Finding Out

One of the most dreaded things to happen when we've been on this journey is when people ask us a question about how we will approach a certain issue, we explain our position, and they say, "Oh, you'll find out in a heartbeat that you're dead wrong!"

And then they chuckle at us like we're a couple of knuckleheads who know nothing about raising children.

Two of the "Oh, you'll find out!" issues to hit us have been the issues of co-sleeping and pacifiers. When we've said we're not co-sleeping and we're not using pacifiers, people have laughed at us. But Leah has been home for nearly 2 weeks, and while we've backtracked halfway on pacifiers, I'm proud to report that she sleeps in her room every night and she seems to love us anyway.

How did we backtrack halfway on pacifiers? Well, it seems the little suckers actually help her fall asleep. They gave her one in the hospital, and B. was a big proponent of the thing, and so she got used to having one in her mouth. So at night when we're putting her to bed, we let her suck on a pacifier till she falls asleep. The big issue I have with it is that when she starts to relax and it falls out of her mouth, she starts screaming and freaking out because she doesn't have it in her mouth. So we are trading in a few moments peace for more upset because she has frustration that she can't keep the thing in her mouth. However, a few other people have also pointed out it's easier to break them of a pacifier than it is of them sucking their thumbs, which she has shown a perfect willingness to do if not given her pacifier. So, at night, we give it to her. During the day, we are able to soothe her and quiet her, and she's fine.

As for co-sleeping, it was harder in Maryland and I was really hard on myself. While we were staying there, there was nowhere to really put her if she got upset. The crib was in our room, and there was literally her crib and our bed. Tom hasn't gotten much furniture yet, so there was no place to go sit with her if she got upset. Consequently, I would pick her up to feed her and we'd wind up sitting on the bed. And then, yes, I know, call the mommy police, we were so tired those first couple of days, I'd fall asleep holding her.

Coming home has been much easier. We have the rocking chair where I can hold her and rock her till she falls back to sleep. Sometimes she doesn't want to go back in her bed and I'll think she's asleep and she wakes right back up and wants to be held. What I have discovered thus far is that if I get a nap in the afternoon, it helps me to be able to better handle whatever situation arises at 3AM. Two days ago, I foolishly did not take a nap. Consequently, after 2 hours of rocking, crying, diaper change, feeding, and screaming, I couldn't do it any more. I caved and we went to bed. Last night, because I had taken a nap in the afternoon for a couple of hours while she napped, everything went much more smoothly.

It's still early days, and I'm sure I'll be learning more and more. She's on a schedule of her own making--she is generally awake from 2-5AM and then sleeps till around 11:00. I've got a system worked out with the bottles so I'm not running up and down the stairs a million times, which is also helpful, and we mainly spend our days upstairs, just because it's easier having all the gear necessary for changing her in one spot.

I am enjoying this experience a whole lot more than I thought possible, and just love this little lady with every fiber of my being. Physically I feel a lot better than I expected I would--there's only been one day I was so dog tired I couldn't function, and fortunately it was a day my dad was here and let me sleep. That morning, my breakfast consisted of a full test Mountain Dew. Now I'm back on track. Tonight we make our final pilgrimage to Maryland for her doctor's appointment in the morning, and then I think we're in business except for the court date and attendant trips to pick up B and bring her home afterwards.

I really was nervous that I wasn't going to be able to handle it, but having plans and being organized in advance has been a total lifesaver. Having help from family has been a huge help--can't wait till my mom gets here Saturday, and it was so great that my sister came to stay last night so Michael and I could have our anniversary dinner together and a little quiet time. And of course, where would I be without Michael himself? He reassures me that I'm making good decisions, makes good decisions of his own on Leah's behalf, and we are most definitely on the same page with all of this. Teamwork! Yes!

New Projects & New News

So I've got several projects in the works apart from the big "Build baby a bureau" and "clean the nursery" projects. One of them involves putting something on the walls of the nursery, which apart from that awesome green paint are blank canvasses at the moment.

