Having a difficult time – as Joshua reached 2, I’ve really wanted a second child. It seems so unfair that having kids is so easy for others.
I’ve been meeting with a Stephens Minister from church; she gave me a book “hannahs hope”. I want to read it but don’t have the will yet.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Originally uploaded by metamorphilia.
Joshua Arden Salsbury
7 pounds, 19 inches, and more beautiful than we could have imagined! Lots more pictures here!
Tomorrow our co-workers are throwing us a shower – fun! The guest bedroom has the bed out of it and it now has a crib and a bassinet. I need to get taking some photos! It is weird coming in the house and seeing baby stuff all over….it seems so weird still.
No new news from our social worker. Left her a message today just checking in, but told her she didn’t need to call me back if there isn’t anything going on.
Found out for sure yesterday that our leave is all UNPAID because it’s not for medical reasons, it’s just leave to bond with the baby. We have 12 weeks to share between the two of us. I think what I’m going to do is use my vacation and personal time up and then use maybe 6 unpaid FMLA days. Hubby will probably use his days to take off Mondays and Tuesdays for a while so we don’t put the baby in child care when he’s so small. I am SO THANKFUL we’ll only need childcare for Mondays and Tuesdays…. and that I at least can work at home sometimes if needed.
Went to Michael’s Art Supplies after my all day meeting and got a cross stitch pattern for MY BABY. This is so weird. I haven’t bawled my eyes out like I normally do, but I’m sure I will when I see the baby. I CAN’T WAIT. I’m glad I got a cross stitch to keep myself busy. I am going inbetween being really, really happy and really, really nervous, so nervous that my heart races and I am shaking. This is crazy!
The title of this post is something hubby’s best friend’s daughter said tonight. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I was at work today at 4:15pm.
My husband called me at work today and said “Our adoption social worker called.”
I said, “Okay.”
Then he said, “You remember that mom that is due in April and didn’t have health insurance? Well, I guess she wanted the adoption agency to pick a family for her. The adoption agency picked us. The adoption social worker emailed me asking me to call her, and she told me we can have the baby if we want him.”
I said, “Okay. What did you tell her?”
He answered, “I told her yes. Don’t talk so loud, you’re at work.”
Well, we work in a call center environment, but I don’t care. Ran around to my friends I work around and told them we’d been picked to adopt a baby boy. Called my friend that had already left; she promptly informed me that we needed to get together on Monday and plan a baby shower. Hubby and I went to Target after work and registered for baby stuff; we’re going to register on Babies R Us shortly. Called our families and Grandma Denise is going to throw a shower with hubby’s Aunt and Grandma Denise’s good friend. We decided on a work truck/airplane/dump truck theme for the nursery.
The baby is due April 16th. It’s a boy, half african-american, half caucasian, no known serious medical issues.
I am totally un prepared.
I am sorry if I didn’t call you personally, I tried to call as many people as I could think of.
Thanks! We’ll keep you updated! 
We have a name picked out (We’ve had it planned for YEARS) but we’re keeping it a secret until he’s born. We’ll let you know!
I can’t stop smiling!
We found another house we liked so we made an offer – another flurry of signing paperwork and faxing it in to our realtor. We will see if they accept the offer or if we need to counter with a higher offer. Our mortgage guy is trying to get sellers to pay all our closing costs, and we have a contingency on it that our house has to sell, so those are things that may not look as good to a seller. However, we feel like making a full price offer helps to sweeten the deal when we have the contingency and high closing costs – so we’ll have to see how it works out!
We really, really like the house. It has a HUGE backyard and an open upstairs floor plan – the only reason you would have to go downstairs would be for the office and laundry, but it’s nicer than our current plan because you don’t have to walk up a flight of stairs to get in the house with groceries and such, so that will be good.
I am also having a bummed out day – even thought exciting things are happening I feel as if it’s going to take a lot of money and a lot of time to adopt (which it will.) Sometimes I just wish it were faster and easier, but I guess nothing in life that’s worth it is easy and fast. I hope when I’m frustrated and sleep deprived and my kid has wrecked our car or messed up our house by scribbling on the wall that I will remember that we wanted our kids so very much we spent so much time, effort, and money on getting them!
I go through periods where I have reoccurring dreams. Sometimes they are nightmares, sometimes they aren’t. I have one dream over and over that a tornado is coming to my farmhouse in Illinois.
Lately, though, I have been dreaming about what our children will look like.
You would think that, being pale as my husband and I both are, that I would dream of having blonde haired, blue eyed children. Well, that’s not how it is. When I imagine my children, I imagine a group of 3-5 Hispanic/African American/Unspecified-race-children- of-color. Is that strange? Sometimes I dream that there has been a group of kids whose parents have died and we need to take them all (but at least one of them is a baby) and I’ve had other dreams where there are twins or triplets that need a good home. However, never in these dreams have these children been white. I don’t know if that’s because I associate adopting with adopting a child that doesn’t look like us or if I just really want to adopt a child of color. I am not opposed to adopting a white child, but that is not how I imagine my kids in these dreams. I also never dream about one kid, I dream about us adopting a group of kids at once. (Which is weird, since we’re traveling down the path of adopting an infant)
I was talking to my husband today about adopting children of a different race on the way to work. I brought up the fact that if we adopt a child of another race I am concerned that we will need to go to counseling to help us raise an adopted child who might face racism. My husband brought up a good point: all of us will face difficult obstacles in our lives, some of which may not have anything to do with race at all. However, I just worry about that sort of thing. I grew up in a small town with all white people and some of them were pretty closed minded. Various family members have made some comments about race that worry me. No one else in the family on either side has adopted, so that would be a new experience.
I would hope when we adopt that friends and family would accept these children as ours, because that is the way that we will look at them. I know the insensitive comments will come (as they already have about infertility) and I must be prepared. I just don’t know how I would handle it if my child had to deal with racism, or looking different from his/her parents, or looking different than most of the kids in school. I know this is a long way off in our future, and I don’t want to treat everyone and push people away expecting that they’re not going to accept our children. I just worry about these sorts of things because no one in our immediate group of friends or in our family has had to adopt, so it really does feel like jumping off a cliff into the unknown. You don’t know how people will react. You feel a lot of guilt regarding the whole thing…like “if I wouldn’t have done this or that, I could get pregnant.” Or, people tell you those things, maybe not directly, but they say “Since you did or didn’t do such and such, now you can’t get pregnant.”
To be honest, I think that is a bunch of bunk. I have made some mistakes in my life, and I will continue to make mistakes, and the only One that I can depend on is Jesus. This has been the most frustrating part : I got on FMLA leave from work expecting to go through surgeries, procedures, etc. But to go to a Fertility clinic and be told that you and your husband are fine, that they can’t find anything wrong, is nuts. To get tested by an endocrinologist and have them send you a letter that says “we can’t find anything to treat this” is not what I was prepared for. I was prepared to have messed up fallopian tubes or no eggs or something.
However, everything is fine. We know people that have done invitro and had success, and I am very grateful for those folks that InVitro has worked. For my husband and I, we have decided to not do anything invasive. If we are going to spend that type of money, we are going to spend it on adoption. Everyone has a different path they decide to take. However, I don’t want to go through hormone treatments, artificial insemination, etc. etc. etc. and THEN after all that decide to adopt. We’ve decided that we are going to skip that “final step” and go right to adoption. That is our choice, no one else’s, and we are happy with that choice.