We're done! Well...we're on our way at least.
L came by on Friday morning to do our homestudy and orientation. She did interview us, asking questions about our families, childhoods, everyday lives and more. She also gave us a lot more information about the process, but more about that later. We were able to get our fingerprinting done yesterday afternoon, so our background checks have started. She will file our paperwork and we should be approved and be ready for a match in four weeks. FOUR WEEKS!!!!!! Needless to say, we're excited.
About the process... in an ideal situation they like to meet birthmothers at the end of their first trimester. This way they can make sure that they get the care and support that they need throughout their pregnancy. Sometimes it just doesn't happen that way. She asked us if we would be able to take a baby if they only had notice of around two weeks. Of course we said yes, and we know it's not the norm, but can you imagine only having two weeks to get ready? :-) We decided that maybe we should start buying a few little things now, just in case.
It's all just really really exciting. It's one step after another closer to bringing our baby home. We're elated to keep moving forward.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
dear birthmother...
So... some days I don't really think about adoption. Actually, that's not true. I pretty much think about adoption, or things related to adoption all the time. I think about our baby and our birthmother and how she may be out there struggling with her decision right now. I think about what things we'll need new and what things we can get second hand. Some days I think about adoption and some days I obsess! Today is an obsession day.
I think that my mind is focused on this today because our homestudy is only a week away. It's going to be our second rung in the adoption ladder (the first being our application). It's exciting and kind of nerve-racking. The fact that L is helping us puts me at great ease, but it's still someone coming to sift through your life to see if you are qualified for parenthood. I'm hoping we are!
Part of obsessing means I've been trolling the internet all day reading about various aspects of adoption. It's going to be a special thing to be a mom to an adopted child, so I'm trying my best to look at what is out there. I'm also reading a book called dear birthmother. The book is really good at helping me see another point of view in the process even if it does make its point and then repeat it several times (and several more times. I find myself skimming through the ends of chapters :-). The focus of the book is on open adoption. An option we're considering now with more interest. The idea being that children are effected profoundly by the loss they experience through adoption and that keeping the birthmother as part of the family relationship helps to ease that trauma for the child and for her without damaging the family bond. I don't think that we'll know exactly what is healthy for our family until we are all united and together, but I do think that we'll pursue this idea of keeping in touch with the birthmother and hopefully not just with letters and photos, but phone calls and even visits.
Tomorrow I'm hoping to be obsessing about Harry Potter and that should get me through until our homestudy, at which point I'm bound to start obsessing again!
:-)
I think that my mind is focused on this today because our homestudy is only a week away. It's going to be our second rung in the adoption ladder (the first being our application). It's exciting and kind of nerve-racking. The fact that L is helping us puts me at great ease, but it's still someone coming to sift through your life to see if you are qualified for parenthood. I'm hoping we are!
Part of obsessing means I've been trolling the internet all day reading about various aspects of adoption. It's going to be a special thing to be a mom to an adopted child, so I'm trying my best to look at what is out there. I'm also reading a book called dear birthmother. The book is really good at helping me see another point of view in the process even if it does make its point and then repeat it several times (and several more times. I find myself skimming through the ends of chapters :-). The focus of the book is on open adoption. An option we're considering now with more interest. The idea being that children are effected profoundly by the loss they experience through adoption and that keeping the birthmother as part of the family relationship helps to ease that trauma for the child and for her without damaging the family bond. I don't think that we'll know exactly what is healthy for our family until we are all united and together, but I do think that we'll pursue this idea of keeping in touch with the birthmother and hopefully not just with letters and photos, but phone calls and even visits.
Tomorrow I'm hoping to be obsessing about Harry Potter and that should get me through until our homestudy, at which point I'm bound to start obsessing again!
:-)
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Our Story
Hi everyone! I've decided to start a blog to help me stay in touch (which I'm really not great at) with all of our friends and family. I'm not always the best at sharing my feelings (you may have noticed), but I do like talking, so I'm going to do my best with all of this stuff so that you can follow along on our adoption journey and stay up on the latest developments. My hope is that sooner rather than later, we'll convert this over to a baby blog and you can check out the latest on that!
This post is just a starting point. It's mainly focusing on where we've been because it's very important to where we're going. It's long. :-)
We started our journey to parenthood the way most people do. We talked about it and there was a period of time when I wanted to and he didn't. We talked some more and finally decided to go for it. We bought books on pregnancy and looked at the baby section in the store. We bought some pregnancy tests and started in on the "fun part." I started my two week wait after that first 14 days and I was sure I was pregnant. I had lots of little symptoms. I tested the earliest I possibly could and got a negative result. I was disappointed, but not discouraged.
