Life plans and whiplash

I'm having trouble sleeping. That in and of itself isn't so unusual - there's a reason I have two different kinds of sleep aids in the medicine cabinet under the bathroom sink. But there's a lot to unpack from tonight's insomnia.

The clock's past midnight so we've officially reached the winter solstice. We can count another year round the sun, and a full seven since our sole Burning The Clocks celebration to mark this day the way only Brightonians know how—with an all-out parade through town packed with handmade lanterns that all wind their way down to a fiery end at a beach-front bonfire.

Today was a good one - seven years since partying on the midnight beaches of Brighton, I officially ticked perform a solo aerial act off the bucket list. Was it perfect? Hardly. Was it fun? Very much so. Still a track athlete at heart, I'll never have the grace and fluidity of movement of some aerialists, but I'm amazed that I can challenge my body to reach new physical limits while simultaneously pushing myself to explore creative expression. And (some) people actually want to see me do it!

Knock "perform a solo aerial act" off the bucket list

But today was also a weird one. We'd hardly gotten home from my performance when one of our couple friends announced their pregnancy. We knew they were on that timeline, but learning the baby is officially in the oven still feels weird. Another one of our friends who'd attended tonight's performance has been trying. And yet another had her heart broken just last week when she learned her body won't be able to achieve pregnancy. Two other friends have told us they plan to start in the new year. It feels like the walls are closing in.

In the midst of all this, we have a deadline looming: January 3. It's our appointment at a fertility clinic. If that statement gives you whiplash, believe me, I'm right there with you. This is officially, 100%, in no way part of the life plan. But what is the plan? With dreams of fostering dashed and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper purchased at the tail end of last holiday season now collecting dust, where do we go next? The fertility clinic. Even though we've never even tried to conceive. Even though a pregnancy is the last thing I want. All in the hopes that some freezer will become home to a healthy-sized batch of frozen embryos that can buy us a few years to figure out the plan. But there are so many ifs.

Some ifs are easy: What if it turns out I'm sterile? Cool, proceed as planned. Regroup and dive back into foster care, or don't! It's our life, and the only thing that's certain is we won't come out alive. Between now and then, game on.

But then there are more tricky ifs: What if we can afford a surrogate? Can we justify spending six figures to avoid a whole lot of pain and to keep up with my favorite aerial hobby? Or worse, what if I undergo a fertility treatment cycle just to come out with only a couple of viable embryos? With numbers so small that a freeze/thaw cycle might leave me with nothing after two weeks of total medical hell, do I just implant? Do we literally throw every plan out the window and dive in? And then what?

And after all this, why? Why am I doing something I'd never dreamed of? For a sticky, screaming, highly expensive outcome that I honestly do not want? The best answer I've got is that the only thing worse to me than not exploring this option is the idea that I'll never have the chance to nurture a child with whom I can form a lifelong bond. I don't need to be there from the start, and I've never cared about the familial resemblance or even the inherited quirks - I've got a heart big enough to love someone different. But I'm not sure that children of trauma know how to love back, and I'm not sure I have the emotional wherewithal to teach them. Maybe this is just my PTSD response to this past summer, but then again everybody's choices are just half-chance.

And I wonder why I have trouble sleeping.

Seeking gratitude

2023's brought a lot to be grateful for. Thanksgiving weekend is about that (and endless food, and those deep discounts on things you were hopefully already going to buy). And looking back, we had some major wins this year:

• We both got our second nationalities!
  
  

  

  Je suis française ! 🇫🇷🍷🧀 And Nicolas is now a card-carrying American. 🇺🇸🦅🏈 

  
  
• Our Neuralink stock got its second comma!
  
  

  

  I guess this makes us millionaires?

  
  
• We got a very good puppy. I'm honestly not sure this last point is a total win as she's definitely reinforced our understanding that we are cat people, but she is so very cute.

Our stupidly cute puppy

And, from the perspective at the tail end of our Thanksgiving weekend, we had another solid holiday even though we didn't host this year. We made my favorite candied cranberries, threw together a nice arugula/apple/pear/pomegranate/walnut/goat cheese salad with a light ginger vinaigrette, rolled out a crowd-favorite apple-bourbon cocktail (pro-tip: probably shouldn't leave the cinnamon sticks in for more than a day), and we were gifted a large enough left-over turkey leg to whip together our classic Black Friday turkey soup without even first going through the hassle of cooking a whole turkey. [Recipes at the bottom of the post]

With all that out of the way, I can't wait to close the book on this year. It's been a tough one, and I've been struggling to be thankful for all we have through the heartache. If the gaping hole in this year's gratitude list hasn't made it exceedingly obvious, our foster kiddo decidedly did not work out. No need to hash out the details here - I kept a totally private blog to work through things as that placement imploded - but I am sincerely grateful that we had the ability to reclaim our home when it was clear he had zero interest in engaging positively or even neutrally in any form of family life. Healing the pupper (who we'd adopted for him) from the experience of that kid has been a journey - she still has some anxiety issues, but they're improving.

