May the Force Be With You!

Waffles sporting the Yoda baby hat

I mean, really, is a blog post needed after that picture?  I am pretty sure that sums it all up...

One of my best friends and former roommate Katie knitted our future baby a Yoda hat.  Seriously, she oozes talent.  She has a pastry degree, is artistic, is a wonderful mom to her son Xander, and now she knits.  Being the childless woman that I am, I did what any other sane person would do and stuck it on my cat.  I had to test it out right?  In the picture above, Waffles was frozen in fear or in some sort of stunned state of paralysis.  For about five minutes after, we were enemies.  Luckily, Waffles is our least intelligent cat and promptly forgot all about it.  This means I slept with 10 lbs of cat on my face again last night.

But wait!  It doesn't stop there!  She also knitted me a hat.  A grumpy cat hat.  Brace yourselves.

Nice image quality Sarah...

Um, so awesome!  Sorry for the grainy photo, I used the reverse facing camera on my phone so I could tell if I was getting the ears in the picture.  One of the best parts of these gifts is that I came home to them on my doorstep.  I love getting snail mail and packages for real.  I don't love that Katie moved to Philadelphia, but I do love that she mails things.  I was having a really hard week, really down on that old familiar stagnant adoption process feeling I often talk about.  This absolutely changed my attitude.  Who can feel down when they have friends that will do this for them?  Here is another look at the Yoda hat, sans cat.

Speaking of friends... My sister in law Heather and I had a very successful combined birthday party last Saturday.  We both made a bunch of fancy snacks, stocked up on beverages and invited some of our favorite people.  I believe we had close to 20 people at the house!  That is pretty good for a house party.  I got to show off the nursery progress to those who were into that.  I got to hold our friend Vicky's new baby Connor, good lord he is so cute!  I believe he is around 4 months old.  Nothing but roly poly baby chunk and smiles.  Love it.

Heather and I had a little too much fun with the Publix cake ordering catalog and ended up with this:

Hang in there!

Thanks for the picture Stephen!  It is a cat with a ball of yarn, apparently Heather's dream cake for years.  We got the bakery to add "Hang in there" for added confusion.  Our friends appreciate our sense of humor, so it wasn't too weird when the cake came out.  Anyway, the party was a lot of fun.  We got to hang out with people we hadn't seen in a while and I got to mark "have any party at the house" of my master to-do list.  It was literally on the ongoing list I keep for life experiences.

The adoption is going.  Just going.  On March 23, which is Sunday, we will have been active with our agency for 6 months.  Again, way under the average wait time, but it still doesn't feel great.  You can always convince yourself that you are way cooler than other people and will be chosen quickly, but the truth is that there is no rhyme or reason to being chosen by a birth mother.  Being cool or young or whatever doesn't always have anything to do with it.  After reading about how some birth mothers picked their child's adoptive parents, it can be anything from hair color to location to it coming down to a gut feeling.  It will happen, we just have to be patient.

We did have a woman (I guess, it was online so could have been a man) attempt to start trying to scam us.  Well, I don't know all of the facts and she very well may have been pregnant, but her story wasn't adding up.  The timeline was all off and she said she was already talking to a family that may not "stick".  In the end, it didn't feel genuine.  Even if she was pregnant (again timeline didn't add up on this though) another couple thought she was working with them and it felt really wrong.  The things she said contained so many of the red flags we are taught to look out for, well, because there are a lot of people who are out to scam waiting adoptive families.  Mind blowing right?  They will scam you for money or for attention.  Like this process isn't difficult enough already, you have to be on high alert for scammers?  Awesome.

So, what is coming up?  Just home study renewal stuff.  Our physicals expire in April, as do the cats vaccinations.  In May a ton of stuff expires, so that should be fun.  I signed up for the Run for Your Life, Donate Life 5K, which is April 26th.  It benefits organ donation awareness.  The kidney walk is May 31st.  We are going to Wilmington, NC in June for a curling event with the Atlanta Curling Club... assuming we don't have baby by then.  I would be willing to skip the trip for that!

