Who's gonna comb her hair?

Well as promised from the last blog it is now August and I am becoming depressed…. We haven’t heard from the agency in a while and they actually reached out and suggested that we change our profile to not say boy but to say boy or girl. I really didn’t want a girl for no other reason that I would need to comb her hair and all of my friends know how I am about people needing people to comb their hair.—lol… Although I didn't know who was going to comb her hair we changed our profile and waited for results.

So speaking of our profile I should share that we did say that we wanted a boy and that was our only requirement at the time. We didn’t care about race, background or anything in between, just healthy and a boy. So deviating from our plan was a bit daunting but after the last contact we hadn’t had any and this agency prided themselves on a lot of contacts and an adoption process that moved quickly. And quickly for them was less than 2 years but when you are in the process 2 years can seem like an eternity and that is just want it felt like.... an eternity.

Since it felt as if every time we travel we received a call from the agency about adopting imagine our surprise to get a call from the agency in September 2013 while we were sitting at home on a Friday afternoon napping and talking about the long week and that we needed to reach to the agency to talk about that maybe this isn’t working. We hated to sound like those people but help us find a normal birth mom that had minimal drama and make it happen quickly.

So to our surprise the phone rings before we can make the call and it was Tisa and Tiffany from the agency. (I just have to mention these two amazing women by name.) They said “we have a birth mom who wants to meet you!” It was weird because I immediately started crying as she reviewed the profile of the birth mom with us… I knew this was the child for me and Doug. I didn’t want to get my hopes up but I had a strong feeling that this child was our child.

The birth mom was out of state, recently found out she was pregnant and knew she didn’t have the financial means to raise a second child. She saw our profile and she and her mom decided on Doug and I because of our travel and family activities. And she wanted the baby to go to a family that couldn’t have children and who better than a gay family. Again, I was thrilled at this and probably missed a lot of what Tiffany said as I was on cloud nine. It was September and the birth mom was due in January of 2014.

We got off the phone and were provided her contact information and encouraged to reach out - so we sat for about 30 minutes to get our thoughts together to be able to send her an email as that is how she wanted to be communicated with as the initial contact. What should we put in the subject line? How should we end the email? What should we say in between? So many decisions and you may be wondering what exactly did we say but I really cannot remember—lol. All I know is that she responded right away, then we arranged a time to talk on the phone and then Doug and I agreed to travel to go meet her, her family and her 18 month old little girl.

This was going to be a long journey and of course everything starts going through your mind. She is not due until January and she has plenty of opportunities to change her mind between now and then, this is going to be hard and we didn’t know how to manage our emotions.

So I reached out to another couple, Chris and Minda, who also adopted a few years earlier and I have to say my discussion with Minda was priceless. She really grounded me and taught me how to manage not only my emotions but also the agency and to be firm in what we wanted and don’t deviate because we would get a baby no matter what. That was a defining moment for me and helped us make it through the next several months. What made it even harder was that Doug and I decided because we had so many ups and downs in previous months that we wouldn’t tell our friends or family about this until we were sure. Maybe around Thanksgiving or Christmas we would let them know if things were going well.... OMG the next several months was like speed dating and that update in tomorrow's blog...