The next few months went much in the same way. I started to have a nagging feeling that something was wrong. I bought ovulation predictor kits and used those to help gauge my cycles. They told me I was ovulating (they were wrong, an unfortunate problem with PCOSers like myself) and my doctor told me it was too early to do anything else. We kept at it. When we had been trying one year (which is way too long, in my personal opinion to wait to be checked even though I know some doctors will refuse to treat before then) we started going in for screening with our general practitioner. She found that my thyroid was underactive. That was very exciting. We filled my prescription and celebrated that in six weeks, we'd be back to babymaking!
More months passed with no success. In that year, I'd started displaying some symptoms of diabetes, though my glucose levels seemed to be okay. My doctor was concerned and she referred me to an OB/GYN. I was super-excited at the chance to move to a new doctor with new options for treatment.
I chose the first female OB/GYN on the list from the insurance company. We met and she diagnosed me with PCOS. (FYI - PCOS is a disease that causes tiny cysts to grow on your ovaries. These cysts produce androgen which causes an enormous imbalance in your entire endocrine system which causes lots of problems including preventing ovulation and poor egg quality. PCOS is also linked closely to some terrible diseases like type II diabetes and heart disease. It's hard to believe that my infertility may also have helped save me from these diseases later in life.)
She started me on clomid to induce ovulation, but when I went back in for my blood tests, she was on maternity leave and the evil doctor was taking her patients (about two hours late :-). We tried another clomid cycle with him, but no success. I know that God put the evil doctor in my life for a purpose. I wanted to be rid of him and we moved on to the Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE, medical speak for OB/GYN specializing in infertility).
Our journey to the "big guns" of fertility treatment happened pretty fast. Like I said, God put that evil doctor in my life and pushed me to move on. I am so thankful He did. Dr. M saw us and recommended in vitro fertilization (ivf) for our next course of treatment. He did say that he would be happy to do an IUI (insemination) first if we were more comfortable, but ivf may be a better option.
I was skeptical at first because it seemed really fast. I thought that ivf was more of a last resort kind of treatment and perhaps this doctor was just trying to get us to try an expensive procedure to pay for his new vacation home. He may have wanted that, but the treatment was right for us. I'm glad that we went straight for ivf. We got answers sooner, and it led us down the right path. We did two cycles of ivf. During both of our cycles, with medication changes and everything, my body only produced a few eggs. We only had one embryo make it to the 8 cell stage during each cycle. Both failed. The reason for failure was poor egg quality. Statistics for poor egg quality ivf cycles put success rates around 5%. Infertility treatment was over for us. I know that God sent us through the infertility maze at a fast rate. We went from trying to conceive to stopping treatment in a relatively short period of time, 2.5 years. We're so thankful for this. I'm thankful for the evil doctor. If we'd never met him, we'd only be looking for an RE now. Instead, we're moving on.
At times, dealing with the permanent loss of our fertility has been absolutely overwhelming. It's an incredibly difficult journey and we've been doing our best to move through it as best we can. We've lost our ability to be able to create a child that is part of both of us, and a symbol of our love for each other. We've lost the emotional and physical satisfactions that come from pregnancy and childbirth. We'll never completely be rid of this loss.
We knew that before we even started with infertility treatments that we would have children. There has never been any question. When our last cycle failed we started thinking we should call our friend L. (L just happens to work at an adoption agency and has been a family friend for years.) When I made that phone call I felt like I was just feeling around in the dark. L has been an amazing blessing to us. We're just beginning the process of adoption. We've completed our application for adoption with the agency, and we've created our lifebook (a book for the agency to show to prospective birth parents to aid them in choosing the right adoptive family for their child). We are beginning the homestudy process next week and then we'll just be waiting to be matched.
I can honestly say that I have felt an amazing sense of peace lately. We've felt the sting of the loss, but we're also feeling the joy of the process. There is a tiny soul out there who is just waiting to get to us. I was thinking of it (maybe over simplifying it a bit) last night like a love story. If my relationships before B had worked out, then I would never know the amazing man I've got as my partner. Our baby is out there, and we'll be united sooner or later and we won't be able to imagine if it had happened any differently. We're very blessed people and our lives are so good!
Hope you enjoy the blog!
