26 months - Three times, now

It looks like my gut feeling about a referral at the end of April was off.  How far off, of course, still remains to be seen.  Today we hit our 26^th month of waiting (and waiting, and waiting some more). (The majority of voters voted for a tie between April 30 and Father's Day.  Since April 30 didn't work out for a referral, I'm hoping Gregg has a nice Father's Day this year!)

If there’s one thing I can say about the month of April, it’s that it sure was rainy and very busy.  I had such high hopes of getting my flower beds taken care of, but every time the weekend rolled around it was either raining or we had somewhere else to be.  Not too conducive to getting outdoor work done.  I finally got all the old growth pulled out of the beds on May 1, though, and now it will just be a matter of bringing in dirt and transplanting flowers.  (Easier said than done when it comes to me, Mrs. Black Thumb.)  On April 30, Gregg’s little league team played their first game and did really well.  He’s so proud of them.  I didn’t get to see that game (I’ll be at the next one, though!)  That day I was in New York City with my parents seeing Catch Me if You Can on Broadway.  I had gotten tickets from my neighbor, and they came with me for a day in the City to celebrate Mother’s Day/Father’s Day early, as the actual days have been difficult to observe.  (Hey, Hallmark, I’m sure one of these days I’ll be OK with your commercials again, but right now I’ve had it up to HERE with the sappy Mother’s Day commercials.  Just saying.)

Earlier in April, we received a lovely packet of information in the mail from our agency telling us that our I-800A will be expiring in July.  In order to prepare for this, we need to have an updated homestudy (#2!) and do all of the terrific stuff that goes with it – doctor appointments, fingerprinting, criminal/child abuse checks, notarizing all sorts of fun documents.  Currently, I’m just waiting on the child abuse clearances to arrive in the mail and we need to make a stop at the bank to have some documents notarized.  Then we wait (some more).  This is the third time we are undertaking this project.  The first two times I was very happy to get it done as soon as it showed up in the mail.  This time?  Not so much.  It was really just a heartbreaking reminder that we have been waiting so much longer than we ever thought we would.  So, hopefully next week I’ll be driving the paperwork down to the office and waiting for an appointment to go to Philadelphia to get fingerprinted (again, for the third time).  What is it they say about the third time being the charm?  Because – seriously?  If I have to do this FOUR times?  Oh.  My.

Here’s hoping for some beautiful sunshine and those May flowers we’re promised after all that April rain!  

25 months: I'm ready to play!

What a crazy month March was.  With the weather, we sure saw it come in like a lamb and go out like a lion.  On a personal level, it was just the opposite – in like a lion, out like a lamb.  I spent the first two weeks of the month sick as a dog and barely able to crawl out of bed and the third week frustrated with everyone and everything.  By the last couple of days of the month, I got some answers to some questions I had been waiting on for some time and that put me in a much better mood.  Now I’m ready to have March behind me and bring on April!  Bring on spring and the nice weather!  It’s been entirely too long of a winter, and I’m ready to start getting outside and doing things again. 

Gregg is involved for the second year with helping to coach baseball for the little ones in our town.  He’s assisting our neighbor, who has two boys on the team this year.  The kids on the team are between 5 and 7, and it’s a mix of T-ball and coach-pitch level kids.  He had so much fun doing it last year and is really looking forward to the weather cooperating this week so they can get started.  They were supposed to have their first practice last Friday but a freak snowstorm forced it to be canceled.  I love going to the games and watching him with the boys – it’s such a great visualization of what a good dad he will be.

We’re also trying to get some home improvement projects done before little one comes home.  Of course, nothing ever goes quite as easily as you’d like it to on the first shot.  One step at a time – it’ll get done eventually.  I’m looking forward to trying one last time with my flower beds this year.  I have a couple of ideas on how to improve them.  I told Gregg if it doesn’t work this time, I’m done – we’re filling them in with concrete and putting a little bench on top of the concrete pad.  So wish me luck – I’d much rather see something grow after all my years in this house!

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention…if you’ve talked to me at all recently you know that I’ve got a feeling about this month…  So keep thinking happy thoughts and we’ll keep praying :)  “Put us in, Coach!  We’re ready to play!”

Two Years

Two years today.  Deep breath.

When Gregg and I first received ICAB approval and were able to begin processing the fact that we had been approved by ICAB for a single, healthy child (today is also the anniversary of the day that we were told that we would not be able to adopt Pooh and Tigger) – we figured that we would be toward the end of the 18 to 24 month wait because we weren’t an “ideal” couple on paper.  Still, I had hope that I would never have to write a post that we were still waiting at 24 months, and I’m sure that there will be more posts on future monthaversaries.  (The question being, how many more???)

Of course, I am totally willing to share that as I sit by my computer working today, I will have my house phone and my cell phone in front of me all day, staring at the caller IDs, willing a phone call to come through.

Just for fun, I’m posting a poll on the blog to see when you think we’ll get THE CALL. 

In the meantime, the past few weeks have been absolutely wonderful hearing about some bloggy friends’ trips to the Philippines to adopt their children.  I can’t thank them enough for sharing their stories and pictures – they were truly uplifting and proof that once you reach the end of the wait, the wait was ever so worth it. 

Rambling thoughts on biology and being good enough

I mentioned in my last post that the beginning of February marked the eighth anniversary of the day Gregg and I found out biological kids wouldn’t be in the cards for us.  I remember being horribly depressed at the news, but that wasn’t something that lasted a long time.  Right from the start, we believed that we would meet our child through adoption.  We felt that biology might have been nice, but it certainly wasn’t necessary.  While I had always felt the desire to be a mother, I really can’t say that I had a need to be pregnant.