I've wanted to put an alphabet poster up on the wall since my ideas about the nursery started coming to me. I did mega-research. Since the room was not going to be a pastel haven with lots of cute little fluffy animals, I needed to find an alphabet poster that would be a little more modern. It took a long time. A very long time. And when I finally found what I liked, it led to the question of, "WHAT!?" Seriously. Here is the poster I like. See any problems with it? Like the $85 price tag and it doesn't even come framed!?

Yeah. Not good. But if there's one thing I pride myself on, it's that I'm a pretty savvy shopper, especially on line. If there's a bargain to be had, I will usually find it. But I searched high and low and I couldn't find this poster for cheaper. Not even on Ebay.

I turned to my friends at Amazon.com Nothing. But they did offer a glimmer of hope. They didn't offer the poster, but they offered a set of notecards with the Binth alphabet on them, one card per letter, at a total cost of $16.95. (They'd be cool just as postcards, forget anything else! Want a set? Click here).

So baby project #1 is to make these into a poster or set of posters somehow and mount them on the wall. They're beautiful and I love the colors and the fun drawings, especially I is for Inchworm :-) And L for lobster is a nice nod to his New England heritage. I think this is going to be a lot of fun to put together.

I was also on a hunt for a baby book for him. It is kind of a pain in the butt to keep up with those little projects, but my mom made them for both my sister and I and they are something I cherish. I did some book store hunting, but most everything included "Here's how mommy found out she was pregnant." I did find one book that said, "Here's how we found out we were expecting you" which was good, but then it said, "Here's what Mommy was craving"... Not so good.

I was pretty sure that there must be adoption memory books out there, and so again turned to Amazon.com and started looking. Voila! There were several options, but ultimately I decided on Our Chosen Child by Judy Pelikan and Judith Levy. I like the design of it a lot, and last night Michael and I looked through it and read it together and much of it we can fill out already. It was kind of silly though, it goes all the way through the teen years (I think just in case you adopt an older child) and then adds a page for "your special day" and I said, "My God, I don't even want to think about him getting married" and burst into tears! Yeah, I'm a mess.

I also got a hanging photoclip mobile and I thought it would be fun to get B. a disposable digital camera and ask her to take a series of pictures that we could turn into a mobile and hang in his room. We'll see how she feels about that project.

Yesterday while I was blogging about the hell our nursery had become, the phone rang and it was B.! She was calling with an update about her Monday doctor's appointment. She went and told them that she was having a lot of trouble breathing and they said it was probably because the baby is a pretty good size and was pushing on all those muscles. Still, they decided to send her for a sonogram, so she went over to the hospital (Darn it! I MISSED IT!) and they did a sonogram (he still didn't want to show off his junk, so they still can't confirm 100% that it's a boy, but he better be, we have a LOT of boy clothes now). They estimated his current weight to be 9 pounds 6 ounces. Now everyone is telling me that it could be off either way by a pound, but 8 pounds 6 ounces is still a big baby, as is 10 pounds 6 ounces! B. said when she heard that news, she started crying, she is afraid of having to push out a baby that big and of having to have a c-section. I tried to offer her words of reassurance, but really, what can I say!? "Good drugs and a bottle of champagne afterwards?" She made me swear I wouldn't videotape the birth--which I hadn't planned on--and said I could shoot all the video and take all the pictures I wanted to after the fact, but not during 'the action' as she calls it. She also said that the hospital told her she could have 3 people in the labor and delivery room with her and she told the hospital that her first 2 picks were us, so they are aware of her plans.

So that's where we are right now. I am going to have to experiment with Blogger's privacy settings--we feel it is most important to keep B's privacy in highest regard. She is not computer savvy, and so we don't want to do anything that she wouldn't want us to in terms of posting pictures, etc. to a public space, but at the same time, we want to be able to share our joy at his birth and share photos with our nearest and dearest. I know Blogger will allow us to make this entire blog "by invitation only" which would mean you'd have to let me know you want access to the password. What I'm wondering is if we can just protect certain posts, so that if we got pictures of us with B as a family after the birth, we could just protect those posts with her image in them.

