dusting off the keys (and chiseling away the rust)...

Wow, you know you've been away from your blog for a long time when the blogger format looks completely foreign.  Let's hope this works...

I have always hated when people disappear for what seems like f.o.r.e.v.e.r in blogland only to later turn up in a completely different place than when they left.  Not that I don't want to see them in a different place (assuming different means better), but the nosy detail oriented freak in me wants to know ALL the specifics.  You were going from A to B and now you're at Q?  What happened during that big gap?  Surely it was something.  There has to be more to it.  Yadda.  Yadda.

Yet, here I am.  The very kind of blogger that I hate*.  I needed to not be here for a bunch of selfish asshole reasons that seem even more assholish now that my head is in a different space.  I never planned to stay away so long.  Of course, then the snowball effect took hold until the thought of trying to catch up not only here but also with everyone else's blogs pretty much overwhelmed me to the point of no return.  So return, I didn't.

What has happened around here since May 2011?

• We completed our home study in September 2011
• We finally **FINALLY** finished and turned in our profile booklet mid-December 2011
• This is when our official adoption wait began
• We were chosen by an expectant mom on February 27, 2012 to parent her child 
• Her due date was in exactly 3 weeks - March 19, 2012
• We were officially considered a match on February 29, 2012
• We frantically researched, bought, washed, sterilized, organized, and packed baby gear, let our employers in on our little secret and did our best to finish/hand off our projects, figured out all the work leave BS, packed our own stuff, worked on the nursery, lined up dog sitters to be on call and got all the dog stuff ready to go, researched airline flight locations and times, hotel accommodations, rental cars, started discussing names - one would think we could have done this one at some point in the last 6.5 years.  Anyway, so we were pretty panicked and busy.  And did I mention that my never-gets-sick husband got really sick too?
• We got a call from our caseworker who told us to get on the next available flight just 9 days later on March 9, 2012 (which we did, of course)
• It was a false alarm, but her labor was close
• Her water broke around 10:30PM on March 11, 2012.  We beat her to the hospital.
• Our daughter was born on March 12, 2012 at 1:38PM, perfect in every way
• There are used to be a few pictures at the end of this post, but I took them down
• We lived in a hotel in her birth state until she was 9 days old and we could make the cross country flight back home
• Note:  Airline travel with a 9-day old baby on a flight full of coughing and hacking passengers (MJ included) during flu season after staying up all night (we bought airline tickets at 8PM, packed, and left for the airport at 2AM) is NOT recommended for first time parents.  The parenting handbook missed this one. 

Yes, so there is our past year.

Six years, seven months, and twelve days after we began trying to add a child to our little family of 2, we found ourselves on the lucky side of statistics for a change.  An eternity to some.  A blip on the radar to others.  An at-least-your-ending-has-a-baby to so many more.

I am at a loss as what to even say now.  I don't know where to go from here.  At all.  I don't know if anyone is even around to read this.  I don't know the first thing about mommy blogging.  I pretty much sucked as an infertility blogger once our cycling days were done.  And let's face it, I REALLY sucked as a pre-adoptive parent blogger.  I may just try to catch up around the blogosphere for now and see where that leads...or if anyone has a question/topic they'd like to hear more about please shout it out.  I am about as rusty as they come right now.  As much as I needed to be away from here, I have missed y'all a whole lot.


*And by hate, I really mean love.  I hate that they have disappeared because I have loved reading their story.

Day 20: Because it's more than unicorns and rainbows

When we first started considering adoption, we dove in blindly by signing up for a 3-hour class called Lifelong Impacts of Adoption*.  No agency or facilitator searching to help guide us, no sir.  Instead, some good old fashioned fly by the seat of our pants and sit down in a classroom to get schooled on a thing or 46,000 that we didn't know about adoption.  I found the class on a whim googling who knows what and off we went to learn more about the kinds of things we didn't even know to think about yet. 

Our viewpoint going in was that of an infertile couple who desperately wanted a baby, but through hell and high water and scientific gonal-f wizardry could not seem to make it happen.  I thought we might hear about some precious childhood adoption anecdotes and how hard infertility is and how wonderful that we are going to be leaving that behind and adopting because adoption is so amazing and we are going to be THE BEST parents.  I mean, we were taking a class and everything!

Oh!  Did you just see my sparkly pink unicorns shoot rainbows from their derrieres!?

Right, so I was a bit naive.  Okay, okay, and a bit of a self-centered asshole.

Try to cut me some slack.  Infertility had driven me to dreaming, wishing, hoping, praying, eating, and drinking all things baby**.  How to make one.  How to steal one.  How to be one.  It had become the all encompassing attention whore in my life.  It was the nature of the beast (for me at least) and I no longer had the capacity to think much past any of it.

The class was led by Dr. Marlou Russell who is an author as well as a psychotherapist who specializes in adoption issues working with adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents.  More importantly is that she has first hand experience to share as a reunited adult adoptee.  Her class is open to all members of the adoption triad and she spends time talking about issues surrounding adoption and how they can affect everyone involved at every stage of life.  There is also a great deal of class interaction where viewpoints are shared from all over the triad - some not yet intimately linked to adoption and others several decades in with all sorts of different connections.

