LADDventure

How I Met My Daughters Part 4: Bonus Family

V and J are the youngest of 6 siblings who were all placed in adoptive homes within our agency. So, we have them, their older sisters are in another family, older brothers in another, and all 3 families are committed to keeping the siblings in very close contact and supporting each other as family.

It's a really strange thing to meet your kids' siblings' future parents. Then to meet them all at the same time before any of you have actually met said kids is even more surreal. Our agency provided us all with tickets to the Phoenix Zoo to just spend the day walking around and getting to know each other. I was thankful for the giraffes and snakes to break the ice, we took our first awkward family photo, and it turned out to be a lovely beginning.

Our bonus family or adoption in-laws as we like to refer to them is one of the things that is unique about our situation. This is definitely not without its' challenges but the benefits for us and our girls greatly outweigh those...

Kids maintain strong birth family ties The most important benefit is obviously all the kids being able to grow up together and know each other as family. As I've mentioned before adoption is born out of trauma, and this hopes to minimize some of that. While it is certainly a loss to them to not be living under the same roof, they know they will see each other and celebrate birthdays and holidays together and grow up as family. They have not lost contact or the relationship.

People who get it. We are quite literally in the same boat. Adoption can be very isolating, since so much is confidential, and every case is different. But our kids are all on the same case so we're dealing with the same case worker, court decisions, etc. Our kids all have the same birth family and history and it is so great to have each other as a resource. We are also not parents through the most conventional means so often don't have certain things in common with other parents. We don't have birth stories to tell, or breastfeeding war stories to exchange. It's nice to have a built-in network of parents just like us.

Big family (but part-time)
One of the most fun parts of having this big wacky family is the big family feel and our kids having lots of siblings, but we only have to raise two of them. We try to get together at least once a month and between everybody's birthdays and holidays, we have most months covered. We had everyone at our house for Easter, and it was so great to have a full house of kids and chaos, and then equally great to be able to send most of them home. Best of both worlds.

The last and final installment about meeting our girls for the first time on Friday!  - How I Met My Daughters Part 5: There You Are

To catch up...

How I Met My Daughters Part 3: Waiting & IKEA

How I Met My Daughters Part 2: Chosen

How I Met My Daughters Part 1: Red Filed

The Best News Ever

I had a technical glitch that took me far longer than it should have to fix, but I'm back to blogging, promise! Thanks for bearing with me and sticking around. To stay on top of all the latest news, please subscribe via email to get each new post directly delivered to your inbox. It will be hard to keep even close friends and family individually in the loop with each new development, so subscribing to the blog is the best way to do that.

Just Sorry

I've been a bit of a wreck lately. Feeling raw, bare, frayed at the edges. This adoption process is more emotional than I was expecting at this point in the journey, taking classes and completing paperwork. It's all good stuff, to be processing what our kids are going through as they navigate the foster system, to think about our own family history and current family situations, and to begin to prepare to parent these littles. But, it's hard and it touches those bare wires of emotional nerve endings you may not have realized were exposed.

On top of that, I'm nearing the launch of my book, and feeling nervous, elated, tired... all of the above with plenty of promotional work ahead. After last week with something scheduled every night including three-hour adoption classes on two different nights, I found myself incapable of dealing with even the smallest of inconveniences or stresses. A monsoon made a mess of our outdoor furniture on the one day we hadn't prepared and brought it in ahead of time. Our cushions were soaking wet, and the wind shattered a potted plant and my nerves. Then we got two pool fence estimates yesterday and for some reason, discussing them with Mr. Ladd sent me over the edge. I snapped at him, irrationally yelling at him over the color of the fence. Hmmm. Clearly not about the pool fence.

So I told him to leave me alone, and sat sulking upstairs, contemplating apologizing and combining it with some explanation of my behavior when I realized there was none. I let myself off the hook, and decided to offer a much more sincere apology. Sometimes things are just hard, and we don't react well to them and there is no good reason. So I went downstairs with lowered defenses and said a simple, "I'm sorry. I was wrong. There is no reason for me to react like that, and I'm sorry." I am not usually the one to offer the first apology when we're not getting along. Mr. Ladd is a much bigger man than me in that arena. When I do offer it first, I often buffer it with an explanation of my feelings and how the whole situation could have just been avoided in the first place. But, I'm learning to just say sorry. Sometimes what you don't say offers the most sincere and honest apology.

