Showing posts with label Hmmph. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hmmph. Show all posts

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Home Life?

Yes, I do have a home life. One that is getting slowwwwwly better. A few years ago my wife of 20 years (the marriage, not the wife) decided that we should try again to adopt a kid or two, not ever having had any of our own. Hoo boy. That led to foster care classes and adoption classes and caseworkers and kids in and out of our house.... At one time we had seven kids living with us. Not good in a three bedroom house. I had to build two more bedrooms in the garage and I built all of the beds myself. What started out as three sets of loft beds turned into four sets of bunkbeds and constant chaos. I lost about ten pounds a month between working and losing my mind.

We ended up adopting two teenagers and taking legal guardianship on a third. In the mean time, the state was constantly moving kids in and out of our house. The two we adopted lasted about a year and they both decided that us being their parents wasn't really what they wanted out of life and they left and moved back in with their birth parents. SInce the oldest was eighteen, there wasn't much we could do about it. Her younger brother has since ended up back in foster care somewhere else.

That was pretty much the final straw for me, and we had them drop our foster license. We now have one teenage girl in our home who is doing pretty good. She's kind of a flibbertigibbet but if we can keep her out of the fire for two more years we're home free. She's a pretty good kid most of the time. But, like any teenager, she likes to test our boundaries.

Other than that, my life revolves around work, the internet, my wife, our two dogs and our massive library. We are all voracious readers and there are books all over the house. A few years ago I got really bored and counted them. At the time there were about fourteen hundred scattered here and there. Most likely there's a few hundred more now.

There... I've bared my soul to you. (grin) Now I'm going back to work for some peace and quiet......