Mysterious ways

This afternoon I just felt the need to play hooky, and I own my own company which isn't doing a lot of business right now so I decided to do some retail therapy. I headed over to S*lv*tion *rmy. As I greeted the Assistant Manager, who outrageously flirts with me every time (to the point I get a little uncomfortable, but I'm not naturally rude - and subtle hasn't worked - plus the discounts he gives me help a lot), he was checking out a customer who mentioned she was finalizing her daughter's adoption next week.

Of course we started talking (I am a total extrovert and she said the magic word - adoption!). Would you believe we talked 2 hours?! The woman was so focused on talking to me that she stopped handing the manager her items to ring up. I kept waiting for her to go back to handing him stuff and she just didn't. I finally reached out and handed him a couple of her items! Someone walked up to be checked out and she finally (with prompting from me and the manager) completed the transaction! That's when we moved out of the way and finished our conversation. The only bad part was I didn't have time to shop and I was a little late picking up the girls, but it was fun.

She is adopting an older child from residential treatment. This woman had actually heard of RAD from her adoption agency (I'm so jealous!) and knew what she was getting into (inasmuch as any of us ever do). Her daughter had every diagnosis my kids have and was on a ton of medications, but the "ending" to her story is different than ours. She took her daughter off all the meds (appropriately I'm sure!) and loved her. While assuredly her daughter had had a rough childhood, she is not RAD, or bipolar or ADHD or any of the other diagnoses she had been given.

Apparently the adoptive family who had taken in the girl and her siblings only wanted the younger siblings, so they scapegoated the girl to such an extent that she was placed in residential treatment. While she was there, the family adopted the younger siblings and informed the girl they would not be adopting her.

The lady and I exchanged phone numbers. It will be interesting to see if a friendship forms. She's not a computer person, which of course I am, and I'm going to have to work on stopping assuming she's judging me for accepting my children's diagnoses and having them on multiple meds.

What a character! Thanks God for crossing our paths!

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Did I mention I'm addicted to my computer? I counted the number of blogs on my Google Reader today, and despite recent weedouts, I have 77 blogs in my reader, am on 10 separate e-mail list serves (Yahoo groups) some of which are extremely prolific, and belong to 2 forums I read regularly, and get tons of e-mail! No wonder it feels like I'm always on my computer!

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Guess I better head to bed. I haven't slept much in weeks and it's probably why I've allowed myself to get so focused on my computer. I can't wait until our health insurance kicks in!