Adoption Whirlwind

It has been interesting what my brain is doing lately. It has had to switch from practitioner/CrMS to retreat/infertility to adoption to wife all at a moments notice. I can be in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend and answer my call waiting to someone wanting to learn CrMS or I can be emailing the adoption facilitator and get an email about the retreat at the same time. Phew, my brain is tired! This recent situation I am sharing definitely made my brain switch to adoption fast...

So it was not but a month ago that I announced here on ye' old blog that we were really moving forward with adoption. We thought we had narrowed it down to one agency or one private law group that we would work with. I called the law group over 3 weeks ago and they still haven't called me back plus the receptionist who answered didn't seem to know who to refer us to when I told her "I am looking into some information about adopting through your law group." Maybe that's a bad sign? I just know that this law group is pretty experienced with handling adoptions so I was pretty puzzled. We haven't registered for the one day training class with the agency we wanted to go with although they sent us the preliminary application approval weeks ago. I have no idea why we haven't registered because we are pretty motivated to get the process started. We know that after the home study the wait could be as long as 2 years for an infant although since we are so open most agencies assured us our wait would be less time. 

So back in December we got a call from a friend, let's just call her our "adoption fairy godmother" or our AFGM for short, and she said there was a baby girl in need of being placed by tomorrow as she was going to be discharged from the hospital. It was our close call and it gave us the push to keep discerning whether or not adoption is what we should be pursuing. My conversation with our AFGM was so fruitful because her exact words were "no one is going to hand you a baby and say 'here you go here is your baby.' You have to put yourself out there and it's tough." At first her words may seem a bit harsh but she was pushing me to take action because she could hear in my voice how much I wanted this. She herself has adopted and known the pain of infertility so she had to come to the same reality of how hard we have to work to become parents. She "gets it" which most people don't so it is so nice having someone like her in our corner. 

So on a Thursday I get a call from her while I am in a follow up with a client. I didn't recognize the number and I usually have my phone on silent but it was on vibrate this time. As the phone was buzzing away I turned it on silent so I could finish my follow up undistracted. I was very curious as to who left a message so immediately after my follow up I walked my clients out of the office and rushed back in to check the voice mail. It turns out it was our AFGM letting us know that there was a baby boy in need of being placed soon. I call her back immediately as I am almost running out of the office waving bye to the secretary instead of our usual chit chat before I go. She tells me all about the baby and who to call. I get home and see our car in the drive way which means JJ is home. I get off the phone with her and search frantically for JJ, he is not in the house which means he is at the church praying which is what he does every day after work. As I listen to the details about this precious baby boy JJ walks up so I mouth the words "pray" and "baby" and do the sign of the cross plus a rocking baby to sleep motion. My husband probably thought I was stark raving mad at this point as I kept doing those actions until he could get it, he just shrugged his shoulders at me. I guess we need to work on our silent communication and play some more charades. 

After I get off the phone with our AFGM and download all the info I was given to JJ I then proceeded to call the facilitator. The facilitator said that if we were interested that we would need to let her know asap as the birth mother was going to look at profiles for potential families the next day. JJ and I prayed and discussed it for about 20mins and decided to throw our hat in the ring. Not having a profile yet I threw together some pictures of us with some savvy words and made a mini-profile and sent it to the facilitator at around 10:30pm that night.

As of today it has been almost 2 weeks since this happened and we still haven't heard from the birth mother, the lawyer hasn't even heard back from her. If you could please pray for this birth mother that would be great, she did have a hard situation and I just pray for her and baby boy. I am 99.9% sure that this adoption is not going to happen. It was such an exciting rush to just be thrown into this situation! To have to act fast and just go with what was being put out in front of us at the time definitely got my energy up. Hmmm, maybe I am a little extroverted after all ;) Although the next day I was a bit exhausted from all the excitement. 

We will be meeting with the facilitators this weekend to talk about their contract and services. After that we will decide when to start everything as well as figure out the financial aspect of it all. I am loving what I am hearing about these facilitators so far and how they walk us through everything. They have been so great with answering our questions and decoding all the lingo for us. They are not an agency which means there is a little more work we have to do on our part as far as lawyers and such but they do so much for the adoptive family AND birth family. They started a non-profit to help their birth mothers with services they might need long after the adoption is final. As well as adoptive families being able to help out another adoptive family's birth mother if they want to donate to their adoption. I really love that about them! It makes it feel less like a business and more like a community. 

So that is where we are at with our adoption plans. It kind if feels like full speed ahead for now until we start the waiting. Oh the waiting...