Next in May

It's May already, and I can't believe 2014 is almost at the halfway point! My allergies think otherwise, but the desert is just beautiful this time of year, with everything blooming. While it may just now be starting to feel like spring in your neck of the woods, here in Arizona it's basically summer. The days are getting longer and warmer, and we're hanging on tight to every cool breeze or cloudy day.

My theme word for the year is Next, both a reminder to take one thing at a time, and an encouragement to be open to new opportunities and set some goals. Each month, I take time to look ahead at what's next, so here's a peek at May!

Next in travel... We'll be staying home this month, but some great friends are travelling here! We're honored to be hosting two of our favorite couples from Wisconsin for a couple's vacation/bachelor/bachellorette weekend mid-May. The plans are shaping up to include a Friday night out in Scottsdale, a pool party on Saturday and golf/whatever the girls decide to do on Sunday. Really looking forward to it!

Next in writing...The book is with the proofreaders!  Round One of edits and rewrites is complete, and we are in the very final stages of getting the book ready to go.  I truly can't believe it, and am so proud of this book. I'm nailing down an official release date and other details this month, and can't wait to share them with you. Head over to The Candid Teacher and join the email list to stay up to date on book news!

Next in adoption... This is document gathering month. As I talked about in this post, we are gathering up all our important papers and getting things in order to start our classes next month. We're getting more and more excited to meet our kids and be a family of four (well six if you count the dogs, which we totally do).

Next in food... Unfortunately our swimsuit season starts a little earlier here than other parts of the country, so food has consisted of lots of fruits and veggies to get these thighs ready for the light of day. Operation Hot Mom is in full swing. More on this soon, too.

Next in faith... Still thinking on a great many things I'd like to write about here. I've had lots of really interesting conversations lately which have my wheels turning about what I believe and why.  But in the meantime, we are just absolutely loving the friends we've met through our small group at church, and can't believe we've only known them a year and a half. All that matters is God and people. I couldn't agree more with this statement right now.

What big plans do you have for this new month?

If Becoming When

When I was a teenager, I swore up and down I wouldn't have kids.  Pregnancy and labor freaked me out, to be honest, and I couldn't imagine actually going through either.  Into early adulthood and early marriage, I still didn't feel the deep desire to be a mom or have baby fever, but something was glimmering on the horizon.  I could see the potential to want it someday.  I knew one or both of us may change our minds at some point down the line, so my 'never' turned into an 'if'.  "Well, if we ever have kids..." I would say, like a long shot - a distant, abstract idea in the future.

In the last few years, Mr. Ladd and I still never really caught the baby bug, but something deeper was brewing.  Many of our friends and family started having kids, and we started having some serious talks about the future.  We still didn't necessarily long for a baby or all the changes one would bring, but we realized we wanted a family.  We wanted to be parents and have family around the table during the holidays.  We wanted family vacations and grandkids, and all the good, hard, meaningful stuff of family.  So we started casually trying to start one, and then more intentionally, and things weren't happening like we thought they would, so 'if' became kind of an ominous cloud of doubt.  "What if we can't get pregnant?" "What if something's wrong." "If we have kids..." we said cautiously, not wanting to jinx it.

Our doubts were confirmed, and we were diagnosed with infertility last summer.  We sat with that for a bit, aching with the constant knowledge that a door we were so hesitant to even open was suddenly slammed shut.  We were told that going straight to In Vetro Fertilization would be our best and really only viable option given the circumstances.  We'd always said the fertility treatment route was not for us.  We knew we didn't want to go through any invasive procedures before even getting tested, but now what?

Adoption had always been an option.  But it had all been hypothetical up to that point; if we had already been trying for a while, if we were diagnosed with infertility, if we were letting go of the possibility of biological children.  But those ifs had become whens, and those things were actually happening to us.  Now it was time to grieve the biological children we would most likely never have, and actually step nervously, but with a flutter of anticipation and excitement, into adoption. 

As we start meetings, classes, and have tangible paperwork in our hands to adopt hopefully two siblings from state care, if has become when.  I'm catching myself still saying, "If we have kids,..." and quickly changing it to "When we have kids..."  If has become when in really difficult but beautiful ways, and while there are so many unknowns in adoption, we do know we will have kids, it's just a matter of when.  That feels good, and it's something to hang on to.  It's a vast improvement over the uncertainty of if.

