3 Month Update

Well, we're now over 3 months "paper pregnant with no due date" as my dear husband likes to tell people.

3 months is insignificant and significant at the same time. It is insignificant insofar as there is no magical way of telling how and when our baby will come to us. There is a misconception that domestic newborn adoption is always a long wait. This is not always so from the people I have met and talked to, although, years ago this may have been the case. It is significant, however, due to the fact that I can surmise a bit from our agency's statistics. At any one time they have 8 waiting families (who have been approved & have active profiles). On average, our agency places approximately 4 babies per year. Thus, we can assume our wait to be somewhere between 3 months and 2years.

Baby has been on my mind a lot lately. I haven't had any dreams about our child, but my mom has. In her dream, she was carrying a baby girl down our hallway. She laid the baby girl on our bed to change her diaper, and she remembers her having a "baby blowout" on the bedspread & telling sweet little girl, "Your mommy's going to be mad at us!" These words made my heart skip a beat. Not the poop part, but the mommy part.

My great-grandma is nearly 98 years old. I don't know what exactly to call this phenomenon, but she sometimes has dreams that then happen in real life. My mom and my sister have also experienced this occurrence. Could it be that the baby that will someday be in our arms will be a bouncing baby girl?

I've begun taking an unofficial "poll" of sorts. My best friend Tif thinks our baby will be a boy. My mom had the dream about a girl. Some days my heart is telling me boy, other days it's saying girl. Jake says he wants a boy, but have you seen this man with a girl? Lord, it simply melts my heart...Who am I kidding? Boys, girls…doesn’t matter…he looks adorable with either…or both! So, do you think we’ll have a boy baby or a girl baby? When do you think he/she might arrive?

To give you a bit of an update …I contacted our social worker to see if our profile has been presented to any expectant parents as of yet. She said we had been presented to a young expectant mother who is in her 7th month of pregnancy. We had not been identified by this woman as the family she preferred, and were told that she chose a family who already has one child. Her child and this couple’s child will have an age gap that is similar to that of her and her sibling, so she felt a connection to them. Additionally, her sibling is around my age, and the only feedback she provided about us was that we were “So young!”

Yes, it stings to think that we seemingly weren’t chosen because of our age. Some couples choose to go through years of fertility treatments, and then pursue adoption. That wasn’t us! We thought we were different! Yes, it feels crushing to think we tried to best show who we were through the painstaking hours of creating a profile with pictures and words and she STILL didn’t "like" us enough to choose us. Immediately upon receiving this news, I began second-guessing my choices of words and photos in our profile and thinking I may need to edit it or scrap the whole thing entirely. Perhaps I did accidentally let a rogue double chin picture into the book (GASP!). Perhaps she didn’t like my writing style or the fact that we have a large, black dog. But then I remembered…this book IS who we are…Yes, it hurts to know that we weren’t what she was looking for. But, the family she DID identify doesn’t sound like our demographics at all (she choose an older couple with a child already). I think many would assume that expectant moms are looking for young, childless couples when making a plan to place for adoption. I’m offering this example as insight, as a way to show that some preconceived notions about adoption, expectant parents, birthparents, and adoptive parents that you may have (and even I myself had!) are not always the case!

I know that someday we will get the call. Unlike many who ignore them, when my phone rings and it’s an unknown number, I pick that call up so fast! I’m always disappointed when it is a political candidate’s recorded message or the library telling me a book I requested is in. But I know someday it WILL be the call.