Hopefully, growing pains.

I couldn't upload the video of Baby Grrl crawling from last week. DH has even tried to do it for me, and compressed the video to 10M so if Blogger can't handle that then fuhgedaboutit. Suffice to say, she's moving WAY faster now, and our house is not completely baby-proofed yet!

I literally spend my day mostly on the floor in various rooms of our house. She acts like she wants to be held and then arches her back and/or pinches me as if she wants to be put down, but if I put her down on the floor she just cries "mamamamamama" unless I get down on the floor and crawl or sit with her. Then, she will happily pull up on me, rock back and forth on all fours, try to eat my crocs, poke her pokey little fingers in the holes in my Crocs, squeal at the crocodile on my Crocs, and then cry like she wants on my lap, only to repeat the cycle. If the boys are in the room she will try to get their feet or shoes. The cycle is almost comedic for about thirty minutes, and then it just gets really annoying. But I just rinse & repeat.

Oh! and the other new fun thing is when I try to wear her in the mei tai or Moby Wrap she will either pinch my chest or if she's on my back, pull my hair/necklace or pick at the tattoo on the back of my neck. And before you say, why don't I wear her forward-facing in the MT/Wrap? Then she will just grab everything AND she hates it now, even though it used to be her favorite position.

We got a letter in the mail today, about the Permanency Planning hearing which is set for April 3. So the County Case Worker and GAL either acted like they didn't know it was coming up then or one of them started the ball rolling after the team meeting that was here at our house on March 3. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach when I read the letter. I don't know why I am being so pessimistic, but it certainly could be a coping/defensive mechanism. That is clearly the case with me wanting to give her up before she leaves us. When it comes to fight or flight, I usually take to the skies. Anyway, DH is going to take the day off if we are supposed to be there for the hearing. We are guessing that we can be there since we got a letter about it, but no one tells us anything. We're just the foster family who took in someone else's broken baby and helped put the fifty jagged pieces of her heart back together on two hours of sleep at a time for two months and then three hours at a time for three months. I definitely have a thing or twenty to say about the matter, but I don't know if I will have a chance to speak at all. Maybe I ought to keep my big mouth shut unless I am asked to talk. I don't even know. I've never done this before, and there isn't a map or a tour guide.

Obviously, I need to sleep on it.