Not that this post has anything to do with frogs (or more accurately: toads), but I think my little guy is so cute, and I needed a reason to smile about him.

Today I finally lost my patience with being compared to the "real mom", the mom he wants to go live with again, the mom he wants to see every day, the mom I "stole" him from... and so on.  And I told him the whole story:  about the baby left alone in a bathtub, about the toddler who clung to me rather than go to his "real mom", about the child who turned gray from lack of oxygen because the "real mom" forgot his medicine when she left him with random people, about the night I tried to peel his little arms from around my neck to return him to the "real mom", about the months -- years -- that he didn't want me out of his sight because he'd already lost me once...  And you know what?  None of it meant a thing to him.  Until I mentioned that if he went back to the "real mom", he'd have no more Papa and no more cousins!

Finally over dinner he commented that his birth mom made one good decision about him: she gave him to me.  (Truthfully, she made many good decisions about him, which I have told him.)

Now he's in bed asleep, looking angelic, and I'm wrung out from having a discussion (punctuated by screams from the other child who had to [gasp] clean up her dollies) that I had hoped to put off until he was at least 12.