It's almost time for work to start, so until next time- we are EVER HOPEFUL and excited that this adoption will happen soon!

March Updates and How I Learned to Love the South

Hello followers!  I do indeed have followers.  I have to say that the interest in this blog has shocked me a bit.  I am so grateful that people enjoy reading and sharing it.  I love feedback, so feel free to leave comments or suggest topics that I should cover.  I have a few updates about the adoption and life in general.

The biggest thing going on is that we have our big fat list of home study renewal documents to get through.  The hardest part of that is scheduling everything to be approved at approximately the same time, so god forbid if we have to renew next year, we wont have to renew pieces of it even earlier.  Our actual home study wont expire until June or July, but we have certain things like the FBI and GBI background checks and the health physicals that will expire starting April or May.  We may even be a bit late with the FBI check since it can take up to 12 weeks.  No pressure or anything! We may just have to take a day off and knock as much out as possible.  We will have to have another home visit this summer, which really isn't as bad as it sounds.  There is a lot of sitting around talking about parenting styles and relationship stuff.

So, one exciting thing happened at the beginning of the month.  Well, exciting and really really stressful.  We had a call for a last minute hospital placement.  Unfortunately, there were issues that went a little beyond what we can handle at this time.  After speaking to some contacts we have in the medical profession and sleeping (yeah right) on it, we had to turn the situation down.  It was not easy!  We both felt pretty heartbroken over it, but it just wasn't our baby.  Someone else out there who has been waiting and waiting hopefully now has that baby.  Our adoption profile is so open that we can get calls about babies that have some pretty significant health issues.  This situation kind of went beyond the examples of significant health issues they listed on the form.  It is just a matter of what we feel we can handle.   Both of our gut feelings said the baby wasn't the one for us and we weren't the parents for her either.  She was meant for someone else. I feel at peace with it. 

That being said, this gave us hope!  We are on the radar, we know that more situations will come up, if we aren't contacted by a birth mom before then.  I think it happened to remind us that we are on the right path.  It is so easy to question yourself when the future is so open ended.  We were reminded that it could happen literally over night!  We have gathered some more emergency "go get baby" supplies and I have a pretty decent looking diaper bag on the way from Amazon.  I wanted something that didn't scream diaper bag and something that John would feel comfortable carrying around.  It is red and black ... UGA colors! We also received our first non-family baby gift!  My co-worker got us a travel set of baby products in case we have to go in a hurry!  So awesome.  Picture below!

This is my excited face!  Thanks Crystal!

So about living in the south.  I was born and raised in Georgia.  Of course this left me wondering how it would be to live elsewhere- west coast or even another country.  When I was growing up, I found myself embarrassed of southern accents and typical southern things.  I just took a walk around outside and felt the warmth (finally!) of the air and noticed all of the trees swaying in the breeze.  I remembered being a kid and playing as hard as I could outside before my parents called me in for dinner.  To me, the south is fireflies, spring storms, good food and friendly neighbors.  It is about sweltering hot summers and being only hours from beaches and mountains.  It is about living where some of our country's most interesting (both good and bad) history took place.  I feel pride about being from the south these days and I even let bits of my southern accent slip out here and there.

North Ave. can even be pretty

Lake Allatoona during a run

 
Speaking of southern things, we saw Once at the fabulous Fox Theatre last Thursday (southern because the Fox is a historic Atlanta landmark- I mean really, I needed a good way to ease into writing about the show).  It was really good, I just had to let my brain release itself from the movie.  The movie is possibly my favorite movie next to High Fidelity (John Cusack for the win!).  The movie is much more serious and romantic... not between the people, but romantic towards the music and life.  I have a bad habit of romanticizing life based on music I love and then feeling disappointed when things don't turn out quite so deep and meaningful.  I kind of felt that way about the play.  It just wasn't as I expected it.  BUT it was still pretty awesome.  We got to be on stage for the first 3 songs!  They had a bar on stage and our usher said if we went straight up there, we could buy a drink and stay up there for a bit.  We ran into people we know from the curling club up there and got to be pub patrons in the show.  It was pretty cool to see the audience from the performers point of view!  I had urges to act out to get attention while on stage... my best/worst attempt at River Dance?  What does that say about me?  Glad my impulse control mechanism works pretty well.  I would like to see a day where people lose the ability to control their silly impulses.  Nothing bad like the impulse to punch someone, just the ones that make you want to sing at the top of your lungs or break out in dance in public.  Randomly meow or hiss?  Let out your best maniacal laughter? 