It was tough to hang the holiday decor this weekend and accept that there was no point waiting for our forever kid to help us pick out the tree topper - I ordered a nice geometric star on Black Friday sales. I found all the extra rolls of wrapping paper I'd bought on the post-Christmas sales in preparation for our first holiday as parents. I've struggled with wrapping my head around the anger and sheer hatred a child could carry, and I can't figure out how we try again without risking getting back on the same roller coaster - I'd love to help make a kid's life better and hopefully form a familial bond in the process, but Nicolas and I completely agree that nothing is worth a repeat of the child of the summer of 2023. Living with the uncertainty, with the reality of this year's broken dreams, and without any clarity of action to take to move forward toward the goal of successful fostering/adoption has left me in a bit of an existential crisis.

There's not much more to say on the matter, so without further ado (and let's be frank, to make next year's Thanksgiving that much easier for me to shop for), here are the latest additions to our Thanksgiving menu:

Arugula/pear/pomegranate+ salad
Serves 6

Salad ingredients

• 1/2 cup of raw pecans
  
• 5 oz. arugula
  
• 1/2 cup of crumbled goat cheese
• 1 Barlett pear, sliced or diced
• 1 Honeycrisp or Gala apple, sliced or diced
• 1 pomegranate's worth of arils
  

Dressing ingredients

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp maple syrup
• 1 tsp of finely grated fresh ginger
• 1/4 tsp fine salt
• 10 twists of freshly grated pepper

Mix all the salad ingredients together. In a separate bowl, mix all the dressing ingredients together. Toss just before serving.

Black Friday leftover turkey soup

Ingredients

• 1 turkey carcass
• 4 quarts of water
• 1 (28 oz) can of whole peeled tomatoes, chopped
• 6 small potatoes, diced
• 4 large carrots, diced
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 stalks of celery, diced
• 1 1/2 cups shredded cabbage
• 1/2 cup farro
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp savory spice mix
• 1 tsp dried parsley
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 large bay leaf
• 1/4 tsp ground pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon paprika
• 1 pinch dried thyme

Put the turkey in a pot with water. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for one hour. Remove the carcass. Strain the broth. Pull the meat off the carcass, chopping as needed, and return to the broth. Add in all other ingredients. Keep the soup at a simmer for at least one hour until the vegetables are tender.

Apple-bourbon cocktail

Serves 15

Ingredients

• 32 oz. fresh-squeezed apple juice/cider (non-alcoholic)
• 8 oz. cranberry-vanilla simple syrup
• 24 oz. bourbon (or less by taste)
• 5 cinnamon sticks
• 1 sliced green apple

Mix all ingredients. Allow the cinnamon sticks to sit for at least a few hours, but remove them after a day if storing the cocktail. Serve the cocktail over ice or cut with sparkling water (optionally ginger-flavored).

Compatriots twice over

Today marked my most anticlimactic major life milestone: just before breaking for lunch on the first day back from a 4-day weekend, I glanced at my phone to discover I'd been a dual national for the last twenty minutes. Just like that. In between writing code and dealing with the stress from a recalcitrant sickly teen, a dream first planted in 2009, that slipped through my fingers in 2015, came to fruition with an undetected ping of my smartphone.

Translation:
Hello,

We have the pleasure of letting you know that you are henceforth a French citizen.

We welcome you and are happy to count you among our compatriots.

This blog was all about how to come home from a decade of the expat lifestyle. Instead, it's followed me on the journey to becoming an expat at home: I might be an American born and raised, but I spent my twenties figuring out adulting in a very different world. Now my legal status finally reflects the duality of my expat/at-home experience.

Nicolas and I lived through the horrors of our contrasting nationalities preventing us from staying physically together despite our very valid marriage contract at the close of 2017. At last, we've completed the process of sharing our nationalities with each other. From today onward, neither of our countries of birth can ever deny us the right to be with our chosen family.

And you know what else? That Eiffel Tower, the baguette tradition,  the macarons of Pierre Hermé, the foie gras and vin chaud at the marchés de noël - all that cultural heritage is now as much mine as any other Frenchman's. And that makes my heart so full.

My favorite compatriot

 Guess who's officially American today? 🤩❤️🇺🇸🏈🍻 

Introducing Nicolas the American!

So proud of you and how far we've come on this crazy journey. 

What a day!

Years in the making, and we've got not one but new major announcements today. Cheers to some major life milestones!

Clinical trials, here we come!

Goodbye, US Immigration!

Big Plans

This was a week for seeing plans finally start to come together.

Even nature's been turning our way, though with a whole lot more rain than I've ever seen before in a California May.

On Wednesday, Nicolas aced his nationality interview. The officer formally recommended him for naturalization! He even remembered the name of our national anthem, consistently one of the toughest questions during our practice exam sessions and somehow the very first he got quizzed on. We should have stopped to celebrate, but we both had offices to run to so the festivities will have to wait until ceremony day.

Nicolas wore some appropriately festive shorts later that day during his company outing in Alameda.

