Room on the Counter for More

When we were growing up, my sister, cousins, and I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house. Granny's kitchen was one of our favorite places to be. She'd always let us sit on a counter, sometimes three of us at a time (we were five in all). She had endless patience and gave us tasks to do while we sat up there. In Granny's boxes of slide photographs, there are many pictures of us all lined up on her yellow kitchen counter.

Abe has discovered the joy of sitting on the counter in our kitchen. He started last year during the holidays, in this spot:Now that he's bigger, that counter gets crowded, so we've moved him across the room to this spot here, where he sometimes reads his Sunday comics.

With all the cooking going on for Thanksgiving, he's especially loving this spot of his. He can easily reach the fruit bowl for more oranges.
Our counter has room for more. If we can ever get our paperwork done, we're hoping for another hiney to sit on these counters with Abe. So where are we with all that second adoption stuff? We had a mad rush a couple of months ago getting the paperwork done, even a good chunk of what we need for our foreign dossier (the big daddy of all the piles of paperwork), but then we hit a snag with one paper. Even our Gladney caseworkers were sort of scratching their heads about what to do. Without going into the boring details, it has to do with how to get a proper " proof of employment letter" for an actor. Not so easy. Yes, we managed it the first time round, but now things are a little different, making things complicated (again, boring details).

We think we have a solution but it means waiting for another document. More waiting. Our goal is to have all our paperwork finished well before Christmas. I can't help feeling superstitious about our adoptions sometimes, as if I write or talk too much about it, I'm going to jinx it. Ridiculous, right?

So that's where we are. One paper away from putting our foreign dossier together. Then the big Wait. The wait for whom? More on that later (really, I promise).