Noelle Dreams & Beyond

This past Thursday was a difficult day that turned out to be a very good day. After writing my depressing blog post, I had an acupuncture session, during which I was able to release a lot of sadness. Right after that while browsing in Ten Thousand Villages, I came across the following poem for the second time in recent weeks. (I figure I best pay attention.) Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Don't search for the answers, they could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. -Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Austria Perfect lesson. Perfect timing. Today I had another gift. I attended a silent retreat at my church with sessions of sitting meditation, yoga, mindful eating, walking meditation, and a long guided rel...

Lately I've been wondering how long a person can wait for something she wants so desperately without risking her sanity. I was lamenting to Chris that this wait for Noelle is not normal. It's not normal to be on the verge of becoming a mother and to feel like you're a mother in your heart, yet without a child, for years on end. It can't be healthy, and there's no way one can prepare for this. For most people it takes no more than a year to have a child -- a year to learn about becoming a parent, a year to create the nursery and stock up on baby gear, a year to save up and buy the video camera, a year to do all the "last before kids" things, a year to savor the moments of one-on-one time with your spouse, a year to dream about everything that's to come in so little time....But not for us. Sometimes I'm OK with this. I imagine there's a bigger plan that perhaps I can't comprehend, but that I can trust. And then sometimes I feel like I...

We had our follow-up appointment yesterday with the reproductive endocrinologist to discuss the test results from last month, and we got really good news overall. One of my hormone levels is a little high, but all the other tests came back normal. We are really lucky. Both my dear doctor friend Meghan and my doctor are optimistic about our chances of conceiving again. We are of course quite relieved to hear this, especially in light of our growing timeline for Noelle (it's looking like fall of 2009 at this point) and the seemingly impossible task of obtaining our fostering license. The latest news in foster land is that I got an email from our licensing worker last week, one week after she said I'd have the license (glad I didn't hold my breath!), and she had figured out that our paperwork was now being held up because the old background check form was used instead of the new one. "Excuse me?" I wanted to say - "You're preventing a child from having ...

I've not been a very good blogger lately. If anyone actually follows my blog regularly, I apologize, and I do hope you'll keep coming back. There's just nothing much to report. We have had a pretty low-key October - the warmest I remember ever - and the driest - thank goodness for the rain this past week! (After re-reading my post, I realized our October was busier than I thought!) We made our annual trip to the state fair this month, which is one of our favorite things in the world. We love to eat all the bad-for-you food and people-watch. We even enjoy all the displays and demonstrations, which are basically the same every year. This year we actually rode a couple of rides - a ferris wheel, which was much slower than I remember them being - and some crazy spinning thing that made me scream. It was quite the rush, and I was dizzy when I got off, but it was a lot of fun. We have some traditions that we follow every year, and this time was no different: Stopping by...

I got my hair cut short this morning. The weather is getting milder - finally! Change is in the air. Today was a good, rather leisurely day for me. I took care of some adoption business after my haircut, then had lunch with Chris at home before he went to work, then visited my mom and later ate a doughnut with her at KK (actually 2), came home and did some laundry, and walked for a long time this evening. Walking outside does amazing things for my outlook, not to mention my doggies really appreciate it, so I hope to get back to walking regularly now that the weather is getting cooler. It was great to be able to mark a few things off the getting-ready-for-baby to-do list today as well: -My new, safe plastic bottles (by Born Free) and glass bottles arrived this week, along with my sheets for the cosleeper. -I cleaned the cover on the infant car seat my sister gave me, which fits so nicely in the stroller from my friend Claudia. I'm ready to stroll! -Last weekend, I picked up the...

The CCAA has updated their website again announcing that families with log-in dates through November 25, 2005 have been matched with their children. This means that in the last month they've only matched 4 days of LID's. I read on a blog recently that they've only matched 4 months of LID's in the last year. Considering there are almost exactly 7 months from the last date matched to our log-in date of June 23, 2006, we could be looking at 21 months from now to referral (i.e. being matched with our daughter) if nothing changes. That would be a total referral wait of nearly 3 years!!!! -Not to mention the 6 months it took us from starting the process to our dossier being logged in with the CCAA. WOW. We never imagined this scenario, and our agency certainly did not prepare us for this. In fact, they gave us a projected referral timeline of 6 months when we started the process, and when I questioned this early on after reading some rumors on the web, they revised it t...

I've got that uneasy feeling again. It tends to show up when least expected. I found out from Chris upon returning from my weekend with family that he has to have his fingerprints redone for our foster parent certification. They must have gotten lost, the licensing worker has informed us -- it's been two months since we had them done and a month since our paperwork should have gone to the state for approval. What the heck??!??!? Did it really take two months to figure this out??? And how did they get lost anyway??? We literally got them done 2 minutes apart, and somehow mine showed up within days at our licensing worker's office, and Chris' never arrived, yet no one thought to check into this until we basically forced the issue. GEEEZZZZ!!!!!! I realize it's not such a big deal for Chris to go downtown and be fingerprinted again, but it's just ONE MORE THING in an ever-growing mountain of delays to parenthood. Couldn't we get a break just once? Afte...

I've had some challenging questions lately as the wait continues to lengthen. One such question was: "If you were to get pregnant, would you continue with the adoption?" I was surprised by this one, and my knee-jerk reaction was, "Of course!" But being the analytical and hopefully open-minded, somewhat objective person I think I am, I had to allow myself to ponder this for awhile. I imagine that more than one of our friends and family members have wondered the same thing, which makes it no less puzzling for us as adoptive parents, yet all the more compelling to contemplate why one would ask this -- Chris and I did just that this evening, and I'd like to share some of our thoughts and feelings in response: We did not begin this process as a last resort or even as a second choice. I have had two miscarriages, but doctors have assured me that as far as they know there is no medical reason I cannot get pregnant again and carry a baby to term. We knew this wh...

Ok, so I haven't exactly kept up with this blogging thing the way I thought I might. For one thing, our computer is SOOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOW these days, and from the increasing groans, methinks it's dying a slow death. We've made the difficult decision (after 9 years!) to let our PC go. It's been a darn good one, but the time has come to make the Mac move. It should be quite the adventure. Maybe once I'm fully skilled on our new Mac, I'll be interested in blogging more...but that's probably only part of it. The wait is wearing on me, I must admit. Chris and I have been real troupers, pretty positive for the most part, with some occasional lows - like when we've realized yet again that we needed to revise our "due date" - not an easy thing to do. Those who have been with us along the journey know that we initially thought we'd be traveling about now, then it was this summer, then we were saying fall '07, and these days we're simply saying...