To hear the firsthand accounts from adult adoptees and mothers who placed their child for adoption as well as adoptive parents of teen/adult children really opened our eyes to aspects that had not been much more than a blip on our unicorn-rainbow baby fest prior to that day.  Then someone had the audacity to tell me that adoption should always be a last resort and that we really needed to get our incompetent selfish a-hole selves a new set of priorities and motives before ever thinking any more about adoption.  I might be paraphrasing slightly, but I'm most certainly sure that this figment of my over-active imagination was so very real in the inner depths of my head because it is exactly how I felt when we left.

We left the seminar with our minds a reeling and so so so much more to think about.  We talked about it off and on through another failed treatment.  When that ended, we still had a lot of unsettled feelings and unclear ideas about adoption.  Contrary to popular belief, infertility did not give us some inside scoop on how to be good adoptive parents.  Hmmph!   

Now what do engineer types do with things they don't yet understand you ask?  Research, obsess, analyze, and dig in to the nitty gritty details like crazed starving graduate students.  They get knee deep into therapy to work through their own grief and anger.  They join pre-adoptive parent support group/classes in which they are in the minority as to if adoption really will be their next step.  They attend more adoption seminars and lectures.  They read everything they can find that helps explain ideas and thoughts they were once too scared to address.  They listen a lot.  They discuss to near exhaustion.

And somewhere along the way they get lost in cloudy thoughts and confusion.  So many opinions.  So much to think about.  So many people to consider.  Lifelong aspects.  Overwhelming overload.  And they retreat.  Sometimes together and sometimes apart.  They stop talking and start letting things just be, processing it all on their own for awhile. 

They re-visit where they are at every so often.  One of them...ahem...starts to see things as more of a whole - the ugly/the beauty, the losses/the gains, the good/the bad.  It isn't all rainbows and unicorns, but it isn't all selfish a-hole adopters either.  There is some semblance of balance.  The other one (MJ) continues to focus on each struggle separately, fully immersed in the details, and not sure he might ever sort it out enough to move forward. 

But then he did.  And now he wants every step of the process to have happened yesterday.

Some of you have asked about the details surrounding MJ changing his mind about adoption.  I want to tell you exactly why and when and how and everything under the sun as to what changed his adoption tune except I can't because I don't really know.  I'm not sure he fully does either.  I think it was mostly a combination of time to grieve and learn and try to understand things to the point of feeling more than just marginally competent.  Couple that with the desire to parent a child who needs us as well as accepting that we can't plan for how to handle every situation.

Okay, so all that AND realizing that kids have some really cool toys these days, but that's a story for another day...

*I am in no way a spokesperson for Dr. Russell and I suspect she could not pick me out of a line-up if needed (and for the record I hope there is never a need for that).  I just learned a whole lot from her class and wanted to pass it along.  And if I had my act together I could have let you know that she had a class happening this past weekend... but I didn't so next up is October 22.  My bad.

**Just so we're completely clear here:  I didn't actually eat or steal any babies.

Day 13: How to remove a hose nozzle - Mastiff style

Step 1:  Chew through industrial grade hose.

Step 2:  Repeat.  Repeat!  RePeAt!  REPEAT!!

Other helpful Mastiff how-to's:

• How to remove a bed cover and create mattress mulch, Volume 1
• How to remove feathers from a pillow
• How to trim the bushes, Volume 1
• How to remove stuffing from a chair pad
• How to change a light bulb
• How to remove a bed cover and create mattress mulch, Volume 2
• How to remove a deck storage box lid
• How to trim the bushes, Volume 2
• How to remove drywall
• How to strip wood furniture
• How to remove drywall repair joint compound
• How to remove a bed cover and create mattress mulch, Volume 3
• How to thin out flowerbeds
• How to remove a bed cover and create mattress mulch, Volume 4

I'm sure there are others that I'm blocking out.

I wish I were kidding.  Oh, how I wish I were kidding.

But then they look at you like this.

Moose and Paris

And all is forgiven.

Again.

And Again.

And Again.

I don't want to point fingers or place blame on our worst offender, but we're thinking of renaming Paris. 

Marley?  Hooch?  Beethoven?  Free to good home?

Any takers?

Day 9: Announcing adoption Ann style...

2 random points unrelated to this post, but floating around my head anyway.

1.  Today is my old girl's 13th birthday (that's 96 in human years) so I thought I should include her somehow.  We're pretty sure she is stubborn and defiant enough to live forever.  Her antsy it's walk time NOW song and dance has just started which gives me about 30 minutes before the arm nudging and full fledged floor pacing begins.  You don't mess with the routine here, people.

2.  Dearest Blogger, please stop eating comments - both the ones that kind folk have taken the time to write here as well as all the ones I have left all over the blogosphere.  K.  Thanks.  Bye.  Jackass.

And on with it...