Our heads were still spinning from the day prior, when we finally got the green light to bring James here for the summer. No, we don't have an adoption date. He's not even our foster kid yet. The administrative quagmire continues, but James's legal guardian has given him the right to travel for up to 30 days at a time, with no minimum wait time between trips, during his summer vacation. So guess who's going on two back-to-back 30-day trips to California with 13 hours back in Fargo in between? (It's cool, we'll just casually performatively jet James back and forth across the country. I'm sure that's totally in a child's - and the planet's - best interests.)

Boy, do we have plans, especially a furry one that James has named Lily.

Meet Lily, our new puppy.

Insanely low-res pix of Lily's mom, Snow White. Lily was part of this pretty lady's very first litter. Before becoming a momma, Snow White weighed in at just 27 pounds. Her shoulder height is 18".

And Lily's dad, Firefly. A total sweetheart who measures just 16.5" (shoulder height) and weighs 22 pounds.

Context: back in March, on our first evening alone with James, his very first question for us whether we could get a dog. And not just any sort, a golden retriever. We half-way saw this coming: one of the top few things James's profile said he wanted in a family was a dog. Really, we may have brought this on ourselves. But we knew enough of James's backstory to know this request wasn't just because he'd seen some dogs on TV or at a park and thought they were cute. As James tells it, he was raised as an only child alongside a golden, adopted at the same time as him, who was his best friend. His first golden had just passed, and he and his mom had adopted his new puppy, when his mom fell ill. This led to a cascade of sadness starting with surrendering the pup, followed by losing his mom, and ending with him in foster care. Knowing all that, "no" wasn't really an option, was it?

How were we going to fit a golden into a 2-bed/2-bath condo already populated by 3 sassy cats? About a zillion dog listings, phone calls, and shelter visits later, we stumbled across the miniature golden retriever, a mix that's been bred for about the past 15 years by a handful of breeders across the US. Miniature goldens are a cross of the golden retriever breed with mini poodle and the Cavalier King Charles spaniel. They've been specially selected to resemble goldens in both look and temperament, but end up about half the size. A couple family calls with a breeder in Ohio who had recent litters, and James had picked his new pup. Problem solved, Venmo transaction complete.

It all sounds like a lot at once, a kid and a puppy, but they go hand-in-hand. Point 1: the moment James will need his pup the most is when he's first arrived. Point 2: this gives James something to anticipate that, unlike a lot of the other prospects of a move from North Dakota to California, doesn't have an element of unnerving uncertainty. Point 3: at a moment when these foster placement proceedings drag out longer and longer, adopting a pup already give James something concrete to show him just how committed we are to bringing him out here.

But wait! Don't let the dog tangent distract us from the rest of the non-canine plans! James has got big plans for this summer:

• We'll be kicking things off with San Francisco Pride🌈✨.
• A week later we'll be taking him down to LA to hit up all the major sites - Hollywood sign🎥, Grauman's Chinese Theater🍿, Venice Beach🌴, etc. - plus he'll get to meet Ryan and Megan.
• The week after that, my parents will arrive bearing our new fluffy friend🐕, who'll be delivered to them the day prior from the Ohio-based breeder.
• After the week with the Repak family comes James's week of aerial summer day camp🤸, which I still can't quite believe he signed up for. Here's hoping he doesn't regret it, and comes out a week later with some new local friends. (Circus kids are the best.)
• We've got tickets to an A's/Giants game⚾ with Jake and Sarah.
• There's camping on Angel Island🏕️ just a few days later.
• Finally, a Boy George & Berlin concert🎶 is on the agenda.
• Between the rest, I'll be doing backbends to get his interstate foster placement approved before the end of this action-packed summer.

The only thing left to do is brace myself for one thoroughly unimpressed teen!😂 Just 34 more days, but who's counting?😉

Restaurant Week 2023

Oakland's Restaurant Week came and went. It was nothing to write home about so it's ironic that I'm doing just that.

We kicked things off with Millennium, a very highly rated vegetarian restaurant. A for presentation, C for taste. When the most memorable part of the meal was the carrot-shaped door handle, it's not a particularly compelling place for return visits.

Millennium: A for presentation, C for flavor

From there we went to Mama in Adam's Point, Oakland. I couldn't complain about the food - the portion size was the only thing lacking - but was a bit let down to realize their Restaurant Week "offer" was just the same prix fixe menu on offer every other weekend. A solid Italian restaurant at a reasonable price. 

Mama: solid Italian fare. Pasta game not on point with Passione Emporio, but a wider selection and a greater mastery of the dessert menu.

We wrapped things up with attempt #2 at the Berkeley Boathouse as part of Berkeley's Restaurant Restaurant Week, which kicks off at the tail end of Oakland's. Last year, having explicitly made a reservation for Restaurant Week, the hostess seated us and casually informed us that they were "all out" of their Restaurant Week offerings. No substitutes, just a regular menu. That disappointment led us to Passione Emporio, an excellent Italian place that we have revisited, so it wasn't a total loss. This year, after seating us, the hostess impatiently swung by every couple minutes reminding that there was only an *hour* left in which to place our order, and then she dropped that Restaurant Week was only for the dinner hour. Cute.