Other items we are discussing--our first date night! We have a tentative date planned for May 13th to go to a concert in DC, just waiting to speak with the ticket office about happy handicapped seating and then it's official. Anyone wanna babysit? :-)

We've also been getting strange calls from strange numbers in the middle of the night, so we're thinking we need to start packing for when the time comes that we do get The Call. Even if we just pack up cameras and baby gear and then only have to worry about our own clothing, etc., at least we're that step ahead of the game. So this is the game plan. We've been talking about it for a while, but we just haven't done it yet! So time to do it.

Our new freezer arrived yesterday, so we are probably going to renew our BJ's membership and start buying items in bulk--hopefully they have formula there, which should cut down on the cost considerably, although B. has offered us her formula vouchers, so that should help a lot too. When my mom comes to stay, I want to do a lot of cooking with her so we can load up the freezer and then I'll be able to just pull meals out and heat them up without worrying about it too much.

All baby's laundry is done except his cloth diapers, but I plan to use disposables for a few weeks while we get adjusted and then transition to cloth, so I'm not worried about that for now. Our washing machine died a painful death last night (it's less than a year old!), so it's being repaired tomorrow and then we can wash our clothes and be ready to roll in the event something happens soon! I'll keep everyone posted about going private and how to contact me to get put on the privilege list :-)

No Real Updates

We've had a few people asking why we haven't updated recently and many more asking if there is any news.

Unfortunately, no there isn't. We received our notarized copies of the homestudy in the mail and that felt great. Otherwise, we're in a holding pattern.

This is a somewhat frustrating thing about an adoption--sitting and waiting. But it's all a part of the process, and knowing that something could happen tomorrow or could happen next week or a year from now is kind of exciting in its own way.

In the meantime, we are enjoying some time with our new niece, and just waiting and hoping and praying that our own baby is on the way. People have asked if news of other people's pregnancies have gotten us upset.

It's a strange thing, because you are truly happy for that person, but at the same time, you think, "Well, geez, we really must be defective." Particularly if someone didn't have to try very hard. I have had clients who said, "I looked at my husband and I got pregnant." And I thought, "Geez, that must be nice."

But honestly, there are a couple of things that bother me much more. The number of people in grocery stores and restaurants whose kids are being rambunctious and who say something like, "I don't know why I ever became a parent". That is my number one pet peeve. I want to grab them by the shirt and say, "Do you know how freakin' lucky you are?!" Same with people with babies who complain about how tired they are and how they haven't slept or showered in days or gotten in a full meal. "Do you know how freakin' lucky you are?!" And when people complain about being pregnant, I just want to scream. I'm sure it's not a fun experience, and I now know first hand that labor and delivery is not a whole lot of fun at all, but don't complain about it. At least you have the chance.

I guess that's kind of a 3 in 1. But the other is how easy commercially companies make it seem to have babies.

A couple cases in point: I recently bought a new computer game called "Dream Home". You are playing as newlyweds renovating your first home after your wedding, and as you go along, you can renovate different rooms, etc. And there is an attic room in particular that you keep making progress on. Well, after about 6 turns in the attic room, it is clear that the room is going to be a nursery. And sure enough, when you win, the game says, "Guess what!? We're having a baby!" The game is a sequel to Dream Day Wedding and Dream Day Honeymoon, neither of which I have played. However, the impression given is, you get married, buy a house, and have a baby in a short span of less than 3 or 4 months.

The other day, I was driving around listening to the radio, and a jeweler in Charlottesville was advertising its engagement rings. And the announcer says, "When she sees the ring, she's seeing the wedding, their first house, and their children."

Ok, I and thousands of people like me are living proof that it just doesn't happen that way. And I can attest to the fact that when you get the A-OK from the doctor to go ahead and start trying, it's not like you "have relations" once and boom, you're expecting. We waited for six freakin' years, only to be told "Sorry, not going to happen". And I think we did ultimately wait an abnormally long time, but life has a way of intervening. The point is, for many, many of us, it just isn't that easy, and it is both painful and frustrating to have these types of scenarios presented as the norm.