Adoption Update #2

Friday we had our initial intake appointment/home visit with the adoption agency we chose.  I was extremely nervous leading up to it, but tried to just channel all that nervous energy into cleaning like a crazy woman.  Mr. Ladd was playing it cool, which totally helped me, although as you can see he was anxiously awaiting the meeting as well. The adoption supervisor told me on the phone that there would be no need to prepare and this wasn't an inspection or anything; that they just liked to do the first meeting in the home to get to know us in our environment a little bit.  But you try to have the first meeting with the people that make you parents and try not to clean as if a white glove inspection was taking place.

As with most things though, the nerves were for naught, because it went fabulously!  Our dogs were incredibly well behaved, which was another worry of mine because they can be a bit crazy with new people, and we actually really enjoyed the meeting. One of the main purposes of this visit was to go over all the requirements and make sure we were clear on next steps.  The more we learned about the requirements, the more at ease we actually were that the necessary steps were very doable, and that we had definitely picked the right agency.  They offer tons of support throughout the whole process.  We really liked the adoption supervisor, even chatting with him for an hour past when our appointment was scheduled to be over, and he told us he was really excited about us and didn't think we'd be waiting too long for a placement.  Seriously the only thing we learned that was a bummer is we definitely will have to be putting up a wrought iron pool fence. It's an agency requirement, and the removable mesh ones won't cut it, which means our yard will be sporting a bit more of the prison chic look, but if that's the biggest disapointment for now, we'll take it.  Plus, in the long run, a sturdy pool fence will provide some extra peace of mind, I'm sure.

So, next steps...

A pool fence guy is coming out to talk with us about specifics and requirements and what we can do for our space.

We start 12 weeks of required PS-MAPP training classes mid-June.  They will be once a week for 3 hours each week, and we need to get the following in before then:

• Agency application
• Fingerprint Clearance Card
• Criminal History
• Counseling Release
• Income Verification
• Guardian Form
• Copies of marriage license, birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, rabies vaccinations and licenses for dogs, auto registration, and insurance

We get physicals, and do a bunch more paperwork and tell our whole life stories basically in our personal profiles (Good thing I'm a writer) while going through training.

Within 60 days of completing our training classes we'll have our final home visit and inspections completed, and hopefully be certified and ready to accept placements.

We are really excited, and it's definitely more real now that our to-do list is tangible! 

We'd love for you to join us on our journey to adopt (hopefully two siblings) from foster care.  I'll be keeping everyone updated via the blog since I'm sure I will run out of time along the way to individually share details with everyone.  If you'd like to follow along for what's sure to be an interesting story, make sure to sign up for all the latest posts by just entering your email address and hitting subscribe in the upper right corner of the blog.

Adoption Update #1

We are adopting from foster care, and the paperwork trail has started!  There have been some recent developments on the adoption front, so I wanted to share a quick update.  We started the paperwork with our initial questionnaire and made a night of it.  About a week later, I got a phone call from an adoption supervisor with our agency to schedule an initial home visit for March 7th!  This visit won't be anything we need to prepare for (except that I'm sure crazy nervous cleaning will ensue beforehand).  The purpose of the visit is just to get to know us, explain all the requirements and paperwork, and get us signed up for the mandatory PS-MAPP training classes.  We have begun the fun!

I'm sure this whole journey will get a whole lot crazier soon, so I would love to use this blog as a space to post regular updates and keep everyone informed.  Subscribe to get posts by email and stay up to date!

What's So Special About Valentine's Day?

Definitely not the mediocre chocolates in cardboard heart boxes. I could do without the commercial store bought valentines that kids trade at school, and don't even get me started on the chocolate rose which is neither real chocolate nor real rose. 

But there is still something special about Valentine's Day  in my opinion.  I think in our busy monotany of life it's nice to have a day set aside with the intention to love.  I don't know about you, but love takes a lot more intention than I realized at first, and we could all use a little help showing it more purposefully.  Of course it's not the only time you should show people you care, but what's wrong with a good excuse to do just that? 

Februrary 14th is more than just a warning to make that dinner reservation, or grab her favorite flowers after work.  It's a reminder to notice what you love about someone, to look for the good, to put in the extra effort.  Sometimes we need reminders to pay attention and recall the butterflies we had at the beginning and what still makes it work so many years later.  What's so special about Valentine's Day?  You decide.  Do a little something special for someone you love.  But, how convenient to have a heart shaped date on the calendar reminding us that those little special somethings really do matter.  Happy Valentine's Day!

