If you haven’t heard by other means by now, our family is finally complete with the adoption of H.D. in September. He’s amazing. V is an amazing brother and my and Mr. Badger’s family have been rock stars in helping us get to this point. They, along with our friends and you, my readers, have helped get us through the darkest times I’ve ever experienced. I can never repay the debt owed for everyone’s support, especially knowing that without this space, we’d never have been able to be V’s parents.

But while I’ve tried to keep this site alive by reinventing it, it simply isn’t a good fit for me anymore. We have our family blog, as well as social media outlets like facebook and the braces bunch for support, not to mention the friends I’ve made online, locally, or online who became face to face friends. Maybe I’ll find something else to say down the road, perhaps related to adoption reform, maybe about running, now that I’ve done a marathon. For now, though, it’s time to enjoy the here and now, and part of that is shedding the cloak of what was the building part of our family. I’ll never forget what a life saver this sacred space was, and I love it enough to know that it is a good time to say goodbye to it, and move forward towards new adventures.

Thank you dear friends and family, you all got us to this place of our family beginnings.

Thank you for coming to support and hug us all.  I have a request. If you’re on f.a.ceb.ook, would you consider “liking” this link, and asking your friends and family to keep on the lookout for us?

More to come as we put everything together.

Today we met with a private adoption attorney, who has been practicing for 15 years.  She apparently was the attorney for the first couple to find their child through fac.ebo,ok! She works in an entirely different method than our agency, and frankly, Mr. Badger and I agree, that both methods complement one another.

This new method will put a lot of onus on us to be proactively doing work, which we’re happy to do. In our state, paid adoption facilitation is illegal. That means if an expectant mother walked into her office and asked for a family identical to ours, she would not be ethically or legally allowed to show our profile to her. So what does she do? She networks with agencies who have that power, as well as other professionals in the adoption community, of which she is a very active member. She also is our legal adviser on retainer for all questions as we do our part of the work. That means as we network, she will help us vet possible opportunities, and help the expectant mothers find legal and social support wherever they are in the country.

She networks and we will be doing the same thing. She charges her retainer, which is a small amount for that work, and legal guidance and activity. In return, we bear the shoulder of responsibility. We are to:

• Create a profile book that she can send to colleagues when opportunities arrive
• Make a PDF handout, much like we did for our agency
• Make a website affiliated with an SEO optimized profile site (we can do it on our own, but she did show us advantages of going with a better networked site)
• Putting advertisements on FB, Google Ads, etc.
• Create a “Dear Family & Friends” flyer with family business cards attached to give to family to put on their refrigerators, to doctors to have in their office, to friends to put up in their offices, and so on.
• Getting a 1800 number to put on our profile
• Have first (second, and even third) contact with the expectant mother before handing it over to the attorneys to hash out. (Though she would coach us through all of it, we legally need to talk to the expectant parents first).
• Be safe by not giving out too much identifying information about ourselves before she gets involved.

That’s the plan for now, to have two paths we pursue at once. One with our agency, where they are working for the money we have paid, and the other where we are doing a heck of a lot of worthwhile legwork.  I was talking to my friend J about our meeting today, and said that it’ll force me to really put myself out of my comfort zone. For those who know me IRL, I like to help when I can. I feel good doing the dishes for a friend who is close to vomiting when she sees food. Bringing food (or wine) to a friend in need of a break, brings me joy. Accepting help? Yeah, I’m terrible at it. Furthermore, actively asking others to help me? Forget it. I feel awful asking for help, and always have been the “do it myself” type.  This new process with force me to seek the help of others, knowing that it will come from our network of family, friends and the family and friends of those people, that our family will add another person.

So I will soon be putting up a link to our profile page, and I will ask anyone interested in helping us on this path to participate with our family & friends letter campaign. We knew that it would take longer this time around, but we’re not content to wait for our family anymore. We’re going to be doers.

Got a reply from our agency.  They are working with a few expectant mothers who are very early on, and it’s too early to start talking match.  They like to do lots of work with mothers to ensure that adoption is the choice that they want, no pressure from them. It’s one of the reasons we chose them.