So anyway, that's my little venting session about that. And we are managing. We are both very excited about the decision to adopt, and neither one of us regrets it or at this point wishes it were any different. I think we are at peace with the way things turned out, and just hope that the end process of building our family doesn't take forever to get done.

If we do get a little gloomy, one of us invariably says to the other, "It's OK, our baby just isn't ready for us yet" or "We have to wait so we get just the right one". This does cheer us up a bit.

We'll be sending out Christmas cards soon and everyone's card will have our little adoption business card taped to it, to remind people that we are still looking and can they please keep us in mind.

Just trying to keep positive! It's all we can do at this point :-)

Argh!

The General's fingerprints have bounced back again as "unverifiable". This is the second time. Considering that he has prints on file with the FBI, I'm not sure what the problem is--surely the FBI can just look him up and be done with it? Right?

Wrong.

So now there is a new form which Beth, our social worker, says we might be able to fill out and request an end to the bouncebacks. I'm not 100% clear on whether or not that means we can skip doing the General's fingerprints or what, but I guess we'll find out more.

The philosophical part of us says that this is all happening because our child isn't ready for us yet. He or she is out there in the great beyond, waiting for us, and we all have to wait for the stars to align properly so that we get the right baby and a baby gets the right parents.

The irrational part of us is fuming. Fuming enough to say "The heck with it, is this really worth this kind of hassle?"

Of course it is, and all this will fade from memory when we have our little one home. But dang, this is only the first step! What else is going to happen?

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I spent a good part of my lunch break reading the blog of Sweet Baby James, which you can find at http://www.sweetbabyjames.info. It was such an inspirational story and so sad, but this family moved me--from the parents' struggle with infertility to the birth of a special needs child and his way too short life.

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My in-laws were down this weekend and bought us a crib! All we need now is a mattress and at least our baby will have a place to sleep and some snuggly blankets. If only we could get a floor put in.

Thanks, Hank and Sheila!

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Colleen, our attorney, said she thought the profile looked good. She suggested we solicit feedback from family and friends. Thanks to those who have commented. If anyone else has a few minutes to look it over, please feel free to do so. It can be found at http://www.mkosior.com/profile.pdf and after viewing it, please leave us a comment about what you thought.

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I guess that's about all. Hope everyone is well out there! We are keeping the faith, even though faith seems to be making a break for it.

It's Been Kinda Slow, But Some Tidbits

There isn't too much big news to report on the baby front. We've been doing little things that will add up to big things, but nothing major at the same time.

Our physicals have been done by our doctor. He wrote on my form, "Will make a GREAT parent!" which is encouraging from a doctor :-) He also gave Michael high marks, so that made us both feel very good.

Michael's fingerprints bounced back from the FBI, which has now happened twice--once for work and once for the adoption. We went to the police station to get him re-printed and the trooper on duty demanded to know if Michael had even read the paperwork that came back with the bounce back notice. I was like, "Um, obviously not" since Michael had his cane with him, and I guess the guy kind of thought I was being a pain in the ass because he wanted to know if Michael had any prior arrests. When he finally let us in the back room, I think he was a little stunned to see the full white cane and he apologized for being rude. Michael and I just laughed a little. Frankly, his "rudeness" was minor compared to some we've encountered, and he was just trying to do his job. So no hard feelings. The trooper actually turned out to be a very nice guy. (I almost wrote "nice young man" but that makes me sound a little geriatric, don't you think?)

Our family profile is nearly done. I have to take some pictures of our house, but in order to do that, I actually have to clean our house first. So that will be tomorrow evening's project--cleaning and picture taking. It's been really cool here, so I might even start a fire in the fireplace, which I think would look pretty in pictures. We'll have to see. If I do that, I can't highlight my photography wall in that room, so I have to make the tough choices! Otherwise, the profile looks amazing and I am thrilled with how it came out. For someone who has never scrapbooked before, it was a damned good effort--and kind of gives me hope that I can scrapbook in the future.

