New Year, New Resolutions

With only about a week to go before our court date in Addis, Matt and I are starting to get freaked out over all of the changes coming in our lives.  At this point, we've programmed our boys to essentially care for themselves.  They know not to wake us up early on the weekends, they can make pb&js for themselves, and more or less get themselves dressed (sometimes in shorts when it's snowing outside, but still).  We are also fairly confidant that they are not going to accidentally ingest coins, drown in the bathtub, fall off the top of the slide, or run away from us in the grocery store (okay, they still do that, but I can always hear them several aisles away due to their noisiness).  Anyway, it will be a shock to the system to go back to all of that, plus diapers, plus naps that need to be taken, plus bringing snacks around with us, plus a million little things that I've probably forgotten about.  But, truthfully, we can't wait to have her home.  As a major bonus, the orphanage reports that she sleeps really well all night.  The dreadful sleep habits of #1 and #2 were a large part of the reason that we decided to adopt a baby rather than have another one - we are pretty sure there is a missing sleep gene in our combined DNA.  You probably think that is an exaggeration, but it is absolutely not - ask anyone who knew us between 2002 and 2005.  So with that under her belt, she may move up to being our favorite child right away.  But even if she reverts a little (can you tell that I am worried that it might be our parenting skills, rather than our DNA, that were at fault), we keep thinking up all the things we want to do with her, show her, teach her, and on and on.
And that brings me to my New Year's Resolutions.  I am really going to try to be a better documenter of Ruby's life than I have been of Finn and Gus' lives.  Probably there were blogs when they were little, but I was not in the know about them and I don't think our old computer would have supported the technology.  Instead, I just took lots of pictures, never printed most of them, and generally ignored their baby books.  I know they did lots of things, very cute, exceptional things, but it's hard now to remember what they were.  Parenting for me seems to be an exercise in living in the moment:  I can't ever seem to see the kids as anything other that what they are right now.  Even looking at the pictures, it's hard to remember what it felt like to hold them when they were just born, or to believe that it was really them smiling like that.  It's the same for the future as well - when they are driving me crazy, I can't believe they will ever stop, or when they creep up the stair to snuggle up with us in the mornings, it's impossible to imagine a day when they will be giant things too grown up to snuggle with us.  So, I think maybe if I commit to recording it as it's happening, I can sit around laughing and crying into my soup (because I am remembering things, not because I have been driven totally crazy by my children) when they have all left to live their lives.  We'll see.