They were very opposed to a web presence, which could be a generational thing. I disagree, personally.  Since we were matched with V, twitter and facebook have revolutionized how people find and communicate with one another.

But the timing…perhaps coincidental, or maybe she saw the other post. I have no way of knowing.  So we wait, as we have done.  I do know in my heart of hearts that this wait is not forever. We will eventually be matched with a baby who needs a home, and a birth family that is seeking a relationship that works for everyone involved. Our family will one day be a family of four.

Anyhow, thanks for the support, whether you’re here from the IF community, an IRL friend, our family, or our agency.  I write now, with the assumption that the whole world reads this site, so I try to be careful with what I say. I know I can be found pretty easily, and so I try to limit posting to things that are my story, or our story, but not V or our future kid’s story.

Waiting the second time around is both easier and harder.  On a day-to-day level, I have the most wonderful son on the planet. Our family of three is amazing and better than I had ever dreamed it could be. I don’t fill my day with hopeless yearning.

On the flip side, I can’t not know things. I watch other people easily become pregnant (or even some of my IF friends who struggle with it) with number 2, and realize that V will be that much further apart in age from his sibling. My brother and I are 2.5 years apart, which allowed us to be in high school and college together, something I will always treasure. I want that for my children. But then I feel awful for what my wishes mean. I have to, on some level, hope someone cannot parent so that I can parent. I am that person that smiles a bit when a potential expectant parent who is considering adoption decides to parent.  Seeing how much I would miss V if he weren’t here makes me ache for his other mother. Wishing for that to happen again, even on a small level, makes me feel like a bad person.

I suppose that’s what keeps me grounded in being an adoptive parent. I don’t blindly call him mine without knowing I share him with someone else. Someone real that I may never know, someone who found herself in a situation that made placing V with us an option. As we approach Mothers’ Day every year, I think of her, because she is V’s mother just as much as I am. We’re both real.

That being said, I do want another child for our family, and with it comes the responsibility of acknowledging that it’s not all rainbow farting unicorns.  We started our paperwork last May, finishing it the first week of last July. Our homestudy, which was done in September on the same timeline for V last time around, wasn’t officially finished until November. The social worker was in no rush to get it done, despite our pleading. It was all posturing anyway, because there weren’t any potential matches for us at that point.

As a result, our paperwork is all expiring in the next few months, which means getting our physicals redone, as well as updating our background checks.  Then, by November, we’ll need our homestudy portion updated again. It’s a crappy cycle where half of our packet is 6 months off of the rest, a constant reminder that we don’t have a match.

I sent an email to our placement agency on Monday to check in, as I periodically do. They’re pretty consistent about not saying anything if there’s no news. If there’s even a sniff of a match, they get in touch with us though.  From before we were done with our homestudy for V until his ultimate placement, we got at least some interest every single month. There were 4 possible matches in 5 months, which includes the disrupted match that spanned two months.  This time, since being live with our agency in September, we’ve had nothing. Not even a hint.  Just a general belief from them that expectant mother contact is down across the board.  I have no idea if it’s true or not.

What I do know is that the agency has another issue that is taking a lot of their time. They’re small, which is why we like them. They know us and the expectant mothers that they work with, and truly try to find situations that work the best for everyone. Now, though, I have this gut feeling that they aren’t doing much outreach because of this other issue that has nothing to do with their day-to-day business. I feel for them with this other issue, I absolutely do, but now, a year after we started, it’s starting to get to me. This is my family.  We started so far in advance, assuming it’d be at worst a year until a match. But none of the waiting has been due to lack of anything on our part. It’s the homestudy agency that took an extraordinarily long time to do their work. It’s the placement agency (who again, I love, and I’m torn over this) who may not be working as hard as I know they usually do for their part of finding matches. It’s all out of our control, which is one of those anxiety-inducing things that I’ve been managing, but noticing creeping up a bit more than I’d like.

They haven’t written back since I sent the email asking if we should put out a web presence, update our profile, or anything else that we can control. Nothing. And that’s disheartening.

