29 months - plan the vacation

Moving on, we hit 29 months today.  (After a while, keeping track of the months is a bit like singing “99 bottles of beer on the wall.”  You know the song is going to end eventually, but it just…keeps…going…) 

The last family from our agency to receive a referral from the Philippines was matched with a 4 year old at exactly 29 months.  I believe this was the longest wait so far.  I don’t have very high expectations that this will happen for us.

The new rumor circulating now is that there are not so many children in the 3+ age range available for adoption, so couples requesting children 3+ are actually being offered referrals for younger children.  I’m not sure what I think of this.  Something seems wrong with this train of thought.  I would have figured it would have been the exact opposite.  At this point, I’ve pretty much given up trying to understand anything.  I’m just waiting and hoping…waiting and hoping.

Completely independent of the adoption, July was a stressful month for us.  Adding the stress of the wait to it, we weren’t a very happy household over the past month.  With some tears, I finally realized that our child won’t be coming home this year, and we should just take advantage of Gregg’s PTO before he becomes overly stressed out at work. I did some research, found some great deals, and paid the travel agent a visit, and the final result is that we’ll be going on a seven-night cruise to New England and Canada in October.  Um, is it October yet?

Here’s hoping August will be a better month than July.  August is normally a busy and pleasant month for us.  Tomorrow Gregg and I will mark 11 years since the day we first met.  Nothing’s turned out the way we planned it and life’s been crazy, but I couldn’t love him more.  Five days after that is my birthday, and I’m so thankful to my mom for planning a lovely day out for me to keep my mind off a phone that won’t ring.  I am amazingly lucky to have a fantastic support system, including all my wonderful bloggy buddies!

Stitching my way to 28 months

Yesterday, Gregg and I marked the 28^th month of our wait since ICAB approval.  My post this month is a day late due to the holiday (Happy Fourth!!!) and some Internet issues.  Honestly, I don’t have anything left to say at this point regarding the wait.  It stinks.  It has for quite some time and I’m pretty sure it’s going to continue to stink until we see Little One’s face. 

Aside from that, last week I completed a special blanket – a “blankie,” if you will, for Little One.  This last project completed a set that I started with three latch hook pillows – Pooh, Tigger, and Eeyore.  The back of each of the pillows matches the blanket.  It is a soft, cuddly fleece material that is so nice to snuggle with.  I trimmed the blanket in a satin material to give some nice contrast and a different snuggling option. 

My Sweet Child,

One thing you will learn pretty quickly once you come home is that your mama cannot sew worth a lick.  Still, I wanted to make you something special while I waited for you, and the results are these pillows and this blanket. 

I want you to know that every stitch was placed with love.  I lost count of how many times I stuck my finger with the needle, but every time I did I sent you an extra kiss – wherever you are. 

Daddy helped with the pillows.  He did a few of the latch hook stitches on every one as his gift of love to you.

One of your kitties, Midnight, also put her love into the pillows and blanket, as she would sit with me whenever I worked on them and gave them her own special love.

Sweetheart, we’ve waited a long, long time for you.  We can’t wait to bring you home and give you all of the love we hold in our hearts for you, the love that even now is making us a family, stitch by stitch.

Waiting for you but loving you always,

Your Mama

Love Letter To My Child

My sweet child,

I want you to know that you are loved.  You have occupied a space in my heart for the last eight years.  Even though I don’t know your face or your name, I have loved you since the day the decision was made to bring you home.

I want you to know you are wanted.  I pray you never spent a moment asking if anyone wanted you.  We have wanted you to be a part of our family for a long, long time.  You will always be wanted by our family.

I want you to know that I pray for you constantly.  I pray the Lord blesses you and keeps you safe and happy.  I pray for your caretakers and I pray for your birthparents.  I know God holds you in His loving hands, but I plead each day He continues to do so, and that he smooths the path to our meeting.

Each night before I fall asleep, I hold a stuffed bear in my arms.  One day, after I have seen your sweet face for the first time, I will send you that bear to sleep with until I can come get you and bring you home.  I want you to know that when I hold that bear, you are the last prayer on my lips at night and the first prayer I whisper in the morning.  Thousands of miles away, I pray you feel that love.

Waiting for you but loving you always,

Your Mama

Hope

Hope 

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The most commonly read post on this blog is this one.  I will specifically quote one paragraph from that entry that was particularly painful to write.

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.   