As it has turned out, adoption has not been an easy road for us – not in any way, shape, or form.  There has been the closure of Vietnam.  Potential independent adoptions that went up in smoke.  Losing Pooh and Tigger.  And more. So there are people who feel, when I avoid going to baby showers and other such gatherings, that I can’t tolerate being around pregnant women and hearing about babies because I can’t get pregnant.  Not really.  In reality, I have trouble with these situations because still, even almost two years into the wait, I have a deeply-rooted fear that we will be passed over and I will never have a child.  Last summer Gregg and I went to a friend’s baby-naming party with my parents, and I actually left in tears when it seemed like every couple I saw had at least one young child with them.  I felt that everyone could have a child but us.  (Not a baby.  Not a pregnancy.  A child.)

It’s not a good feeling, feeling that you’re not good enough to be a parent.  I will say with 100% certainty that being forced through this emotional wringer over the last eight years has made me much more acutely sensitive to my future child’s emotional needs.  There is pain in knowing that who I am so severely limits my possibilities for adoption.  There is pain in knowing that because of a diagnosis, we were not good enough to be Pooh and Tigger’s parents. 

There is also pain in knowing that some people outside of the adoption community judge the formation of our family as “second best.”  Before I started working from home, I managed a hair salon for almost five years.  My last year was agonizing.  Everyone who worked at the salon who was in a committed relationship became pregnant within a few months of each other.  Every. Single. Person.  Clients and staff joked that it was in the water.  They wanted to know why I wasn’t drinking the water so I could get pregnant. 

Then along came Pooh and Tigger, and the announcement that we were expecting – two.  “OH!  Twins?  How lovely!” was the common theme.  “No, not twins, a four-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother.”  I cannot begin to tell you how many people changed their tune – from total excitement at the thought that I might be pregnant to completely changing the topic, or telling me that it was bad news to be adopting “older children who surely have problems.”   Again, it would have been good enough if I was pregnant, but not good enough to be adopting.

Gregg told me not too long ago that sometimes I talk about the adoption too much.  It’s hard not to.  We are adopting a child who will be at least the age of three.  That means that our child has already been born and is somewhere – I don’t know where; being taken care of – I don’t know how and I don’t know by whom.  I think of our child every day and wonder and pray and hope we hear something soon so that I will know.  I want to tell our child that s/he is amazing and wonderful and has been waited for for eight long years.   I want to tell our child that no matter what anyone has ever said, s/he is better than good enough – s/he was created by God to be just right. 

The Psychic

If you’ve been around me long enough, you might have heard me tell the story about the psychic.  When it comes to my relationship with Gregg, it’s one of my favorite stories, simply because of how “out there” it is. 

When I was a junior in college, I lived with 11 other girls in an on-campus house.  One of the requirements for living in on-campus housing was that we had to do a certain number of activities as a group each school year.  Well, I don’t remember whether it was around mid-terms or finals, but for one of our activities, my friends and I decided it would be fun to bring in some food and hire a psychic to come to the house as a good break from studying.  How much crazier could it get than having 12 girls getting their fortunes read over pizza? 

When it was my turn, the psychic let me ask her one question.  I decided to ask her where she saw things going with the guy I had recently started seeing.  What she told me instead was that she saw me with a man who drove a green vehicle, that we would be married in two and a half years from that point, and that we would travel to many amazing locations. Yeah, OK, lady, whatever you say.  I’m gonna go get some pizza now.  That was fun.  She did some numerology thing, and was on to the next person.  Honestly, that was the last I thought of it.

Until about a year later, when I was cleaning out some papers from school and I found the slip of paper where I had written down what the psychic had predicted.  At that point, I had been engaged to Gregg for the last six months and we were set to get married in two years, and…oh, yeah…he drove a green truck.  We had a cruise to Alaska planned for when I graduated from college and to Hawaii for our honeymoon.  Holy cow, the psychic was right!  (How did that happen?  We just picked someone out of the phonebook for some laughs.)

So why this story, and why now?  Well, frankly, because if I could remember the name of the psychic we hired all those years ago, I would go back to my old college town and track that lady down.  Now, the other day, my bloggy friend Kelly over at Just Me made the point of not wanting to see into the future.  And to a great extent, I really agree with her.  Life is full of surprises, good and bad.  I think if Gregg and I knew in advance how much crap was going to hit us in the face right after we were married, we probably would have given up before we even got started.  And aren’t nice things 10 times nicer when they come as surprises?

Had Gregg and I had a biological child, we would have waited until the birth to find out the sex.  (See, I do like surprises.)  We often joke that when we receive our referral it’s going to be like Christmas morning – we left the sex open and the age fairly open, so we have no idea what to expect – and I’m just fine with that. 

So why the psychic?

I’d like to have a clue when to expect THE CALL.  (Were you going to say when I’m least expecting it?  Too late.  Every Thursday and Friday is fair game.  Saturdays through Wednesdays are less likely but still highly suspicious for a phone call.)  Why am I so persistent about having a specific time for this call, you might ask?  I think I’m just too overly organized with my time.  I’d like to know how much time we have to get certain projects done around the house so I can prioritize them.  If the call is not going to come until the end of the year, I’d actually start planning some long weekends away now that we have more vacation time to work with. 

Overly processed?  Sure.  High-strung and tightly-wound?  Absolutely.  I’ll go with any of that.  But if I were given the opportunity to see that psychic one more time, or to have a crystal ball put in my hands, I’d just ask one question:

“What month will we get this phone call?”