150 Steps...In the Present Moment

It's funny that the title of this blog is "In the present moment..." "Why is this funny?" you ask. Because for the last few weeks I have been anything BUT present for each moment. This is the time of year when my work life ramps up to Warp Speed 10. The Universe and my life are flying by... I'm SO busy right now that I'm not at all in the moment. There's so much rattling around in my head. Even with my "to do" lists and all of the technology I use to try to keep myself organized - most of the time I'm issuing myself mental reminders every ten minutes. It's hard to be present when you're mind is racing with thoughts like, "Don't forget to add X to your to do list" or "Remember to call X when you get back to the office" or "You didn't add X to your thank you note list. Take care of that when you get back to the office." Even after I add these reminders to my actual to do lists - ...

From our adoption profile: Dear Expectant Mother, Writing this letter to you, we recognize that neither of us can know nor fully appreciate what you are experiencing - the decisions you must make, your worries and fears, and your hopes for the future. In considering adoption, we recognize that you are making the most significant and possibly difficult decision of your life. We have nothing but respect for you as you move through this time in your life and would feel incredibly honored to parent your child. We're Jennifer and Chris and have been married since the spring of 2001 after becoming friends during college, going our separate ways, and then reconnecting and falling in love. Here's what we want to share with you about us: we're happy, we're best friends, and we're not perfect. Our house might not always be spotless and our jobs may drive us crazy sometimes, but we still manage to make each other laugh daily and try our very best to enjoy each day and wh...

Finally, after three weeks of long days, late nights, and full weekends of work, we managed to find some time to get some work done on our placement agency profile materials. In doing so, we made a discovery that may not be terribly uncommon – in the process of selecting the myriad photos required (I'll let my wife  explain what is expected of us ), we suddenly realized how few of the thousands of photos we've taken since we got our first digital camera 7 years ago actually have us in them. What will you find in our photos? Cats Lighthouses Our gardens Rocky promontories with crashing waves Cool Building Family members Christmas trees Cats Fascinating stuff in museums Our friends Our friends' kids Wildlife Interesting creatures at the zoo Renaissance fair performers Before and after photos of the inside of our house Did I mention cats? Notice anything missing? It would appear that we've been so busy taking photos of other people, places, and things...

"Dear  Birthmother ..." This is how we are supposed to start a letter to a woman who is pregnant and contemplating giving up her child for adoption. I have incredibly mixed feelings about writing this letter. In the first place, I truly dislike the term " birthmother " - as if the woman who is giving birth to the child we may be raising is just there to give birth for us and that's it. Eeeuuuwww . No. This woman is a human being - a mother - who is likely making the most difficult decision of her life - a decision that will have lifelong consequences and implications for her, her child and certainly for us should she decide to select us as the people to raise her child. We decided to address our letter as "Dear Expectant Mother." Whether the facilitators will let that pass is questionable at best. ALL of the other letters we've seen from other prospective adoptive parents that use these facilitators read "Dear  Birthmother " and...

30 photos... That's the  minimum  of how many we have to send to the adoption facilitators so they can build our various web and print "profiles." Action photos of me... Action photos of Chris... Action photos of the two of us together... Family photos... Close-up portrait-y photos... Our pets and our house... As I sit here  clackering  away on my laptop, Chris is busily working at his computer pulling together the photos we've selected to put on a CD to send along to the facilitators. This is a Herculean task. We've never, aside from our wedding, taken any formal portrait photos together and most often we end up taking photos of each other, but rarely do we have a photo of us together as a couple. So finding those has been especially challenging. The facilitators indicated that they don't want us to be wearing hats or sunglasses in our photos. Crap. Since many of our best pictures were taken while we were in Maine on vacation, we're w...

After the excitement of completing the home study, the adoption effort ground to a halt, not as a result of any problems but simply the intrusion of the rest of our lives. October is a hellacious month for both of us with regard to our jobs, a convergence of multiple events, accelerating projects, and long days. As a result, we've made virtually zero progress in preparing our profile materials for the placement agency. It's frustrating to have reached this point only to come to a screeching halt to deal with other things. It doesn't help that we've both been getting home so late from work lately. Forget about writing our birthmother letters or even writing brief entries in this blog...we barely have the energy to say hello and spend a few precious moments together before passing out at night and then waking up and starting all over again. Today was a grey cold Saturday tailor-made for working on the profile but I instead spent it at my desk working on work because th...

It hit me yesterday for the first time that there will be a baby in our house fairly soon. A baby. In our home. Part of our family. And I'm going to have to take care of this completely helpless creature. A being who will be totally dependent on me. Oh dear. I'm suddenly very nervous. I've been so focused on the process of  adoption  that I haven't really taken much time to think about actually  caring  for this baby: the actual day to day...feedings, diapers, swaddling (how DO you swaddle a baby???), burping, rocking, getting the baby to nap, keeping to a schedule... Suddenly I'm feeling like Prissy in Gone with the Wind, except instead of yelping loudly "I don't know  nothin ' 'bout  birthin ' babies!" I'm crying out, "I don't know  nothin ' 'bout  carin ' for a baby!" I have  What to Expect in the First Year  sitting right on my bookshelf, but have yet to actually crack it open. Guess I...

My friend G calls me on Saturday sounding very glum. She had yelled at her stepson. "I just lost it," she laments. And she proceeds to regale me with the tale of the rather horrible fight that they had at the breakfast table. She then tells me what a terrible mother she is. "All parents yell at their kids at one time or another," I say to her. "We're only human and sometimes no matter how hard you try to be patient you're going to lose it and you're going to yell." We talk for a while longer. I have no idea if my words reassure her (particularly in light of the fact that I'm really wiped out and fighting some kind of bug. I have no idea if I'm making any sense at all.) I imagine that no loving parent wants to yell at their kids (I certainly don't), but sometimes patience finally takes a flying leap out of the window and there you are...you find yourself doing the thing you dread doing...yelling at your kid. My mom is n...

Homestudy  - DONE and in the hands of social worker M who is soon going to be writing our  homestudy  report. Application to the adoption facilitators - DONE and MAILED. E-mail from the marketing folks at the adoption facilitators - RECEIVED. Marketing gal S describes in the e-mail our next steps to get our online profile designed. She sends us a long list of photos and writings that we need to submit ASAP to get our profile up and live FAST. Now, here's the funny thing... We're not going to send the stuff to marketing gal S ASAP. We've been cruising along these last few months trying to get everything done in a timely fashion to get us that much closer to being Plus One. We've been efficient. We were frustrated at times when the wait for certain pieces of the  homestudy  paperwork seemed to take forever. We were in a hurry! And now... Well, now we kind of have to put the brakes on. It's not that we don't want to get  Schmoopie  s...

Naming kids is tough. Do you go classic? Clever? Make something up? Something you don't usually associate with the name of a person? I'm leaning toward a name that reflects our adoption journey. After all, if Gwyneth Paltrow can name her daughter "Apple" and Penn Gillette can name his daughter "Moxie Crimefighter", is it so wrong to consider naming our little one "Paper Work"?