Saturday, August 25, 2007

Here's a photograph, taken a few weeks ago, of us trying to take pictures of Huck's sprouting molars. He moved around a lot.

I can't sleep. I am so scared that the things from my last post might get our house closed down and Huckle moved somewhere else.

I've been crying on and off for about 12 hours now. A bowl of fruit? Terrycloth hand towels? A fridge with a thermometer built in?

I understand that standards have to be maintained. I understand that a lot of terrible things can happen to a child in foster care. If there were rotten bananas in the fruit bowl, I could understand. Or if the cake weren't still kind of warm from the oven, if it were covered in ants or flies or whatever. But partly frosted with a picture of half a donkey? WTF. Every time we've had social workers, fire inspectors, or the health department out here, there's been a bowl of fresh fruit, or at least a few lemons, out in the open. Everything that we were cited for this time around was in the same state the last time we were inspected, and back then the evaluator told me a nightlight in the hall was burnt out, but he didn't write it down, I think he was just letting me know.
After the first thing was noted, I started following the evaluator around with our digital camera. I have photographs of the evaluator with almost everything mentioned in frame. They were all covert hip-shots without flash, but you can still make out the towels, the vacuum, the fruit, the digital display on the fridge.

My lawyer is out of town until Tuesday, and although I know a lot of real estate, divorce, tax, estate, and corporate lawyers, I can't find anyone in my book that could advise me on this.

I do have one "in" that, should we need it, could prove useful.

I started the adoption paperwork. We'll get through this, hell or high water, adopt the Huckster, and keep our license for when/if a biological sibling is born and brought into care. If we have a license but we don't have foster kids in the home, no one comes around, not even our agency.

It also looks like Huck's grandmother just moved to a house five miles away from us.

Here's Huckle's cake, chocolate fudge with cream cheese frosting:

Cake based on Huck's current favorite book, Donkey-Donkey. I had a bunch of leftover red frosting, so, yay, flowers. Last week I made a blue colored cake with blue frosting, and Huck pooed blue for a week, so I went for a white background so as not to freak out his new teacher on Monday...
This book now beats out The Owl and The Pussycat, which he's been able to recite for about five months. The moon, the moon, the moon...This was my all time favorite book, my mom tells me. She says she read it to me six times a day from 2 to 4, when I started to read it myself. The photographs are wonderful. I still love to look at it. We've got a lot of books that used to be mine. There's a shelf of "Fragile" books in my room that Only Mommy holds.

2 comments:

Other Mother said...

Hi - just found your blog - so sorry you're going through this! Don't forget that the kids are worth it -- and some workers (or state inspectors) are just jerks!! It's not you, it's them.

Yondalla said...

Try not to panic. The inspector was being ridiculous and other people who read the report will have brains.

It will be okay.