a kleenex moment

A dear friend of mine - a mother through adoption - sent me the link to this. I'd never seen it before, and I was completely unfamiliar with the artist, but I thought it was really sweet & so I decided to share it.

It might blow my tough, cynical rep, but I have to admit I cried watching it.



(And because my tough-girl cred is at stake here...I'll note that I think Steven Curtis Chapman looks like the love child of Doogie Howser and William H. Macy. There. I was cynical. Better?)

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because I know you're dying to know...

how things went yesterday, I guess I should probably post about it.
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talk me down...

...cross your fingers, wish me luck.

Our home visit with Sue is tonight at 6.

I've taken the day off so I can clean my house. Which, interestingly, is pretty clean because I've been away for nearly 2 weeks. I think George did some de-cluttering when I was away. I hope he didn't throw away anything important.

I'm hoping I can settle down enough to actually get anything done. I haven't been nervous about anything - we already had our individual meetings with the social worker (which I *will* blog about at some point), and I wasn't nervous for that. But my stomach hasn't churned like this since the morning game 4 of the ECF. :/
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meet sue...

Sue is our social worker. We're meeting her on Sunday. Well, that's not strictly true - we've met her before, at the homestudy classes we went to (Jesus on a bike we've been dragging our feet on this for a long time) last year. Heh.
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another small step...

I just finished my autobiography. I'll be dropping it off - along with G's - at the agency tomorrow.

I could make all sorts of excuses about why it took me so damn long to finish it - busy with work, busy with things around the house with G's recently hectic travel schedule, and a million other things - but they'd all be lies. The truth is, I've been worried about a million little things that have no bearing at all on what sort of parent I'll be, and my brain simply wouldn't let me string the words together until I'd gotten those things out of the way.
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w00t! w00t!

Got another e-mail from Michele - the state FedEx-ed the agency a buttload of fingerprinting cards. Which means we won't have to wait until god-knows-when for them to be able to fingerprint us. I just called the agency & made an appointment to get our prints done on Monday morning.

This still creates a delay, but at least this way the clock starts right away - ten weeks for the prints to be processed, and then we're assigned a caseworker & start the homestudy meetings - versus waiting who knows how long for the agency to even be able to submit our prints. The delay seems more reasonable now that we have a good idea of how long it will be before our homestudy is finished.
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well, dammit...

I just received an e-mail from our adoption agency. Their e-mails all come with a confidentiality notice, but since there's nothing confidential about the information this one contains, I'm going to copy parts of it here.
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parenting, worrying about parenting, and worrying about worrying about parenting

I've been dreaming a lot about having a baby again. Not about physically giving birth, of course, but about actually having a baby in our care that is our child. It seems more real these days - I can actually describe the baby's features, I know the child's gender, I know how it came to be in our care - unlike my earlier dreams in which I simply found myself caring for a child with no idea how it all came to be.

I think it might be because I feel closer to actually becoming a parent than I ever have before. We haven't finished our homestudy - we both have appointments this afternoon with our doctor, who has to fill out a form for each of us, and I'll bring this last bit of paperwork to the agency either tomorrow or Monday. Then we just have to meet with the social worker, who we hope will approve us. There is still much to do, but I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

It's not all sunshine and bunnies, though.
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a little light reading

If I weren't so lazy I'd take a picture of the "education manual" we got from the agency during our initial consultation yesterday - but that would require finding the camera, then uploading the picture to my computer, restarting the computer when it crashes, getting back online, finding the picture, and pasting it in here. In short: too much like work. So you'll just have to trust me when I say it's easily a full ream of paper, comb-bound with plastic covers & tabbed dividers that separate the information that will be used in each of the classes.


"You don't have to read it cover-to-cover," K, the social worker, told us. "It's got tons of information in it that will be helpful to you while you're going through the homestudy.""Well, our classes don't start until October," I said, "and I hate waiting around with nothing to do. I'll probably have it read by Friday."


We laughed, but I wasn't kidding. Except I was wrong on the timeline; I finished reading it tonight.

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one small step

I meant to start posting as soon as we started, but between working & trying to paint the dining room, I just haven't had time. So here's a first post to get this blog up to speed.

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