Sheesh!

Would you look at the dust around here!  Someone has NOT been keeping this place up.

Sorry for the long absence, everyone.  Mea culpa.  As all of you have probably no dount heard, at the beginning of June Jeff and I were selected to be the adoptive parents of a little boy!  The shout of joy that went up from this house was probably heard around the world.  Sam was born on June 25th at 12:25 in the afternoon and has been with us since he was three hours old.  It was love at first sight! 

I quit my job at the library and am now at stay-at-home mom (SAHM for short).  Jeff is off school for the summer so both of us have been able to spend every moment soaking up the joys and sleep deprivation of new parenthood.  It's been amazing.  Sometimes we look at each other and say "We have a baby!"  We can still hardly believe it.  Sam's an amazingly good baby and so very sweet.  He melts our hearts with his snuggly ways. 

I'm hoping to get back here more during the coming days to let you know all about Sam and the adventures of our small family.  In the mean time, I'll leave you with some pictures.

   

Not Picked

Not us, not this time.  Didn't expect it to feel so horrible.

Unexpected

Our adoption profile is being shown to a first mother!!!

We're in her top five choices.

She's expected to make her decision next week. 

Please pray for her!

I'm handling it gracefully, as usual.

Still no news on the baby front.  This is one place where no news does not equal good news.  No news usually equals frustration. 

We got a heads-up from another adopting friend that one of the social workers at our agency had, with very little notice, packed up and moved to Africa in order to serve the people there.  Selfishly, I didn't worry too much about it since G. wasn't our social worker.  I commiserated with my friend, told her I would pray and (aside from the praying part) pretty much forgot about the whole thing.  That is, until we recieved word that due to G.'s abrupt departure, our entire branch of Bethany would undergo a restructuring and we would lose our social worker, too.  If you heard a small but ferocious freakout somewhere in the vicinity of middle Delaware last week, that was me, dealing with change the way I normally do.

We love our social worker, Christyn.  She's been with us from the beginning.  She's young and empathetic and she connects with us in a way that we don't think happens every day.  She's also the one that was willing to hear our whole story out and take a chance on us.  She believes in us as people and as future parents.  We're not your typical infertile couple looking to adopt; we've got a huge history behind us and daily challenges as we move forward.  Christyn is intimately familiar with our case, where we've been and how we've overcome.  To lose her now makes me feel like we don't have a chance.  She's our advocate and our friend in this process. 

I spoke to her about my concerns and I also called the director of our branch, the one in charge of the restructuring.  I understand why they are reorganizing cases; it helps evenly distribute the load among social workers so that no one person is overloaded and so that no one has to drive to three different states all the time.  I understand that they are in a difficult position.  And I am normally not a problem person when it comes to stuff like this; if I was I'd never make it with military healthcare, where you see a different doctor virtually every time you arrive on base.  But this is one time where I think it's okay for me to make a polite fuss.  Even if we are the only one of Christyn's cases to stay the same, I want to remain with her.  She wants to remain with us, too, which makes me feel better.  We have gone through so much of this process with each other, we all want to reach the finish line together.   Besides, the thought of telling our whole story again to another total stranger makes me want to cry.  It's a lot to tell, a lot to relive.  Those days were very dark.

We won't know anything for a while yet.  The director has to consider our request and talk it over with Christyn and our new social worker.  The most likely arrangement will probably fall somewhere into the middle; Christyn will go with us to meet potential birth families whenever that opportunity should arise and perform our first post-placement visit.  The new social worker will probably handle everything else.  I'm not overwhelmed with joy at this compromise but it's better than not having Christyn at all.  And my friend Lorie is still in the back of my head reminding me that God can take care of this, too. 

Yeah, yeah.

Well, since you asked....

So many of you have supported Jeff and I during our years of infertility.  You've offered us your shoulders to cry on, your prayers and your own tears on our behalf.  We couldn't have made it this far without you.  Along the way, many of you would ask "How are you doing?" and I would hem and haw, trying to think up an answer that was socially acceptable.  Most of the time I just said "I'm ok! How are you?" 

