Adoption

I am not a very "keep-it-to-myself" kind of person when it comes to sharing things about my life.  Some people are very private and reserved about everything, which is cool - maybe even admirable - but I am not one of them.  But about this one thing I have held back for a long, long time. 

See, it is hard for me to talk about adoption.  Even with my family, it is not a natural, easy discussion.  I think it is because no one in my family has much experience with it.  And so our conversations about adoption feel awkward and clouded with lack of information and uncertainty about what the future holds and what it really means to adopt a child.  I think that everyone worries about what it will be like.  I don't really have those worries myself - I already love our as-yet-non-existent children so much that sometimes it hurts and I just can't wait to meet them and I feel really awed and slightly strange admitting that on our blog but it is true - but I understand why others might have those worries. I think that because I have held back on really sharing my thoughts and feelings about adoption in the way I would share my thoughts and feelings about any other topic, if there is such a taboo around the topic of adoption then it is my fault and I want to break that barrier now. 

So here goes - the news is that we are actively preparing to adopt a child.  Before you get too excited, you should know that this process is going to be long.  As in, it may be three more years before we actually have a kid.  But I'm really excited and I feel like I should let that excitement take me as far along in the adoption process as it can so that when we are faced with months and possibly years of waiting for a birth mother to choose us that I can draw upon this time in the adoption process when I am so hopeful despite the scariness of uncertainty about what our path to parenthood will be like. 

This is something that Paul and I have been planning for a long, long time.  I have known since I was 15 that I wouldn't be able to get pregnant.  I told Paul within two weeks of dating after I got home from my mission that I couldn't have children.  We knew before we got married that we would be adopting.  We discussed timing during law school, especially toward the end when we knew what our job situations would be like.  And all this year, but especially this summer, adoption has weighed heavily on my mind.  The plan really was to wait until January 2011 and then get started.  But back in August, I just knew that we shouldn't wait any longer.  So I called LDS family services and got in touch with our case worker (her name is Heather).  She explained that in California, it typically takes about 6 months to get qualified to adopt.  So we've actually been moving forward with our adoption plans for a couple of months now and we are hoping to be qualified sometime early next year - maybe February or March. 

My guess is that most of you will have a lot of questions for us about this process, so I plan to share a lot of what is required of us to adopt and what the process of adoption is like.  We are using LDS family services, so the process will be specific to them.  The first thing Heather did was to send us three different forms requiring our signatures to get the process rolling.  One was a general authorization type form.  The other two were reference forms - one where we were asked to list our bishop's contact information and one where we were asked to list four non-family references with their contact information.  We filled those out and sent them back to Heather the next day.  Then Heather mailed forms to all of these people to fill out with questions about us that asked things like "What are Paul and Amy's strengths and weaknesses?" or "From your perspective, please describe Paul and Amy's relationship."  Once Heather had all the forms back (it took two months because our bishop was out of town and then Heather was out of town, etc., which has already pushed the approval process out longer than the 6 months Heather originally told me), then Heather called us to set up our first actual discussion about adoption and to give us the real paperwork.

We met with Heather this past Monday for about 45 minutes at her office.  Basically she just explained the process that we will be going through - filling out paperwork, getting physicals, getting CPR certified for infant, child, and adult CPR, writing a letter to birth parents, collecting photos of ourselves, getting fingerprinted, attending parenting education classes and child abuse education classes, etc.  The main reason it takes so long to get approved in California (compared to other states where the process is less arduous) is that in California we actually first have to become certified foster parents so there are all these extra requirements like the child abuse education classes.  The fingerprinting takes the longest though, according to Heather, because it has to work its way through the machinery of the State. 

So, that is pretty much where we are at:  we have all the information and now we just have to start gathering documents and checking things off our list.  I imagine we will be mostly done with the work we need to do by Christmas and then will just be waiting for our fingerprints to be approved through the state.