This post is just a starting point. It's mainly focusing on where we've been because it's very important to where we're going. It's long. :-)
We started our journey to parenthood the way most people do. We talked about it and there was a period of time when I wanted to and he didn't. We talked some more and finally decided to go for it. We bought books on pregnancy and looked at the baby section in the store. We bought some pregnancy tests and started in on the "fun part." I started my two week wait after that first 14 days and I was sure I was pregnant. I had lots of little symptoms. I tested the earliest I possibly could and got a negative result. I was disappointed, but not discouraged.
The next few months went much in the same way. I started to have a nagging feeling that something was wrong. I bought ovulation predictor kits and used those to help gauge my cycles. They told me I was ovulating (they were wrong, an unfortunate problem with PCOSers like myself) and my doctor told me it was too early to do anything else. We kept at it. When we had been trying one year (which is way too long, in my personal opinion to wait to be checked even though I know some doctors will refuse to treat before then) we started going in for screening with our general practitioner. She found that my thyroid was underactive. That was very exciting. We filled my prescription and celebrated that in six weeks, we'd be back to babymaking!
More months passed with no success. In that year, I'd started displaying some symptoms of diabetes, though my glucose levels seemed to be okay. My doctor was concerned and she referred me to an OB/GYN. I was super-excited at the chance to move to a new doctor with new options for treatment.
I chose the first female OB/GYN on the list from the insurance company. We met and she diagnosed me with PCOS. (FYI - PCOS is a disease that causes tiny cysts to grow on your ovaries. These cysts produce androgen which causes an enormous imbalance in your entire endocrine system which causes lots of problems including preventing ovulation and poor egg quality. PCOS is also linked closely to some terrible diseases like type II diabetes and heart disease. It's hard to believe that my infertility may also have helped save me from these diseases later in life.)
She started me on clomid to induce ovulation, but when I went back in for my blood tests, she was on maternity leave and the evil doctor was taking her patients (about two hours late :-). We tried another clomid cycle with him, but no success. I know that God put the evil doctor in my life for a purpose. I wanted to be rid of him and we moved on to the Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE, medical speak for OB/GYN specializing in infertility).
Our journey to the "big guns" of fertility treatment happened pretty fast. Like I said, God put that evil doctor in my life and pushed me to move on. I am so thankful He did. Dr. M saw us and recommended in vitro fertilization (ivf) for our next course of treatment. He did say that he would be happy to do an IUI (insemination) first if we were more comfortable, but ivf may be a better option.
I was skeptical at first because it seemed really fast. I thought that ivf was more of a last resort kind of treatment and perhaps this doctor was just trying to get us to try an expensive procedure to pay for his new vacation home. He may have wanted that, but the treatment was right for us. I'm glad that we went straight for ivf. We got answers sooner, and it led us down the right path. We did two cycles of ivf. During both of our cycles, with medication changes and everything, my body only produced a few eggs. We only had one embryo make it to the 8 cell stage during each cycle. Both failed. The reason for failure was poor egg quality. Statistics for poor egg quality ivf cycles put success rates around 5%. Infertility treatment was over for us. I know that God sent us through the infertility maze at a fast rate. We went from trying to conceive to stopping treatment in a relatively short period of time, 2.5 years. We're so thankful for this. I'm thankful for the evil doctor. If we'd never met him, we'd only be looking for an RE now. Instead, we're moving on.
At times, dealing with the permanent loss of our fertility has been absolutely overwhelming. It's an incredibly difficult journey and we've been doing our best to move through it as best we can. We've lost our ability to be able to create a child that is part of both of us, and a symbol of our love for each other. We've lost the emotional and physical satisfactions that come from pregnancy and childbirth. We'll never completely be rid of this loss.
We knew that before we even started with infertility treatments that we would have children. There has never been any question. When our last cycle failed we started thinking we should call our friend L. (L just happens to work at an adoption agency and has been a family friend for years.) When I made that phone call I felt like I was just feeling around in the dark. L has been an amazing blessing to us. We're just beginning the process of adoption. We've completed our application for adoption with the agency, and we've created our lifebook (a book for the agency to show to prospective birth parents to aid them in choosing the right adoptive family for their child). We are beginning the homestudy process next week and then we'll just be waiting to be matched.
I can honestly say that I have felt an amazing sense of peace lately. We've felt the sting of the loss, but we're also feeling the joy of the process. There is a tiny soul out there who is just waiting to get to us. I was thinking of it (maybe over simplifying it a bit) last night like a love story. If my relationships before B had worked out, then I would never know the amazing man I've got as my partner. Our baby is out there, and we'll be united sooner or later and we won't be able to imagine if it had happened any differently. We're very blessed people and our lives are so good!
Hope you enjoy the blog!
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