A life in progress

I don't have much to say today, as I'm completely exhausted from a hellacious week at work... but I wanted to post one last time before I wandered off this side of the globe. In 12 hours, Mike and I will be sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for our flight to San Francisco, which will then lead us to a flight to China!  Woo!  China! This is my excited face!  I'm going to do a combination of being an insane tourist and seeing all of the awesome stuff that China has to offer, and relaxing and getting a lot of massages.  Massages are cheap and unlike in the US aren't often confused as a method of prostitution... don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are plenty of "happy ending" massage parlors to be found, but the general idea is if you want a massage, it's because your back or feet are sore.  :) After this week, if I wasn't going to China, I would just dig a hole and hide for the next 10 days.  My students have been absolutely insane ...

This morning, Mike and I are starting to take care of some of the little details for our next adventure -- hunting for camera chargers, talking about packing lists, and other things we can take care of a few days before we go; we'll go out this afternoon and pick up a few things - as it's probably the last opportunity we have to go out together before our flight Friday morning.  I even took the plunge, and against my frugal nature paid for the "economy plus" upgrades for our flight to Beijing.  Our flight home isn't very full yet, so I moved us to a window/aisle seat with a empty center seat between us, in hopes that either a) it won't fill up or b) if it does fill up the person in the seat will move to another empty seat.  I don't love long haul air travel, but I can deal with it.  Mike, on the other hand, at 6'2", finds it uncomfortable in the best of situations.  He's still trying to wrap his mind around a 10+ hour flight.  At the very leas...

So, last night, the call we'd been waiting for came.  Baby C's dad had gotten all of his ducks in a row and was ready to take custody of her.  So... we spent a little time saying goodbye and stopped to visit the ducks in the park on the way to drop her off. We knew this day was coming.  It was actually supposed to happen last weekend, but there was a little bit a a hiccup in the process.  Her had actually moved from California to comply with CPS.  We didn't completely understand the situation, but it came across as he'd never really been involved as a parent, but when given the opportunity, he really did what he needed to do to step up.  For the past few weeks, he'd been doing visitations with Baby C on Friday evenings.  At first he wasn't really sure of what he should be doing, but at the most recent visitation, when I went in at the end of the hour, they were playing together with the toys.  The simple fact that he was willing to move...

Today, I am linking up with Jen from  Ramblings of a Suburban Mom  again for her Thursday Thoughts. I actually started this blog post last week.  It was my birthday (FYI, I am old now) and I was doing a lot of very un-birthday like things... I feel like I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up baby poop and chasing after 8th graders. But, for some reason, I didn't finish the post.  It just sat here.  I probably got distracted cleaning up more baby poop or chasing after some more 8th graders. In the past week, things have actually settled down somewhat in the baby poop department.  We're giving Baby C less milk, so she's calmed down a lot.  8th graders, on the other hand, are a terrible population of people in general, and in the past week, they've only gotten worse.  (If, for some reason, you are an 8th grader reading my blog, I have a couple of things to say.  Firstly, you might want to consider some more age-appropriate reading ma...