I am not going to lie - I have already had some feelings of anger and frustration about this process, not about adoption itself or anything, but more about the questions that are being asked of us and of our friends.  As wonderful as our friends who agreed to be references are, it was frankly embarassing to feel like we had to get permission to have a kid when all of them could just do it on their own without talking to anybody about it first.  I understand and am grateful that adoption agencies want to make sure they aren't getting wackos trying to adopt, but I guess it was just the first reality-check for me that this process, while wonderful, probably isn't going to be all fun and happy and perky all the time. 

Well, there is a LOT more I have to say about all this and I am still trying to gather my thoughts and all, but we have a couple days off work and Paul and I are literally about to head out the door to drive to Yosemite.  Quickly though, I just wanted to tell everybody who reads our blog that we really appreciate your friendship and we will be asking for your help as we go through this journey.  At some point as we get closer to being approved, we will ask that you help us find our child by talking to people in your ward about listening for an unwed mother who might be trying to decide what to do about the child that she is carrying.  We might ask you to talk to your own moms and ask them to talk to their friends about it (the mom network is one of the best ways that adoptions go through apparently).  We will probably start an adoption blog and provide a button that you can add to your own blog.  We may even do pass-along cards with our information that we will send to you to post in your church buildings or wherever (apparently that is a totally normal thing that a lot of adoptive couples do).  But for right now, your love and prayers and support are enough. 

In the meantime, here is a link to an amazing blog by a family that adopted their two children.  Her post sums up a lot of what I have been thinking and feeling and have worried about or hoped for as Paul and I have been preparing for this. 

We love you guys.

Libra

October is my favorite month.  And coincidentally it is my birthday month!  I think I've mentioned before on here that Paul and I celebrate birthday months, not just birthdays.  What this basically means is that we do whatever we would normally do in any other month, only we say that we are doing it as part of a month-long birthday celebration.  Case-in-point:  Today we went and bought a lemon tree to plant in the backyard.  Therefore, it is my birthday tree.  Awesome, right?  Go ahead, try celebrating your birthday for an entire month and report back on how much you love it.

We removed a dead lemon tree from this spot a couple weeks ago.  Today I helped Paul dig a hole for our new lemon tree.  It was hard work, but I just imagined myself as Zoolander posing with the pick-axe and went to town on the hard earth. 

Once the hole was deep enough and wide enough, we mixed potting soil with the existing dirt and planted our tree.  We went with a Lisbon lemon tree which is more resistant to extremes in temperatures (unlikely in the Bay Area, but you never know) and is supposed to produce the kind of lemons that you buy in the grocery store.  If you look closely, you will see that our tree actually already has two little lemons on it. 

Once the tree was settled into its new little home beside our fence, we gave it a nice long drink.  Now we have to wait and see whether it will survive.  I don't think there is any reason why it should not thrive, but since neither Paul nor I have done much gardening before we're just hoping that one of us has a green thumb. 

We have lots of fun things planned for the rest of my birthday month, including a trip to Yosemite, a 30th birthday party/open house, a 5k known as a "Warrior Dash" where we will be jumping over burning logs, climbing haybales and cargo nets, and crawling under barbed wire through mud, and culminating in the traditional end-of-birthday-month-costume-and-sugar-fest, known to the rest of the world as Halloween. 

Life is good when you are a libra.

Busy doing nothing

I really wanted to blog this weekend. 

All last week I looked forward to it.  While driving home from work I would think to myself about blogging and how fun it would be.  Not that I had much in particular to say.  But I find that blogging is sort of therapeutic for me.  Don't judge me for being totally nerdy about this please.  I just enjoy the exercise of writing something that I want to write without feeling like it is "work product".  I don't consider myself a writer or anything, but I wish I was.  It is not that I treat our blog as a kind of journal, because I don't.  But in a way, I guess I kind of do even if I don't write the same stuff in the same way that I would write it in my journal which I don't keep.

And here it is, 10:30 on Sunday night and I am exhausted after a much-too-busy weekend, I still haven't watched "The Amazing Race", and I have to be up early tomorrow for a big day at work.  It was one of those weekends where a lot happened and nothing happened.  I had to attend a lunch in Oakland where I was honored for doing pro bono work - nice and all but I found myself wishing I could just be at home enjoying my Saturday.  I went to the Relief Society dinner and broadcast, which was great and don't think I'm a bad person for saying this, but I really wanted to go out to a movie with Paul (although really I'm SO glad I went to the broadcast - it was wonderful and just what I needed). 