Catherine Hockmuth wrote a very good article for the New York Times the other day about what it's like to be infertile.  Much more gracefully than I ever could, she explains what we all feel and think every time we fail, every time we lose another pregnancy.  This blog is mostly about adoption, I know.  I promise not to beat you over the had with infertility (much.)  But we wouldn't be here if it weren't for that long grieving process and I'll bet that we are not the only people you know who are going through this.  If you want a thoughtful read, try this article and then let me know what you think.  In the mean time, I'll be organizing my closets.

I didn't think the call would go like this.

We got an email today from our social worker, Christyn.  There's a family in the middle of the country expecting a child in four days and she thought we might be a good match.  But the baby (we're not sure if it's a boy or girl) has a profound heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  We'd said we were open for correctible anatomical defects but this was the outside limit of what we'd been thinking of.  Did we want our profile to be shown?  Our decision needed to be in by 5 this evening.

I rushed home from work to talk it over with Jeff.  I was happy we'd been matched, frightened of how sick this tiny life is, wondering if we could effectively parent a child with such deep needs.  We called a pediatrician friend of ours.  He was head of trauma at A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children for a long time and he now practices privately right down the road from us.  He told us as gently as he could that the outcome of this type of defect is uncertain.  It depends on the child.  We read him the limited information we had: "The doctors predict a 90% chance of long term survival.  They anticipate surgery at 10 days old, 6 months and 3-4 years and then a heart transplant as a teenager."  Dr. Dan told us that basically, the left side of the baby's heart is the side that pumps blood to the body and that is the side that will not work properly.  He said no matter how well this all turns out, there is a chance the baby could suffer brain damage from the sheer volume of surgeries s/he will have to have.  It's certain that though he or she could lead a good life, s/he'd never live a normal life.  Any illness would be a major concern.  And the baby could die at any time.

We didn't know what to do.  We called our parents, our pastor, Beth and Josh and asked for advice and prayer.  We cried.  We talked.  We prayed.  We cried more.

In the end, we called Christyn and told her our answer had to be no, at least for now.  There's not enough information and there won't be any more until the baby is born.  And there wasn't enough time.  We just couldn't make a decision that would shape the rest of our lives in the space of a few hours.  It's too big, too much.  Which doesn't stop me from feeling absolutely awful.  If love could fix this child, s/he'd be whole in seconds.  I'd be in the car and on my way to where s/he is in the time it takes to blink.  I want to hold that baby so badly.  I just can't make a decision like that in only a few hours.  I think of all the NICU stories I've read, of my blog-friend Tertia holding her son Ben as he died.  And I just can't.  I can't write that without crying, I can't think about it without crying. I can't.  I feel like the worst person in the world for saying no.

When we called Christyn, she told us that it was okay, she knew it was too short of a time.  She said she'd be happy to keep us in the loop because right now it looks like there is no other adoptive family showing interest.  She said as soon as she knows more, she'll pass on the information and she'll let us know if the door is totally closed or not.  Even though our no has a caveat, we're not expecting it to work out.   We are pretty sure this is not our baby.  But it doesn't stop us from grieving another loss.

I don't really know what else to say.  I feel like I don't deserve another chance.

Finally!

Our Delaware state background and criminal history checks came back clear on Saturday!  This means that our social worker can finally write our homestudy and we will be officially waiting for a child.  Christyn has two other homestudies to write before ours and will be away for a week, so the estimated time for that to be completed is the first week of September, right around the time I will be flying to Germany to visit Beth.  Basically, two weeks.  Two weeks!  Then the real waiting begins.

Now I have to write our profile, a daunting task.  I have to write a two-page "Dear Birthmom" letter, telling prospective firstmoms all about our family and what we like to do.  I then have to scrapbook it all with photos.  It's harder than you might think.  I've got a rough draft started and I always feel like I'm saying "Dear Birthmom, we don't want to toot our own horns but beep beep!"  There's also a little despair as I wonder who would choose us?  There are so many healthy parents out there waiting for a child, why would anyone want us?  My friend Lorie assures me that this is all under God's control, just like everything else.  I'm struggling to believe her (and God!)

I owe you all some fantastic London stories but I'm going to save them for another post.  I'm sorry for the lack of updates during the end of July and beginning of August; things were very hectic around here.  I'm sure I'll have plenty to say as we wait.  In the mean time, I'm off to go work on our profile!