wow. i hate when i check my last post and realize that it has been so long since i have posted. life just gets busy. and in my little snafud world busy is an understatement.

so lemme see.... where are we...

oh reader. damned Google. it still throws me off. i am slowly tracking down my favorites. but it just makes things harder. and makes me much slower to read and comment. and we all know everybody loves blog comment love.

we had a couple of birthdays. Lil'K celebrated her 8th. and in step with the 'Mother of the Year' that i am obviously winning at, i did not do my normal birthday blog for her. but i redeemed myself with getting her a bike. the birthday was great. we had tons of friends and family at the house to celebrate. cupcakes that were yummy and a pinata that held wayyyyy more candy and goodies than should be allowed by law. the only downside was that, at the time, Lil'K had fractured a bone in her lower leg and with all the running and playing it was causing a lot of pain, so she petered out a little early. and mom of the year over here didn't realize something was wrong with said leg for over two weeks.

my birthday followed a little over two weeks later and it was fun. all the big people actually went out. like out out. like big people do. i even dressed up. and wore make up. and 3" wedges. friends, family and co-workers showed up and it was great. the BFF wasn't able to make it due to not feeling well so that part sucked, but all in all it was a good birthday.

we have started having Friday Night Community Dinner at my house. it started out as a way for me to pay a neighbor/friend/inner-circle-member for keeping Lil'K a couple of afternoons after daycare until i got home. but i live in a small town so as soon as friends started seeing the cars the calls started coming in. which turned into "sure!! come on over". within two weekends we had well over 40 people at my house. i cook with the help of BFF and the inner circle mamas help with the picking up of the house on Friday after Friday morning coffee. it did get to the point that there is now a facebook private page just for the FNCD crew. we will kind of slow down during the summer as most of my friends actually do things. i have totally enjoyed the Friday nights, but after 6 months of it...it is getting to be a little much. but i love it. i get to see all of my nearest and dearest friends that i love so much at least once a month now. and that more than makes up for it. although it seems that even if the FNCD is cancelled, the inner-circle ends up still hanging out. the inner-circle is just myself, the BFF, cousin June, cousin August, cousin BigJ and The Blondes (neighbors that have become very close). so even without the full on party, there are still quite a few of us. but i enjoy it.

we have been on quite a ride with Lil'K and her meds. i cannot remember how much i have said without going back and reading older posts, and well, i am at work and not gonna do it lol. we have switched meds recently. since christmas maybe? i cannot remember exactly. but we are on lithium now. and prozac. and respirdol. it has been helpful. but we will always be on a medicine ride. until she gets a little older and can learn to self-control her moods and swings. but all in all we have had a much better last three months.

Big'K got her class ranking and GPA. she is 26th out of 165. which just makes me mad. she has a 3.7 GPA which makes me mad again. she is so smart. and she knows had she not had so many zeros she would have been way higher ranked with a better GPA. i do hope this helps to push her forward a little. her anxiety was way worse this freshman year of high school. but she is finding ways to work on it.

this coming weekend we will be heading to dallas for A-Kon. the anime convention not the singer. we are all excited. the two big girls and the BFF and i are going. so there will be a post after that. we also had a tragedy at work. so i will post about that as well.

i hope that is enough of an update for right now. and secretly the only reason i updated is because i know MOTPG would stop by.

...apparently off the face of the earth. but only the cyber earth. i am actually alive and well. just have not spent a ton of time online.

first Google  decided to kill off the Reader. which is horrible in my world. i relied on it. to read the blogs i loved the most. to let me know when there was a new post. and now....nothing. i have to go and hunt them down like 'olden times' and well seriously i was following over 260 blogs. with a good two dozen that i read weekly. finding them all is a pain. so i have been slow to comment lately. and slow to blog. i will sit down this weekend and hammer out a few posts. we celebrated a birthday, had a holiday weekend, have started Friday Night Community Dinner at my house weekly, dove back into the world of daycare, and so many other things over the last couple of months.

i have not written due to the lack of words or inspiration, it has been due to how busy we have been. both good busy and bad busy. and the fact that my children have taken over my laptop. plus we kind of instituted a 'no electronics' on the weekend rule. which is bad for me.

