Happy Homestudy Day!

Happy Anniversary & Happy Homestudy Day to Pete and I. We celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary and completed our homestudy today! We are so excited to be through the mountains of paperwork and be officially PAPER PREGNANT! For those who have been wondering, our next step is to wait! We will be finishing our profile key in the coming weeks, which will give the agency an idea of what type of child we are going to parent. This key allows us to choose race and birthmother history. We have chosen to keep our exact choices private. We do not get to choose gender, and there is a high likelihood that we will not know the gender until the baby is born. Rest assured that we will continue to share details during the matching process as we can. We have a job to protect the privacy of the birth mother, and we plan on honoring that. We encourage you to follow this blog for all of our updates.

Last night, we posted a picture on Facebook to announce to the world that we were adopting! This picture sparked an amazing number of likes/comments/private messages and we are overwhelmed with the amount of support that we are receiving from friends and family! Thank you! But something else pretty amazing happened when we posted this picture. We found another family within walking distance who is also adopting. She reached out to us via facebook and we found that we are both in the dreaded waiting period. I'm so excited to have found someone so close that is going through the exact same thing as we are. I think I actually asked "can we be best friends?!"

Jealous Juno...

Already "parents" to our two dogs, a 5 year old American Eskimo and an 8 year old Beagle, Juno and Solo have been the center of our lives. Until tonight...we recently hired a trainer to assist us with 1. teaching Juno manners, and 2. preparing both Juno and Solo for our future lives with a baby. The trainers advice: "get a baby doll that cries". So, $15 and a noisy trip down the baby doll aisle at Wal-Mart later -- we emerge with this:

It didn't take long for Pete to figure out how to multi-task! We dressed this baby in a onesie that was given to us (we are already accumulating hand me downs!) so that it would smell like something other than plastic. Little one sucks on a bottle and when you take it away, it cries! Juno is alert and slightly interested, but we can already tell he's JEALOUS! Solo -- she hasn't moved from her bed throughout all of this! Surprise, surprise...

Here's to hoping that we don't come home from work one day with a chewed apart baby doll!

~WORDS~

What is in a word? So many things! Adoption has evolved over the years, it used to be a secret, and birth mothers were often thought of as promiscuous young girls without a future. Adoptive parents were always white and their babies were always from an Asian country. The children were "rescued" from a life much less desirable than what a wealthy American family could provide. My, oh my, how things have changed! Children are no longer "given up" or "put up" for adoption. A phrase that dates back to the times of children being physically placed upon crates in hopes that the passing train would pick them up and take them off to a better life! Are birth mothers and fathers giving up their parental rights? Yes. Are they giving up on their child? No! In open adoption, birth parents make a plan for their child and that plan includes an adoptive family who will accept the responsibility of raising their child. Gone are the days of "real parents" and "adoptive parents" -- we will simply be parents. Our child will have a birth family, but they will be our child. They will be your grandchild, your niece or nephew, your cousin, etc. They will be wanted and loved by all of their family. The journey of adoption is never ending. We encourage you to educate yourselves with positive adoption language, to avoid the negative, old school phrases that have so often been associated with adoption.