out. What I wanted to do so badly was crawl into bed and read a good book and snooze off and on. No such luck. I had standing plans to take the kids to the community center pool for the first time. 2.5 hours, 4 kids, 1 mom, 2 water slides, 1 twirl pool and 1 diving board. You do the math! Thankfully they can all swim. Our 4yo was so distraught to be left at home so tomorrow will be his day alone with me at the pool. Two days at the pool in a row, I can hardly wait! I already stink like chlorine!

This week I decided to have the kids make dinner on Thursday. I had them make up a menu on Monday, a grocery list on Tuesday and tonight they went grocery shopping. Tomorrow is D-day (D standing for dinner OF COURSE!). It should be interesting. I'm pretending the goal is to have them all learn to work together as a team and to make important decisions as a group and to learn what it takes to put together a dinner. Really, it's just a no-effort meal for hubby and I! haha - don't tell the kids! I figure they can't do much worse than we do. We make our dinners at places like this so we don't have to deal with shopping at all and only have to prepare meals once every 2 weeks. Even so, as was the case tonight, we still burn them when all we have to do is throw them in the oven and set the timer!

So I'm water-logged but I'm happy that I'm not alone. All those flowers we bought yesterday? They are still sitting in their pots, not planted, water-logged along with me :-) The one we had managed to actually hang up didn't hold well under all that water weight and bent our apparently very cheap shepherd's hook in half.

And for my cryptic message of the day: our baby daughter has a new name and it is not Madeline!