Checking In

I promised myself I would report in as to how I was keeping up with my resolutions, hoping it will keep me motivated. I have been dreading writing this post because I have to report mediocre results at best. On the adoption front, I have no complaints. Our agency requires a transracial adoption class and individual meeting for anyone adopting outside their race. I don’t think many agencies have such requirements which I think is unfortunate. There are a lot of issues Caucasian couples will face as their children grow up that they might not think about when they are making the decision to adopt a baby. Not having faced racism themselves, they might gloss over the impact it will have on their lives when they become a multiracial family. But I digress. This week, we had our individual meeting completing this requirement. Next week I need to get started on our scrapbooks which will be shown to the birth family. Not being the crafty sort, I’m a bit intimidated by this one.

As for the new recipes, I’ve tried two since my last post. The first was a Brazilian chicken and rice dish from the Bon Appetit cookbook I got for Christmas. The dish was tasty but it used a yellow rice mix for the base of it which means it was loaded with sodium and felt a bit more like glorified processed food than good ol’ home cooking. Since I cook to avoid consuming too much processed food, this may not be a recipe I go to again and again. This morning we tried the Light and Fluffy Pancake recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. This was a bit of a copout in that we only tried it because I forgot to buy pancake mix at the grocery store and we both had a craving for blueberry pancakes this morning. The verdict: The pancakes were definitely light and fluffy which yielded an interesting (and pleasant) texture, but the extra effort involved in making them (separating the eggs and beating the whites until quite frothy) was really not worth the slightly better taste than just mixing pancake mix and water.

And I’ve left the worst for last: the writing. I had some good days and some bad days, but I definitely did not make the goal of 1,000 words 5 out of 7 days. I’m trying not to get down on myself, but rather just pick myself up and force myself into the chair and do better next week. I just finished one book on writing (Anne Lamont’s Bird by Bird) which was full of inspiration. I just started another by Arthur Plotnik that begins “The truth is this: writing is a bumper-to-bumper crawl through hell with an occasional jolt to the next level of anguish.” How’s that for inspiration?