i will catch you all up. soon. promise.

it is no secret that i am adopted. after the birth of Lil'K i was forced to do a little thinking. health wise i was going through things that were a bit scary. things that my mother had gone through. that ultimately led to her having a hysterectomy when i was three. which led to her being on hormones. which as we all know led to her death. facing the same surgery in my near future started to worry me. it made me think long and hard about my medical past. and more importantly, my lack of knowledge about my medical past. the fact that i now had a second child, whose paternal medical past i had no knowledge of either. being adopted, and in the mid 70's at that, you can imagine that the 'passing on of information' was not quite as open as it is now in some cases. i literally knew very little. i knew the agency used. that she was musical. had brown hair. was 21. and that i was a mix of irish, dutch and indian. the tribal headdress kind, not the in the sand with camel's kind. and that the possibility i was given up was that she wanted to head to medical school. but that was the extent of what i knew.

enter Lil'K and my need for learning more skyrocketed. but how on earth could i do that? my adoption was obviously closed. my birth mother used an agency that in my area is known for their 'wayward home for expecting young mothers'. or back in the day that was the case. i started by contacting them. no help. i could pay an astronomical amount of money and send in an application that if happened to match another party would allow me to receive information. so i put my information out on a couple of adoption sites. by the time i forgot about it i received an email from an adoption search agency. in the email it only asked if the number shown was my birth certificate number. it was. the number matched a birth certificate from my birthday with only 'baby girl' listed. but with a name under mother. then the same number is shown with my name, my mother and father as well. she said it was unusual back then for the same number to be on both. they would usually give a new number to the birth certificate that went with the adoptive parents and child. so it made things easier. she was able to give me my birth mother's name. her parents names. the name of her mother. and another relative as well as his address and phone number and the fact that at one time she had lived with him. of course, i could not fathom calling that number. i just kind of sat on the information for a while. do not get me wrong, i would google the shit out of the information i had. but just could not act on it. i googled for quite a while. years even. but did not get the push i needed until early 2012 when my cousin and i started putting together our family tree. i decided to start another one on the side. you would not believe the information that can be found on those sites. so i entered my birth mother's name. i found a picture of her. from high school and nearly fell out of my chair. i could not even think. i took a picture of it on my phone and sent it to August. she immediately was like WTF is that? the resemblance was striking. i knew it was her.

i continued to search for her brother. i knew her parents were already deceased. i had found their death certificates. but the brother remained elusive. and she was just kind of in the wind. i searched and searched. but kept coming up with nothing but dead ends.

school started and the holidays hit. and the searching just kind of came to a halt. after christmas i decided to look again. and the first entry in google was... her obituary. it took my breath away. she had passed away at the age of 57 in september of 2012. i contacted the funeral home that was listed as doing the arrangements. the gentleman there was very sympathetic to my story. after playing phone tag for almost a month, i got in touch with him this morning and heard the news that i was dreading. he did not do the pick up from the hospital. it was another funeral home. it was a county case. she was cremated. no living relatives or assets. it was a friend from work that made the arrangements. they did not even know where she was born at. where her parents were from. or any other information.

the only part i heard was ... no living relatives.

it brought my everything to a halt.

every. thing.

after all my searching. and wondering. that was it. it was over. no. living. relatives.

all i can do now is try to find the woman that helped make the arrangements. and maybe talk to her. i searched all day for her brother. and the other relative. to no avail.

i just have a hard time imagining that this is the end. but i have to say my heart is very heavy. i know as an adopted child that your past is always hard to narrow down. and i love my parents. they are the only mom and dad i know. the best ever. and i do not want to belittle them. but i think being human...there is an instinct to understand your past. to know where you come from. i think that has nothing to do with being adopted. i want to know the same things about my parents. especially my mom. i knew her as my mom, but growing up without her i was not able to really understand what she was like as an adult. i only saw her as a mom. i want to know about her as much as i do my birth mom. probably even more. but with both of them gone...where do i start? how do i get to my past? what will i tell my girls? i do not want them to be my age and wonder about their pasts. i know this will be something that i will have to get past. getting past your past. sheesh i sure have been working on this lately.

ughh. just one more thing to add to my list of 'shitineedtoworkthrough'