This telling thing seems to be slightly trickier than expected.  Way back in the day I had elaborate plans on how I would tell everyone that our family was expanding.  I kept a secret growing list stashed away in an Excel spreadsheet and named it detailed_period_diary.xls as a preventative measure that MJ would be too horrified to even think about opening it.  I saved ideas for how to tell MJ, our families, our friends, and even some for coworkers.  Looking at it early on made me downright giddy.  I could remember my own (pre-infertility) screaming and crying reactions to so many of their announcements and couldn't wait to be on the receiving end.

As time marched on and my body became a voodoo witchcraft open science experiment for anyone who wanted to get a gloved hand or dildocam up in my business, the list grew stagnant.   It was draining enough just to wait for that pregnant/not pregnant phone call from my RE's nurse without figuring out a quick way to make MJ a meal comprised of baby-back ribs, baby carrots, and baby's apple juice served in little sippy cups all while shoving an Endometrin up my lady bits and a fistful of pills down my throat.

I knew some of the announcements would be confusing for those who were not part of the in-crowd on the general dysfunction of my ovaries.  I honestly wasn't sure what to expect.  I didn't even bother taking a look over my old list before making some phone calls.  I was led to believe that announcing in some cutesy way that we are going to be parents would drive people to instantly believe we are expecting (in my over-imaginative-slightly-over-processed-but-assumed-to-be-pretty-damn-accurate-because-I-too-once-thought-like-a-fertile-and-I-have-Excel-lists-to-prove-it brain).  I imagined it going something like this:

Cutesy grandma-uncle-blah-blah whatever old Excel list idea of my choosing...

"OMG, you're pregnant!  Congratulations!  Oh, I can't believe this!!  How exciting!  How do you feel?!  When are you due?!" 

Cue in "No, I'm not pregnant.  We're adopting!"

"Oh...  Well that's exciting too."

Or something slightly less dramatic, but with the kicker being that adoption is not where their minds would first go at the hint of a baby.  I knew I had to pretty much just spell out what we are doing from the get-go without leaving any room for pregnancy assumptions. 

Left to my own on-the-fly devices without a plan paved the way for a 1 hour 39 minute phone call in which my announcement was made at 1 hour 34 minutes.  I'm breezy like that, ya know.

"I wanted to let you know that MJ and I are in the beginning stages of starting the adoption process!"

Spontaneous enginerd creativity at it's finest right there folks.

While the general consensus is that people are happy for us and our exciting news, what some hear when we say "We are adopting" is "So you're infertile."...and I'm going to need to ask some slightly invasive questions about this to make sure.  And the excited over the moon because we are adopting conversation becomes clouded with round about specific types of infertility questions for which vague answers are provided followed with my switchback to how excited we are to be adopting.  It was a bit emotionally charged and draining.

And I just now realized that I am the adoption newbie equivalent to the, "OMG we tried for 3 whole months and it worked so now I'm going to tell anyone who will listen before my peestick dries." clueless fertile.  I'm thinking we might just let the ink on the paperwork dry a bit more and wait until we are further along in the process with more substance and details to add to our spiel before continuing this announcement love fest.  Hopefully that will not leave any room for the infertility speak.

I've officially gone from infertility expert to adoption fresh out overnight.  This should be a fun train wreck learning curve to follow.  Here we go again...

Welcome.  Back.

*Day 1: Finally...

A fresh start.  A blank slate.  A new blog.

Where to start.  What to say. 

I suppose this is the place where I could be explaining what you will find in this blog, but I think it's pretty spelled out in the blog header.  Maybe it would be nice to let you know who we are and how we got here, but I've already done a good portion of that here.  An explanation of the blog title might be helpful so I did my best to explain that too.  What's left?

How about that we are adopting!!  Domestic newborn open adoption. 

I am reeling in an I-cannot-believe-we-are-finally-here-bubbling-over-with-excited-tears-at-random-inappropriate-moments-my heart-is-bursting-out-of-my-chest-good-things-like-this-do-not-happen-to-people-like-me-OMG-we're-really-adopting kind of way!  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

So far we have:

• contacted the adoption lawyer we met back in January 2010
• filled out the paperwork we received at that time
• found out they do not take the one and only credit card we own and use
• waited 8 days for our bank to process and send a card they do accept (but not like I continually called them or obsessively checked the mail everyday or anything) 
• talked about nursery-den room arranging
• as well as about buying a crib (a real crib here people!)
• started actually telling a few people (which will be a post all it's own)
• faxed in the paperwork and 1/2 of the Phase I fees (*this is Day 1 for all official blog title-like purposes)
• and a whole bunch of other foreign stuff that I don't yet feel I have any business even thinking about

I can't remember the last time I was this happy or felt more at peace.

And for those of you who have been listening to me whine about infertility and such for what likely seems to have gone on forever, I want to say "thank you" for sticking with me while we figured things out and also give you permission to breathe a quiet sigh of relief while thinking

Fucking FINALLY (or something less vulgar if you are so inclined).

I know I am.