I’m afraid I’ve once again let my posting lapse, due to fairly overwhelming demands from real life. A few of the things competing for time:

• Our family has, over the past week, been playing host to the Streptococcal Follies. Liam is the only one who has made it through the last 7 days unscathed by illness. I’m on my third day away from work, and am finally beginning to feel the effects of the antibiotics.
• When Kathy and I got married, Emily had just turned three years old. I had never gotten around to formally adopting her, but finally resolved almost a year ago that it was time. The adoption process has been an amazingly frustrating and convoluted one, and has included hiring a lawyer, firing her months later because she wasn’t doing the job, hiring a new lawyer, discovering two weeks ago that we needed to hire a social worker to do a home study, getting fingerprints and criminal history checks done on me and Dan (Kathy’s brother-in-law who’s living here currently), finding a notary to witness our signing of child abuse history request forms, and on and on.

  The ironic thing about this whole process is that nothing about Emily’s life will change a bit as a result of the adoption. She’ll still be living in the same place, with the same people, with no day-to-day difference in her life. But if all goes well, come Friday, it will all be done. (Emily has decided that she really likes “Kuusisto” as a surname, so will be “Emily Joy Kuusisto-McMains” once the process is complete.)

• Liam has continued to have difficulty finding academic challenge in school. Kathy has gone several rounds with the administration there to see what they could come up with in the way of a more appropriate academic setting for him, but nothing seemed to really fit the bill well. After a good deal of discussion and consideration, we finally decided over the past weekend to go ahead and pull him out of school for now and teach him at home for the remainder of the year. He seems enthusiastic about the change, and told me yesterday that he really likes doing school at home. He continues to do very well with his work; I’ve enjoyed getting to be home to help a bit with this as a result of my illness this week.
• We’ve started making plans for [Chris->] and Becky’s wedding, slated for late July in Bath, England. The most wonderfully serendipitous part of our planning so far has been that my cousin, Mary, put us in touch with a fellow in London who was looking to swap houses with someone in the United States for his vacation. We swapped a few emails, and are now slated to stay in their home for three weeks this summer while they stay in ours. In order to rack up this much leave time by then, however, I’m having to work through lunches with some frequency and generally keep my nose to the grindstone in the interim. I’ve also been assembling everything needed to get passports for all six of us, a process complicated by the ongoing adoption.
• Income Taxes. Bleah. This is the one time of year that I’m not so glad to have had stock options at Electronic Arts.
• The other lads in The Grant Mazak Band decided that they were ready to start rehearsing more regularly with the ultimate goal of getting to play more shows in different places. Though it’s been fun to get some more music under our collective belt and to spend a bit more time with those guys, that has sucked up another night of the week.

Sadly, while all of this is necessary or important, when combined with the daily demands of life in a family of 6, it has left little time or energy for writing, taking pictures, hiking, or much else. The next few weeks should see things slack off again, and should allow me to return to a more normal schedule.