We had a little fundraising yard sale over the weekend. Two adoptive families stopped by--one guy with his daughter from Guatemala who was GORGEOUS and one woman who adopted one daughter from China and has a special needs child in China waiting for the final paperwork to come through so they can bring her home. They didn't want to buy much, but they both gave us very generous donations. They also gave me and Michael a lot of hope about the waiting process and showed us just how worth it this all will be. We made just about $200, so that was great, and donated all the leavings to the Salvation Army for a nice little tax write off, so even better. :-)

Saturday evening, I went baby registering with Judy and Lucas at Target--little Dottie is coming in less than 2 months now, hopefully! Since there wasn't much else to do, I created a registry for us as well, although I felt a little funny doing it. I had fiddled with it on line a lot, but there's something about actually going and doing the registry that feels a little "gimme"-ish. I think I will probably use it more as a checklist for things that Michael and I need to purchase than anything else. It was a lot of fun to run around with the gun, however, and Lucas and I played a bit of laser tag in the aisles at Super Target, which was great.

Also, I don't know if anyone from the state workforce is reading this and looking for a charity to donate to during the CVC campaign, but our adoption agency, Jewish Family Services, is one of the listed charities in the pile this year. So if you want to support the agency that is supporting us, please list them as your CVC beneficiary.

On the "how we're going to raise this kid" front, I've come to the decision to try cloth diapering. I was cloth diapered as a baby because I had a lot of skin allergies to disposables--although I won't be passing along my allergies to our child, obviously. However, it seems the responsible thing to do in this age of the greening up of society, and I figure I can learn. I need to find out what type of cloth diapers are good to use and how to handle diapering on the go. Otherwise, that's the plan.

We've started getting leads from our attorney--she has us on her mailing list and we get little blurbs from people around the country who know of people with infants who will be up for adoption. I'm excited that once our homestudy is approved and I finalize our profile and get that copied and bound, we'll have some good opportunities to send it around and maybe find ourselves a baby!

Let's see...

I really, really appreciate the sentiment, everyone. I don't know how to say this exactly and not sound like a total witch, but here goes...

Yes, a small minority of adoptive parents do manage to become pregnant after deciding to adopt. I have heard stories--heck, I'm guilty of saying that to people who were adopting! With that in mind, Michael and I continued to take zero precautions after hearing the news of our infertility back in May. It is now September. And this morning, I asked my doctor for birth control pills. I'm going on Seasonale, which gives you only 4 cycles per year--for which I am extremely grateful. The regular cycles are a disappointing reminder to both of us that things didn't pan out like we had planned, and I feel so much better knowing that we won't have those little monthly reminders in our face. If I continued to think, "Well, the doctors could be all wrong" or "stranger things have happened" or "now that the pressure's off, I'll get pregnant", then Michael and I will have to continue living through the hell of emotions that our infertility has caused, all the pain that we've endured the last 6+ years. He and I have made peace with the news that we will not conceive biologically, and we are moving on with our lives. The pills will help regulate and diminish the cycles, and we won't have to worry about the emotions that come up month after month, despite knowing that it isn't likely to happen. My cycle was irregular and uncomfortable and I take great comfort in knowing from here on out when it will happen and being in control of the situation. So no, we will not miraculously conceive after being told we can't. Thanks for the sentiment, but we've heard all of that we can for right now.

Ok, back to happier topics. I've been Brailling some children's books with a client of mine and I was in Borders the other day and I found a really cool book that I can't wait for Michael to read with our little one. It is a scratch and sniff book!! How cool is that?! It has all different kinds of fruit and each page smells like one of them. Remember those scratch and sniff stickers? This book smells exactly like them! Peach, orange, pineapple, lemon, strawberry. It's amazing. So I'm going to Braille the hell out of that sucker.

Ok, that's about it from here for this week. Hopefully I'll have news for you all soon!