Picking Our Own Brains

Are you ready for something very cool? Or an least cool in my admittedly dorky mind?

The Open Adoption Bloggers list now has its own custom search engine: a Google search box that spits out only results from our fabulous blogs.

If you're wondering what writers in open adoptions are saying about Mother's Day or open records or just something non-adoption related like Halloween, this is a great way to find out. You can even refine the search results to look just in a specific blogroll category, like first parents or pre-adoptive parents.

There are a couple of different ways to access the search engine:
1) There is a search box on the Open Adoption Bloggers page
2) The search engine has its own permanent home on the web ready to bookmark
3) You can add a search box to your own site

It's run by Google, so if you've told Google not to index your blog it won't show up in the results. And if you're on the blogroll but would rather not be searchable, just let me know.

Give it a try!*

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* If you're reading this in a feed reader, you need to click through to the blog to see the search box. Sorry about that!

Renaming My Kids and Not In the Way You Might Think

The following things are true:

• I've always thought that if I ever had kids the regular old birth way, I'd wait to get to know them a bit before choosing names for them. It's always seemed odd to me that we parents name our children before ever meeting them face to face. Naming that way wasn't an option the way Puppy and Firefly came to us, and in the end the process of naming each of them was meaningful in other ways.  But it wasn't long with either of the kids before I looked at them and thought, "Oh, they're really more of a [this whole other name we had never considered]." It's not something that keeps me up at night, tossing with regret, but it is something I think about on occasion.
  
  
• When I started writing here, Puppy was a two-month old nugget of baby awesome, totally dependent on us for everything. Giving him a cute online nickname seemed fitting. Now he's growing into a more independent little guy every day, expressing all sorts of complex thoughts and stories. For awhile now whenever I've sat down to write about him I want to call him something more real, more person-ish. The same is just beginning to happen with Firefly.
  
  
• Nicknaming an adopted kid "Puppy" in a world in which pet adoption programs exist was dumb. It just was, even if it was only on a blog and even if it was a play on words based on his actual name. That's one of the scary thing about blogging, at least for me. If you're writing honestly and openly, all of your mistakes and missteps are preserved for the world to view. But it doesn't mean I can't try to make it right after the fact.
  
  
• It occurred to me the other day that, unlike in the real world, I can change the kids' blog names whenever I please. And finally have a chance to bestow on them the names I think so fit their little selves.

So, without further ado, meet Eddie (short for Edward)...

...and Marian, often called Mari (sounds like "merry").

This Day

I am feeling affection for this day. The sort of affection that is not nostalgia, because it is for the present moment instead of the past. An anticipation of nostalgia, rather--the sense that years from now, it will be a time such as  this I remember with a twinge.

I think it is the rain falling quietly outside. Or the way the kids' playing spills through the house on the open weekend afternoon. I think maybe it is that Firefly wears Puppy's hand-me-downs I pulled out for the autumn, although I don't feel this tide of emotion every time she wears his old clothes.

Then I realize I dressed Firefly in the pants her brother wore the day he met her. The first time our family was together in one room.

Of course.

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