I didn't wash my car.  I didn't go shopping at the outlets at Gilroy.  I did, however, have an awesome time with friends eating dinner, going for a walk, and playing games tonight.  I guess it is time now to brush my teeth and put the weekend to bed.

At least now I have blogged.

Weekend Photo Round-up

We have had a laid-back, enjoyable weekend being homebodies and working on projects.  (If our house posts get boring, we're sorry - it is kind of an all-consuming thing).  Paul demolished the 20+ year-old nasty hot tub in the back corner of our yard.  We are planning on having a tree person come take out the palm tree too (it is one of those tall, skinny palms that is getting too old and looking really scraggly).  Hopefully next summer this will be our garden spot. 

This is what the yard looks like with the hot tub removed.

It's not too early to start decorating for Halloween yet, right?  It is my favorite holiday after all. 

While wandering around the local craft store, Paul and I found these awesome skulls, pumpkins and ribbon on sale, so I decided to make a wreath.  I can sew and bake and am generally competent when it comes to domestic things, but I am not the craftiest person ever.  But overall I'm pretty happy with how the wreath turned out.  I was going for more creepy/scary than cute. 

These glittery purple spiders are the perfect finishing touch.

Here is a photo of the overall result of our decorating.  It is not a whole lot, but we figure there will be more stuff on sale after the holiday and we'll pick up some more things then for next year.

And just for fun, here are a few photos of our main living space now that we have moved in our furniture and hung some of Paul's photography on the walls.  Also, you can really get a feel for what the kitchen is going to look like after the full remodel now that we have torn out the wall that used to divide the kitchen from the living room.  (Paul is reading Mockingjay on the couch for our next book club meeting).  We also still need to find a nice rug to put down in the living room.

Our jimmy-rigged island until we do a full kitchen remodel next year:

Other fun things that happened this weekend included holding a heartbreakingly adorable newborn named Maxwell, eating sushi, orderling light fixtures online, making pumpkin chocolate chip bread for the first time of the season, and driving a load of torn-up hot tub trash to the garbage dump. 

It has been a wonderful weekend, but tomorrow it is back to the grind.

Spam Attack and Stolen IP

Today at work my inbox was flooded with over 300 spam messages in under 20 minutes. Turns out the emails were based on a virus that hit every computer in my firm and a whole bunch of other companies across the country. It was kind of exciting - like a cyber earthquake or something.

Also, I learned today that one of my outlines from law school (the one I created for Criminal Law) somehow ended up in the hands of the folks who operate the website outlinedepot.com and is available for purchase on the internet. I have never before minded sharing my law school outlines and have doled them out to pretty much anybody who asked for them (even when I was still in law school - I'm cool like that), but learning that somebody was trying to make money off of my intellectual property gave me pause. I feel so ... used. But then I decided that I don't really care - it is just a law school outline after all and I highly doubt outlinedepot is going to make any money off of it. Is that lazy of me?

In other technological news, my computer no longer functions for longer than 3 minutes without being plugged in to its power source. The poor thing is a dinosaur anyway and I should just break down and buy a new one, but there are so many other things I would rather do with a thousand or two bucks: go on a cruise (Paul says no but I say let's go!), start our bathroom remodel, pay extra on some debt that is almost retired, buy new shoes, etc. I guess I can always share with Paul. How much do married couples really need two laptops anyway? (That is a rhetorical question. The answer is that both Paul and I are totally addicted to the internets and might begin to experience marital discord in the extreme if we were forced to share computers for more than half an hour).

Oh technology, where would I be without you?

Other HoN happenings include deciding on our constitutional last night that our neighborhood is spooky after dark - it was only 8:30 and all the lights were off in most of the houses on the street because there are apparently a lot of seniors who bought these houses way back in the day when they were built (1958) and they still live there and go to bed early. Exterior lighting exists on some houses but not others, so there are dark stretches that feel haunted, especially with a brisk autumn breeze blowing.