ON THURSDAY'S I POST FROM THE VAULT. THIS POST IS FROM SEPTEMBER 2010. We are finally settling our accounts for all of the repairs that had to be made from The Great Flood and Exile of 2010 – which seems like a very dramatic description of a laundry load consisting of two towels.  But lest you think I’m being overdramatic, this rodent did some hefty damage.  And as it turns out, it wasn’t even a rat.  It was a tiny little mouse that wreaked all of this havoc.  By taking a bite out of the . . .

ON THURSDAY'S I POST FROM THE VAULT. THIS POST IS FROM SEPTEMBER 2010. This is a vent.  This is purely a vent.  Should you like to read about actual problems in the world, go here. But back to me and my astronomical issues.  I HATE CHANGING THE CRIB SHEETS.  I really do.  Taking off the crib bumper, pulling out the mattress, the tucking, the climbing.  I hate it.   I rarely do it.  I also hate applying emolient lotions.  We have a lot of them in my house.  Jafta has eczema, Kembe’s hair needs . . .

ON THURSDAY'S I POST FROM THE VAULT. THIS POST IS FROM SEPTEMBER 2010. I am so very happy to be back in our house.  Have I mentioned that?  Because I am.  Giddy happy to be home.  I was going slowly insane in that hotel room during the month of August.  I am too embarrassed to even mention how looney-tunes I was towards the end.  I kept telling Mark, “I just need to get back in our house.”  And he kept telling me, “You just need to relax”.  And I kept telling him, “No, REALLY, I just need to . . .

ON THURSDAY'S I POST FROM THE VAULT. THIS POST IS FROM SEPTEMBER 2010.   This will mostly be a random post of adoption-related links, but if you are an adoptive parent of a child who is dealing with attachment stuff, I would love your feedback on the last paragraph.  But first: Several people pointed me to this article that Lisa Qualls wrote, and I really appreciated it.  These points were especially poignant for me: In my first 20 years of being a mother, before adopting, I was . . .

ON THURSDAY'S I POST FROM THE VAULT. THIS POST IS FROM AUGUST 2010. We are officially back in our house after the Great Flood and Exile of 2010.  We’ve been a little back and forth over the past week – packing up the hotel room, unpacking boxes at home, escaping to the hotel when there was too much construction going on here, and then retreating to our house at night when it was empty.  We’ve all been coughing and hacking from the drywall dust.  That or we have mesothelioma from all the . . .

ON THURSDAY'S I POST FROM THE VAULT. THIS POST IS FROM AUGUST 2010. I’m working on my syllabus this morning for a new class I’m teaching this semester.  I’ve been hunting for an HBO documentary called East of Main: Asians Aloud (which seems to be off the schedule and which I’m desperate to get my hands on, in case anyone happened to record it).  Anyways, as I was perusing their documentary listings I came across one film entitled Homeless: Motel Kids of Orange County.  As soon as I saw the . . .