I got my husband to eat fish, that final culinary frontier. Now, we're not talking ceviche here, just your basic crumb coated baked cod, but still. Pretty impressive for a guy who lives on red meat.
We have a new CO and his wife is determined to have an up and coming- ie. mandatory-FRG. So during the getting to know you meeting, she asked the men to write down their wive's numbers so she could get in touch with us.
Keith wrote down his own number instead, so did his friend. (So did most of the men, truth be told.) Shortly thereafter, she called my husband and shortly after that, while they were eating lunch, she called his friend's number.
Like, she means business. I have no idea who ran the last FRG, all I know is, it wasn't mandatory. Now, I would completely understand a mandatory FRG if we were in a line unit and our men were deployed and we had to meet regularly to receive updates in person to try and head off rumors and such like.
But we are a garrison unit. The most intense thing our men do is go off into the field- which is pretty much down the road- for training that only sometimes lasts weeks on end. They may not have weekends during this time, but they come home every night. They may be in the field but they can go down the road to get a Big Gulp at the gas station. You get my point.
Anyway, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. FRGs sometimes are very good and people get support and info from them and maybe make friends. Other times, (from everything I have heard and read it's most of the time) they are a nightmare of gossip and powerplay.
Either way, I don't like being subject to someone else telling me what to do. I understand having to do what the Army tells me to do, the Army is a vast, faceless bureaucracy that I knew would dominate my life when I married my husband. It's impersonal and implacable, it's the gulf stream carrying a shrimp up the Eastern Seaboard.
But this is another woman who wants to run an FRG, (for whatever reason, maybe it's a good reason) and she needs warm bodies to do so and I am one of those warm bodies. Suddenly it's personal; I am at this woman's beck and call. It's a strange and not pleasant feeling. After all, I didn't join the Army, I just married into it.
Anyway, that's just my uncensored, army wife thoughts. She probably is a lovely person who sincerely wishes to do good. What will end up happening is that Keith will go instead of me. Which is per regulation and perfectly acceptable and all that. Maybe I'll go with him once, just to satisfy my curiousity.
The Bethany adoption agency sent me an e-mail. They said they hadn't heard from me in a while and were wondering if I was still considering adoption or if I had decided to work with a different agency and if so, could I let them know what they could do better to serve me.
I felt surprisingly moved by that. I had no idea they knew I was alive. I wrote them back and said that as we only had a year, which was not enough to move forward in an adoption plan, we had decided to focus on infertility treatments during that time. After the year is over, we'd move to GA and definitely move forward in an adoption plan at that time, most probably through the fost/adopt system.
I've had lots of time to think about it. It is possible to have an infant placed with us through the fost adopt system, it just might take a while. But so will domestic infant adoption. There is a risk that the biological parents of the fost adopt child will not have their parental rights terminated, and so we risk losing the child after parenting him or her. But there is the same risk with domestic infant adoption; the birth mother has the right to end the adoption plan at any time, up til forty eight to seven two hours after giving birth and it is not uncommon for this to happen, after the adoptive parents have taken the child home with them.
So the risks and benefits of either adoption routes seem very similar to me. The only major difference seems to be the cost. The fost adopt program is very affordable, whereas domestic infant adoption can run from ten to fifteen thousand or more. I want three or four children, and I don't want to bankrupt their future trying to adopt them.
Anyway, after I sent that off, they wrote back! They said it sounded like we had a good plan in place and to let them know if they could help in anyway and that they would be praying for us.
I'm definitely going with Bethany if these infertility treatments don't work.
I have ordered "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek and "The Federalist Papers" by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. The last is going to be some serious reading, but I feel like I need to be able to articulate my own positions on government in a more intelligent and clear way. I think reading those books will help.
