Oops I did it again

baby May 10, 2026

I played with my blog and spammed your RSS feeds. Oh baby, baby. My apologies to the 3 or 4 people who were impacted. I don't update enough to justify what I was paying for Ghost Pro, so I moved the blog to smallest, most under-powered VPS I could get. Hopefully it runs OK.

I installed a new theme to very slightly freshen up the site's look, but some tweaking was urgently needed. In particular, I yeeted the share by Facebook and X buttons into the sun and replaced them with a share by Mastodon button. It will probably never get used, but I can feel self-satisfied knowing that I really stuck it to Zuckerberg and Musk. I doubt they'll ever recover.

I can't believe that it is already May. This year has been a blur because the baby (Flock of Kittens: FoK) stopped being a baby and started being a toddler. At the start of the year, he was unsteady on his feet, stumbling around like someone going to get their fifth Strong Zero. Now he walks around much more confidently and can overcome previously insurmountable obstacles, like climbing onto the couch and ascending/descending the step into the laundry/bathroom/shower area.

It's amazing how fast he learns things. He needed less than 2 weeks from learning the stomp gesture to doing a pretty decent stomp-stomp-clap stomp-stomp-clap to We Will Rock You 🥹. He can say some word-like things now (mama, dada, baby), though sometimes the meaning is questionable (<points at snacks> "Dada!" / <points at me> "Mama!").

The other big baby news that has happened since I last posted is that the adoption was finally finalized. It was quite an undertaking, and to be clear, Ms. FoC deserves the lion's share of the credit. Maybe one day I'll write about the adoption process in more detail, but here is an overview of the timeline:

June 2023: Initial application submitted and approved (this is the application just to start the screening / training process)
July 2023: Information session
August 2023: Training video and question sheet
October 2023: Online Interview
November 2023: Group training session (養護原理・児童福祉論・発達心理学・沐浴実習　他: principles of childcare, child welfare theory, developmental psychology, infant bathing practice, etc.)
<Delay>
July 2024: Home visit
September 2024: Approved as prospective adoptive parent
<Delay> (asked to be added to list from December 1)
December 2024: Baby comes!
March 2025: Court application
February 2026: Adoption finalized

Though it might seem counter-intuitive, we didn't want to get on the list as soon as possible, so we delayed the process at some points. In particular, Ms. FoC had a month-long research trip planned for November 2024, so we didn't want to get added to the wait list before that. It's really tricky — you have to be ready to drop everything when the baby comes, but you can't drop everything while you're waiting, because a baby might not ever come.

The above dates might be a little off since I reconstructed the timeline from sometimes incomplete email chains. And there is a lot of stuff that is left out. For example, there were also home visits by the Child Guidance Center (児童相談所) and a court investigator, and we had to file weekly, then monthly, reports with the adoption agency while the case was pending in family court. Also, during that time, we concurrently did training for the public adoption/foster care, which involved a similar amount of training, interviews, and home visits. We are also approved as prospective foster parents/adoptive parents in our prefecture for 5 years (after that we can go to refresher training to renew), though right now one kid feels like plenty!