We’re meeting with another attorney who does placements on Tuesday, just to keep our options open.  The downside of this is twofold. One, most agencies/attorneys ask for anywhere from $7-$15,000 just to be listed with them. That money is non-refundable. We have to be very selective if we’re going to go with another group alongside our original agency.  The other issue is time, and mentally resetting our waiting clock. I mean, we could go with someone else and be matched tomorrow, or have another year’s wait ahead of us. In my head, it feels like the latter.

We could go with a larger group, but my gut says that we’d not get the same ethical attention to detail that we experienced with our first placement. I don’t want to have to choose between ethical and fast, especially when we’re already deep in the wait. Mr. Badger and I have strong issues with our kids being far apart in age, so we’re really feeling the ticking of the clock these days.

Anyhow, I’m putting it all out there in hopes that it lessens the weight on my heart and mind. I know my parents read this, and maybe even my ILs and Mr. Badger’s sister. If you do, please cut us some slack if we’re sensitive on this issue. To my dad especially, who has been extremely respectful of my personal space since our big blow up a few years back, I’ll let you know if I want to talk about it with you guys. Right now though, it’s too painful to really get into, so let me bring it up with you if I want to.

For the rest of you, do you have an ethical agency that you like? I’m needing a virtual hug, so, if you lurk, say something nice today. I could use it.

Not much to say, because there’s not much going on. No news on the adoption front, and I would say that it’ll be a while there.  I’m simply glad winter is over, because I don’t think my mood could have stood for much more dreariness.

On the positive front, I ran a 10 mile race this past weekend and kicked it’s ass, running about 30 seconds per mile faster than I was hoping to do!

I’m not really ready to pay for V’s haircuts. Call me cheap, call me weird, I really like cutting V’s hair these days.  Nonetheless, he needed a trim.  I couldn’t get Fred to sit very still for a picture this morning, I used it all up on giving him a haircut. His hair was getting very long in front. Just three weeks ago he looked like this:

And now, he’s looking a lot more tidy!

I’m pro-choice.  I’d say, since adopting, I’ve become even more staunchly pro-choice. Why? Because it’s a choice dammit, and one that allows women to parent, to abort a fetus, to choose adoption, or heaven knows what else. What you may not know, especially if you are anti-choice, is that the recent activity in the US House of Representatives is chipping away at the rights of women in the infertility community under a pro-life slogan.  Don’t kid yourself, these politicians are not pro-life, they’re anti-choice. The second a woman chooses to keep a pregnancy, the government goes back to it’s slogan of less government intrusion and won’t support families who rely on things like head start or low-cost healthcare.  These are people who want to defund Planned Parenthood (who you also support you know, PLANNING PARENTHOOD) but in the same breath give $7 million to NASCAR.  Keep it classy, politicos.
Don’t believe, me? Check out this post:

http://hannahweptsarahlaughed.blogspot.com/2011/02/um-why-does-government-hate-women-so.html

Technically macro shots are supposed to be these super close up pictures that show things that one doesn’t normally see with the naked eye.  Well, I need to learn more about that because I couldn’t quite get the hang of it. Instead I’m taking pictures of small things.

First off, Mr. Man who has the butthurt.  This was Mr. Badger’s toy when he was a kid, and apparently his ass fell off the other day.  V told me, “Mama, tushie ow!”

Next up, V’s “Lele” or Ukelele.  He likes to tune it as much as he likes to play it, which is to say that it’s always out of tune as a result.  Nothing beats him playing and singing though for making me smile.

Have you ever seen the PBS Kids show “Dinosaur Train”?  I’ve had it on the TV, but never watched it myself, if that makes sense.  Either way, for Christmas, V got these two guys from the show.  The crazy thing is, they have some sort of infrared thing going on where if they’re both on at the same time, they’ll talk to one another.  Also, both are herbivores so if you put your finger in the Stegosaurus’s mouth, he says “Yuck dude! I’m no carnivore!”.

I didn’t get a picture of breakfast yesterday, but I did manage to get a gorgeous shot of V as we landed in New York the other day. Not too shabby for a camera phone.