Working dog? Maybe not!
Bodhi came to work with me this afternoon. Since January, I’ve been working in a new office, here in Berkeley, after they closed my company’s San Francisco office location. I’ve been loving the new location. It has a “hip” startup feel, which admittedly can sometimes feel like a bit of a caricature of the hip startup office.Think wild colors on the walls, odd furniture, fruit water and snacks and a lot of talk of “community” —but overall, I like the new space and it’s been a welcome change of pace from my previous office, which had really gotten to be kind of tired and sad as more and more people worked from home. One perk of the new office that I hadn’t fully taken advantage of is that the office is dog friendly. So,today, I had a relatively meeting-free afternoon (a rare event!) and I thought I’d give it a try with Bodhi. Others in the building bring their dogs and they all seem to do pretty well. Most just hang out and sleep. Well, let’s just say that Bodhi is not that sort of a dog. I should have known. After thoroughly sniffing out the office and common spaces, making some friends in other offices (he’s an attention magnet for sure!), I thought he might settle down and do what he does best—sleep or chew his bone. But, he made it clear that he had zero interest in settling down on his dog bed and hanging out for the afternoon. It didn’t take long before he started with his best “I’m bored, can we go” whine and harumphing. You have to hear it to understand it. It’s a pretty good impression of what a dog-version of a teenager might sound like. Since I knew the barks were next, we called it a day earlier than expected. Honestly, I should have suspected that pups don’t like being stuck in glass walled cubicles any more than people do! My guess is that he much prefers his perch on the couch at home where he can do his “real job” of guarding the house from postman invasions and squirrels that get too close to the yard. Well, it was a fun experiment but a “working dog”, Bodhi is definitely not!
I went to my monthly adoption support group tonight. I try to go most months when I am in town. I am generally glad I do, though it’s a mix of emotions each time. It’s helpful to meet other families in the same boat, but at the same time, it marks the passage of time, another month without a match, feeling that I am stuck and that this is not moving forward, wondering whether this will work out. The mantra is always “patience”,”hang in there”, “waiting is the hardest part.” All that may be true but still, it doesn’t make the waiting limbo feel any easier and in all honesty, hearing the mantra time and time again, just starts to wear thin. There’s always a topic for the meeting, usually some informational component on one of the many, many logistical, legal or sometimes emotional ins-and-outs of adoption. Today’s topic was all about birth fathers and the rights they have in the adoption match. Let’s just say there was a LOT to process, and a lot to start to worry about. In all the training and counseling that goes on for potential adoptive parents, there’s generally a lot of discussion around birthmothers (as there should be) but comparatively less so about birth fathers. But, they are, of course, a part of this too and the legal issues around consent are complicated and the potential complicating scenarios are many. In earlier stages of this, I used to approach these types of discussions by taking tons of notes, sucking in every last nitty gritty detail, learning as much as I can to prepare myself for the possible scenarios. I’m nothing if not a good student and researcher and that’s generally been my strategy for life—arm myself with as much information and preparation in advance, so I can’t be taken by surprise. “Be Prepared,” as the Boy Scout motto goes; an adaptive strategy that probably most Type-A achievers like me learned early in life. But, as time has passed and also hearing more and more adoption stories from adoptive and wanna-be-adoptive parents, it just became clear to me that every situation and story is so different that you can’t really prepare for all the inevitable surprises. And in fact, you can drive yourself (and probably others around you) crazy with trying to foreshadow the possibilities and prepare for every scenario. The best you can do is let go and be open (there’s that word again!) to whatever happens. 
My friend Noelle, her husband Paul and kids Aidan and Keira came to visit and I took the week off to vacation with them. We had a great week and packed in a walloping amount of Bay Area sights and fun along the way. Noelle and I met when we were both in graduate school at UCSF so it was a homecoming for her and the kids were excited to see “where Mommy used to live.” We spent some of the time taking day trips from my house in Berkeley and then mid-week, went up to Stinson Beach in Marin for a few days.
I haven’t posted a stork sighting in quite a while. Storks are few and far between here in the U.S. but I did see a mural with a bird (maybe a heron?) that looks suspiciously like a cousin of the European stork! I’ll take it as a stork sighting!
The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur and so I am finally catching up on finishing some old posts. I am big sentimentalist about holidays. I just love celebrating holiday traditions. Even better when there are kids involved. It lets me be a big kid too! Easter is one of my favorite holidays. There’s the excitement of spring and the world coming back to life and color after a gray winter. Coloring eggs is a lot of fun and of course, who can’t love a holiday centered on candy and chocolate. I have great memories of Easter as a kid. I remember hunting for eggs that my Dad (aka the Easter Bunny) had hidden and how in some years “the easter bunny” did such a good job hiding the eggs that we’d be finding (or smelling!) errant eggs weeks later. I remember hoarding my chocolate bunny, not willing to eat it because that might hurt the bunny and being horrified to find my bunny, which I had carefully tucked away, eaten up by my little brother. This year I did a two-take Easter. Since I knew I’d be travelling to the east coast for Easter weekend, the weekend before Easter I had friends over to my house in Berkeley for brunch and an egg hunt. And then the following weekend, on the “real” Easter Sunday I was in Connecticut celebrating Otto’s first Easter. Otto seemed to like the Radio Flyer baby trike I got him as an Easter gift. Easter Sunday was lovely weather and we had a nice walk to their local park nearby. I’m not sure who had more fun playing with the plastic (cheerio loaded) eggs, Otto or Gary, the dog. Gary figured out the trick pretty quickly and was all over the eggs! It was a fun two weekends. I’m in the midst of updating my adoption brochure (more on that later in another post!) so the timing was good for getting some fun photos. I knew the visit to Connecticut was going to be a bittersweet weekend, with it being Otto’s first Easter but also coming up on the fifth anniversary of my Mom’s death. My Mom died just before Easter in 2011 and I think of her so often this time of year, around Easter and spring. We visited the cemetery to put flowers on my Mom and Dad’s graves, the first visit there with Otto in tow and I couldn’t help but think about how much Mom and Dad would have loved him. This year, maybe for the first year since Mom died, looking at Otto, I could really feel both how life moves forward and on in the next generation and how the memories and traditions we grew up with bridge the past and present and keep those we’ve loved and lost alive in spirit. There’s some sort of peace in realizing this.
Waiting for my stork 