Despite what people have said to the contrary, my all-time biggest fear was that we would not be looked at as good enough for a child’s social worker or for ICAB to sign off on a referral for us.  That they would say out of five potential families, we would consistently rank as the #5 – until forever, really.  You can say it’s silly.  You can tell me I’m nuts.  You can tell me that would never happen.  But that was my biggest fear.

We’re still waiting for a referral.  There is not a referral on the horizon just yet – we still have to wait our turn.  

But finally, finally – someone we can trust told us in the most concrete way imaginable that we were Good Enough.  And that is something that gives me an indescribable amount of hope.  Hope that there will be a child, and that someone out there knows I will be a good mommy one day.

What does 27 months sound like?

Well, if you were in our house today, 27 months sounded an awful lot like the vacuum cleaner running, the carpet shampooer cleaning, the washer running, the dryer running, feet pounding up and down the stairs in a hurry trying to get it all done in time – followed by bats cracking and six- to eight-year-old boys yelling and screaming at a baseball game.  That’s what 27 months sounded like to me, anyway.  Oh, and don’t forget the bickering.  Because I was in a VERY cranky mood today.

Gregg and I originally had our second homestudy update scheduled with the social worker for June 26.  Something – don’t ask me what it was – had me suddenly feeling all nesty and in the mood to clean the last week or two.  Maybe it was the weather.  I don’t particularly like to clean that much.  Imagine my delight in how clean my house was when we got an e-mail requesting that the home study be moved to tomorrow!  Still, we do have quite a few fur babies, and even though our social worker has told us every single time she has come to visit that she also has two large dogs and she is quite used to homes with pets, I normally prefer to go overboard with the carpet cleaner.  Just because.  By the time I was finished with the vacuuming and carpet cleaning (and laundry), I was pretty much ready for a nap but it was time for Gregg’s coach pitch game.  (Thankfully it was just one game this weekend.  The last two Saturdays were double headers!)  The boys play a six-inning game, and by the bottom of the fourth it started to rain. 

Gregg will tell you I’ve been bitchy all day.  I’ll tell you I’m tired and irritated.  And since it’s my journal, I can say that.  I’m irritated that it’s gotten to 27 months and is just going to keep going.  I’m irritated that I’ve spent the better part of a week getting ready for my third homestudy.  I’m tired trying to say “Maybe today will be the day” every single Friday so that I don’t let myself go down the path of believing that I’m going to be doing homestudies and fingerprints every year and a half for the rest of my life because this adoption will never ever happen.  (Which may be what Lakota thinks.  When we came home from church tonight, she had gotten her jaws on my copy of Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child and ripped off the front cover and shredded the first section.  So that’s what she thinks.)

So I’m tired.  And cranky.  And absolutely unapologetic about it.  But, hey – my house is clean.  And that, my friends, is what 27 months sounds like today.

Telephone Games

In the last job that I held, I managed a hair salon.  The phone rang all day long there.  At the time, it was something that I enjoyed very much.  I loved being able to talk to all sorts of different people all day long.  Granted, when I came home at night, I pretty much wanted nothing to do with the phone at all.  I had pretty much had enough of it after eight hours. 

With my current job, working from home as a transcriptionist, life is almost totally silent.  My job is done entirely through e-mail, so I have no need for work phone calls.  I hear from my boss on the phone maybe once a month.  If the phone is in use, it’s almost always an outgoing call, not an incoming call.

The fact that things are so quiet around the house and the house phone almost never rings makes things that much more stressful on Thursdays and Fridays when it does ring first thing in the morning.  The rest of the week, it pretty much doesn’t faze me in the least.  Our agency does have a liaison in the Philippines, though, and we are always able to get news first thing in the morning.  In the past, we have been able to get it immediately – Thursdays or Fridays. 

So the point is this, I guess.  Telemarketers:  Here’s a reminder.  We are on the “Do not call list.”  If you really want to push that button, don’t do it on a Thursday or a Friday before noon again, or next time you’re going to get an earful. I promise you that.  To the nurse from our doctor’s office who called this morning:  I know we needed to hear from you, but boy, I wish you had called later in the day.  I almost needed to stop back for another visit for the palpitations your call at 9:15 this morning caused me.   

I’m certain that at 26+ months there will no longer be a point where I’m not expecting the call to come.  Even though it feels like it could keep dragging out forever, it would be nice not to have the instinct to dive for the phone saying “is this it?!?” every Thursday and Friday when it rings before noon.