Sunday, October 30, 2016
Anticipation
Hi there! Yes, we are still here. It has been a really long time since I sat down and wrote, obviously. The last 2 years have been busy. We are fully settled into our life here, the kids are doing well in school, jobs are going well, we have friends here (yeah!)
Since things are so settled right now, why not change it up in a major way? No, we are not moving, at least we have not found a house that we like enough to make us move. We are going to be adding to our family. Oh yes, we are going to be a family of 5....someday...we hope. We are pursuing a domestic newborn adoption!
I would often tell Justin that it felt like someone was missing from our dinner table. It took us about a year of debate, discussions and disagreements to decide to jump in. Once the decision to adopt was made then the hunt was on for an agency that we felt we could work with. Let me tell you there is a huge variety of adoption agencies out there, and all have different expectations, guidelines, and hoops that one must jump through in order to work with them. We met with a few agencies and settled on one.
We have gone through the home study process, it was relatively painless thankfully, we had heard horror stories of lengthy and expensive home studies. So, now we have in hand the document that states that we are a-okay to be parents (whew!). Then we started the process of putting together our online profile. Writing a profile that will be used to find your future child is difficult to say the least. I mean you have to be completely honest about your life in the hopes that some aspect of what you write and the pictures you choose will somehow catch the eye of a birth mother who is looking through all the other profiles and she will pick you. No pressure.
So, our profile has been posted for almost 2 months. We are fully in the waiting game now, which, if I am honest, kind of stinks. Living your life while waiting for a phone call that will ultimately change our life is really hard some days. To stay sane I try and not think about it too much, but everyday I have moments where I wonder when it will happen. I wonder if we picked the "right" pictures, did we get too wordy, should we have shared other aspects of our life?
Most importantly I wonder who our child will be. What will they look like? What will their personality be like? Will they like the hustle and bustle of our house of two older siblings and two dogs? Will they be a good sleeper, or will we be spending the nights on the couch binge watching Netflix? Honestly, I am kind of scared to raise a healthy term baby. I mean I know what to do with a medically fragile preemie, that is our normal. How will I sleep if they aren't hooked up to monitors and alarms, no round the clock medication schedules, no nurses dropping by for weight checks and injections, no living through the winter months in quarantine, no specialists, no developmental appointments. That is the safety net I am used to having around me with a newborn.
I wonder what kind of relationship will develop with our child's birth family. Will we be able to reach a point of having a fully open and healthy relationship? We feel that it is important for our child to know their story, and having some sort of contact with the birth family will be so important for that.
So we wait and wait annnnnd wait.
Since things are so settled right now, why not change it up in a major way? No, we are not moving, at least we have not found a house that we like enough to make us move. We are going to be adding to our family. Oh yes, we are going to be a family of 5....someday...we hope. We are pursuing a domestic newborn adoption!
I would often tell Justin that it felt like someone was missing from our dinner table. It took us about a year of debate, discussions and disagreements to decide to jump in. Once the decision to adopt was made then the hunt was on for an agency that we felt we could work with. Let me tell you there is a huge variety of adoption agencies out there, and all have different expectations, guidelines, and hoops that one must jump through in order to work with them. We met with a few agencies and settled on one.
We have gone through the home study process, it was relatively painless thankfully, we had heard horror stories of lengthy and expensive home studies. So, now we have in hand the document that states that we are a-okay to be parents (whew!). Then we started the process of putting together our online profile. Writing a profile that will be used to find your future child is difficult to say the least. I mean you have to be completely honest about your life in the hopes that some aspect of what you write and the pictures you choose will somehow catch the eye of a birth mother who is looking through all the other profiles and she will pick you. No pressure.
So, our profile has been posted for almost 2 months. We are fully in the waiting game now, which, if I am honest, kind of stinks. Living your life while waiting for a phone call that will ultimately change our life is really hard some days. To stay sane I try and not think about it too much, but everyday I have moments where I wonder when it will happen. I wonder if we picked the "right" pictures, did we get too wordy, should we have shared other aspects of our life?
Most importantly I wonder who our child will be. What will they look like? What will their personality be like? Will they like the hustle and bustle of our house of two older siblings and two dogs? Will they be a good sleeper, or will we be spending the nights on the couch binge watching Netflix? Honestly, I am kind of scared to raise a healthy term baby. I mean I know what to do with a medically fragile preemie, that is our normal. How will I sleep if they aren't hooked up to monitors and alarms, no round the clock medication schedules, no nurses dropping by for weight checks and injections, no living through the winter months in quarantine, no specialists, no developmental appointments. That is the safety net I am used to having around me with a newborn.
I wonder what kind of relationship will develop with our child's birth family. Will we be able to reach a point of having a fully open and healthy relationship? We feel that it is important for our child to know their story, and having some sort of contact with the birth family will be so important for that.
So we wait and wait annnnnd wait.
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