Once at the Fox!

 Tuesday is my 34th birthday.  It is also my mom's birthday.  Yep, I was born on her birthday and she promptly lost her birthday until I was old enough to go celebrate on my own.  We are both taking off of work and want to go do something fun during the day.  Any suggestions?  She is going to the High Museum of Art  Saturday, so that is out.  We did the aquarium and Fernbank last year, but I wouldn't rule those out again.  John and I are missing IAC support group again this month since it is my birthday.  I feel bad about it, because I really love to go and stay in touch with everyone.  Any Atlanta people want to have an adoption coffee meet up this month?  Waiting families or families who have already adopted?

I am having a little (well kind of getting big) birthday shindig (you know you are getting older when you refer to your party as a shindig) combined with my sister in law Heather this Saturday.  Her birthday is right after mine, so why not combine the two?  We just wanted to have some friends over to hang out and catch up.  Good friends and good music.  Yes please!

I'm ending this with the usual..  we are ever hopeful and excited about this adoption!  Until next time!

Grad School- With a Heavy and Relieved Heart

I have to get something off of my chest.  I am only two semesters into grad school and have already decided that I will take at least the summer off.  I am also considering withdrawing from one of my two courses this semester.  I have to decide by March 6 in order to just get a W and not a WF.  The class in question (photography in instruction) is stressing me out so badly.  I literally feel sick about it every time I think about what all I have to do in a short time.  The problem is, if I intend on finishing the program, I will still have to take it eventually.  I have really overloaded myself this time.  So here is my real confession...

I hate this program!  I spoke to the faculty before I ever applied and they assured me that the courses were intended not only for K-12 educators (which I am not) but also for people looking to get into professional development and community education, both career options that I have considered.  Well, the courses are so focused on K-12 that I find a lot of the assignments make no sense for anything I want to do.  There is a lot of applying professional standards for K-12, a lot of lesson plans with no direction on how to make a lesson plan, which of course many of my classmates do DAILY for their jobs.  I feel as if the program needed more students, so they decided to expand it to professional development, community education etc...  In actuality, you really need to have a background in teaching to really get the most out of the coursework. 

It isn't that I am not doing well, I have really good grades.  I just don't care about the subject matter and I don't see the benefit of it long term.  Now, that being said, I am going to give summer off a try and if I decide to go back fall, I will.  I am also going to keep an eye open for other programs that I could start maybe Fall 2015ish.  There are studies that show that if you have graduate degree, it is more likely that your children will too.  I just want to set a good example.  I also realized that more than anything, I try and try to prove to myself and others that people with kidney transplants can succeed and even excel.  I have always been really hard on myself to try and not appear to be the weak person.  I always feel like I have to be a role model for other people who need transplants.  The  best way I can show my strength at this point is to make this difficult decision.

How does this tie into adoption you ask (adoption blog .. yada yada yada...) Well, adoption is stressful!!!  No joke, I don't care if your skin is a mile thick and you heart is made of steel, it is hard.  Emotionally, psychologically, financially etc.  So I think right now I need to focus on the adoption.  I need to focus on getting us noticed and preparing to bring a baby home.  I need to focus on John and I having a strong relationship.  I have let my exercise routine slip and I started that whole thing to be healthy and live SOOO LONG for our child.  In my heart I know that this is the right thing to do. 

Today, my mom and I went shopping for some more baby supplies that we can pack in a "get away" bag.  Just in case we don't have a lot of notice.  Hey, you never know!  My real homework is to be the best prepared I can be for this adoption!