What a short, strange trip it was!

I will admit that I had my Sirius radio set on the 70s channel (I was listening to the end of a Southern rock song), so the odds of hearing a song from my childhood (i.e. the 70s) were pretty good. But, I still find it fitting that as I crossed over the county line into my "where I grew up," Shaun Cassidy came on the radio.

It was one of those moments...I was bee-bopping westward on I-70, and had just crossed over the line into Shawnee County, where I lived until I was 16. I literally saw the Shawnee County line sign, passed over and "Hey Deanie" came on. A glance at my Sirirus receiver told me that the song was from 1978...yep, that'd be my 70's sweet spot.

Today was a strange, trippy day. I needed to go to Topeka, the city of my childhood and adolescence, to get 3 pieces of paper apostilled (a fancy term for making a state notarized document a legal international document). When Brian and I had our first large batch of documents apostilled we drove to Topeka together, but left right after as we had to get documents also apostilled on the Missouri side (we got married in Missouri, and there's a Missouri Secretary of State office in downtown KCMO).

I found myself there again today so I decided to drive around a bit. It was weird. Really weird.

I grew up two blocks from Washburn University and in older home in an older neighborhood. We lived in that house until I was 13, then we moved across town to a new subdivision, where I lived until I was 16, when we moved to the Kansas City metro area. I've been back to Topeka over the years, but it had been a long time since my last real visit.

What was the weirdest thing? I knew it, but it's still weird: the house I grew up in is gone. Yep...gone. Not even dust. Gone. Torn down. It's something my Mom and I share - the house she grew up in in St. Joseph, Mo., is gone, too. (But I guess that means that two houses she lived in have been torn down, and that's just even weirder). The plot of land upon which my childhood home stood is now the neighbor's back yard. With a fence around it.

I'll bet that practically everyone who drives by never even suspects that a house stood there. But, one sign gives it away - a set of stairs that now go to nowhere. The stairs lead from the street up to what was our front yard, but now it's a side/back yard of the neighbor's home. Weird. Disconcerting. Odd. A place where we lived just isn't there any more.

From there I drove past my elementary school, where the kids were out at recess. I drove around my neighborhood remembering all of those childhood things: playing tag with friends, catching fireflies, riding my bike, getting my first kiss - it was on Halloween night around the block from my house.

I'm not entirely sure why the trip was bittersweet, but it was.

Now my apostilled documents are on their way to our adoption agency in St. Louis, and soon they'll be on their way to Smolensk, Russia, to finish our 100% our registration to adopt from that region. Then we wait for a phone call that lets us know there's a child the baby home would like us to meet - then we have to decide to travel to meet that referral or wait for another.

Fingers crossed for a short wait and the perfect referral the first time around. Now that wouldn't be bittersweet one little bit.