Good gravy.

We're at the urgent care today, because Medium has the same illness that I have, Hubby has, my parents have, and one of my aunts has (the bunch of us were all together last weekend).

The PA listened as I explained Medium's symptoms, and then listened to Medium's lungs.

Then she peered into Medium's right ear.

"There's something pink in there!" she exclaimed. "It looks like an eraser!"

I looked. Sure did.

Medium said, "Well, I had an eraser on my finger once, and thought I got it off, and then I itched my ear."

The nurse came in to flush it out, and Medium said she'd had it in there since September!

So we not only got her medicine, we got her ear flushed out too.

I will say that eraser fragment looked a lot bigger in her ear canal than it did when it came out in the basin.

Never a dull moment around here.

176 Days

As of today, that's how many days our appeal has dragged on.

Before you get your Hanes in a half-hitch over how long that's been, I should point something out. A lot of appeals that aren't on the children's fast track haven't even made it to review by the Superior Court by this time. Normal appeals can take nearly a year to be reviewed, and then another 200ish days to the Superior court to file a decision.

That sort of makes the 102 days between the filing and the review by the Court darned fast.

Hubby did some checking, and found records of similar termination hearing appeals. Of the seven he looked at, the average time (and I use the term "average" rather loosely), he said that it took anywhere from 100-250 days between the appeal filing and the date of the filing of the Superior Court's decision.

Incidentally, all but one of those appeals upheld the trial court's ruling. (There were exigent circumstances in that one case that simply aren't present in ours.)

So it looks like we're in the home stretch, as far as the waiting is concerned. I still hold my breath every day as I check the mail, waiting for an envelope from our lawyer's office.

We expect that the Superior Court will side with our trial judge. We'll have another 30 days beyond the date of the Court's decision to wait before we can have the adoption hearing. We're hopeful this can be resolved before the end of the year.

But I don't mind telling you...the waiting is hard. The girls especially are having a tough time because they don't understand why this can't happen yet. "We can't yet" is a difficult concept for them.

Heck, it's difficult for me. I want to scream at the court clerks that our lives are hanging in the balance; what's taking them so long to type up the decision?

Waiting is rarely any fun.

Large Fry Does Portraiture

Large drew this tonight, while we were waiting for the twin Fries to get ready for bed. I didn't want to turn on the TV just for 15 minutes, and she decided to draw a picture. Of me.

So, that's me, walking down the sidewalk, probably some 20 years down the road. Behind me and across the street, there's a construction zone. That's my house being built, Large said. The small person across the street in front of me is Large Fry, holding her bible, because she just came from church. She's standing in front of her house. Off the page, out of the frame and on the other side of Large's house, are the two houses for Medium and Small Fries. I am walking on the sidewalk so that I can cross the street to say goodbye, since Hubby and I are going to leave on a trip. That's a lot of action packed into one drawing!