This post starts off having nothing to do with adoption, but when I saw the headline, "How Old is Too Old?" in this story I had to take a closer look.

So, what else besides the contemplation of adopting small children could possibly prompt a question like that?

How old is too old for learning to ski? Nope. Geezers take that up every winter and some resorts have special classes for the careful-about-the-old-bones set.

How old is too old to be an astronaut? John Glenn settled that a while back.

How old is too old to chuck all the 'stuff' and live as a nomad? Rita Golden Gelman proved it's easily, and very happily, done later in life.

How about: How old is too old to join the army?

Yeah ... well ... that gives pause for thought, does it not?

This NPR piece (the link is above) from "All Things Considered" looks at new recruits now able to join up right up to the age of 42, and apparently they're doing so by the hundreds. (Out of 80,000 new recruits each year about 1,000 are now middle-aged.)

Going by quotes from a few of the new soldiers ... one a former flight attendant ... it sounds like lifetime dreams are coming true, and boot camp is everything they imagined and better.

"I'm old enough to be some of their mothers — and some do call me mom, but that's OK," Stiehm says.

[Training officer] Lauro, who barks out, "You're a stone-cold killer, aren't you, Stiehm?"

"I'm hoping to be, sir, one of these days. Working on it."

Fort Jackson, South Carolina is one of the posts training "mature" recruits, and often those barking the orders are substantially younger than the ones having to "Drop and give me fifty!".

Not everyone is thrilled with the idea. Retired General Barry McCaffrey insists that middle-aged recruits are one more indication that the Army is lowering its standards, and the Pentagon does admit that the new old soldiers are nearly twice as likely to wash out, usually for medical or physical reasons.

As I've been writing this, I've caught myself thinking of how brutal this all sounds, how amazingly difficult it would be, how physically demanding and mental exhausting and emotionally depleting it would be to go from a normal civilian life to one of military inflexibility, to relinquish control of the day-to-day life and suddenly have every aspect of life controlled by others.

Then ... I got to the part of the story about the 40-year-old flight attendant:

She still struggles with the regimented life: rising before dawn, the constant commands.

"... It's kind of a learning curve to have people yelling at you and telling you to move it."

Hey! Doesn't that sound just like having a toddler in the house?

Piece of cake ...