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc

My Kids Won't Be Lucky

Tonight we will order some pizza, sit down to fill out our initial paperwork for the adoption agency, and make an evening of it.  Mr. Ladd’s brilliant idea was to document each little step of the adoption process with a video log in addition to blogging about it, so we will have a sweet reminder of how our family grew and something to share with our kids in the future.  So that’s what we’ll be starting tonight!

We are learning so much about adoption, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of something you see it from a different perspective.  My goal in blogging about our experience is to simply share our perspective and all that we are learning.  Hopefully along the way we can help to make our little corner of the world a more understanding place.  We have received so much support and many kind words already in sharing our news, but one word in particular has me thinking.  That word is lucky.  Usually it’s said something like this, “Those kids will be so lucky to be in your family,” or “Oh what lucky kids you’ll have.”  When people say things like that they mean to tell us we’ll be good parents, or that our kids will have such a great life with us.  I’ve never been offended by it, and if you’ve told me how lucky my kids will be, please know that I take it in the way it was intended, as a compliment.  But, I have to tell you, that lucky is just not exactly how I would describe my future kids. 

No matter what, adoption involves pain and loss, and in painful situations a sensitivity to the words used to describe them matters.  Domestic infant adoption involves the painful separation of a child from their biological mother, and the pain of that birth mom in her very real loss of the child she lovingly chose for someone else to parent.  International adoption involves the pain of the circumstances that have orphaned that child, or rendered their family unable to care for them, and the very real pain of a child leaving all that is familiar to him or her culturally, linguistically, and placed in a completely foreign environment. 

Adopting from foster care, as we are doing, involves its own painful set of circumstances, and kids in the foster care system are anything but lucky.  It’s not lucky to be born into a situation where your biological parents are unable or unwilling to take care of you.  It’s not lucky to be abused or neglected.  It’s not lucky to be taken from everything familiar to you, and moved to one or more foster homes while you wait for a permanent family.  It’s not lucky to possibly be separated from your siblings.  Most likely, my kids will not feel lucky to be eventually placed in our home, with unfamiliar everything, and told that we are their new family.  They will be scared, angry, confused, and probably feel anything but lucky. 

To say that they are so lucky implies that they should feel grateful for something that is quite possibly terrifying for them at the moment, or that they got some sort of special experience, when in reality they have likely gone through things many of us can’t even imagine.  Every child deserves a family, and that is what we’re hoping to provide.  If anyone is lucky in this scenario it’s us as parents.  We are the lucky ones to play a part in the rest of our kids’ story, that we'll get to call them son or daughter, and we are lucky to have so many friends and family supporting us along the way.

I read a quote recently that sums up how I feel about adoption perfectly...

”A child born to another woman calls me mommy.  The magnitude of that tragedy & the depth of that privilege are not lost on me.” - Jody Landers

 

photo credit: cloud_nine via photopin cc

Adoption Announcement

Yesterday I shared our big news. We are adopting!  Thanks so much for all of your support and excitement.  I had tears in my eyes reading all of your congratulations, and it means so much to us. 

One of the things that has been very hard for me about our infertility diagnosis is the little "normal" exciting things you get to do when telling everyone you're pregnant.  I felt sad about the idea that we would never have a fun "we're expecting!" announcement, with a sonogram picture or growing bump to show off.  So, I was determined to dream up a creative, thoughtful way to tell our families that we were adopting.  They knew that we were considering adoption, but they had no idea that we had officially decided to adopt from foster care, or that we had already begun the process.  So we thought it would be great to surprise them at Christmas time when we'd be seeing them all in person. 

I used some pictures taken by the amazing Gretchen Wakeman from our holiday mini session package to create an announcement on treat., a relative of tinyprints, where I made our Christmas cards (more to come soon on how much we loved both Gretchen and our Christmas cards).

Then, during both of our family Christmas gatherings, after presents were opened and wrapping paper decorated the floor, we gave each family member this card...

front of card

 

inside of card

 

back of card (my favorite part)

We made them all open it at the same time, and also gave them each a book for relatives and friends of adoptive families.  It's a fantastic book, full of practical answers to common adoption questions and great ideas to support an adoptive family.  We're enlisting our support team early, because I'm sure we'll need it more than we know.  I would highly recommend this book to anyone considering adoption or with a family member or friend going through the process:

Click for link to book

There were hugs, tears, and "congratulations" from everyone, and we couldn't have asked for a better reaction.  We had successfully kept things quiet, knowing we wanted to tell them all in a special way, and it was totally worth avoiding the topic for a couple months. 

We have already attended an orientation, and our next steps will be to choose an agency and start taking our mandatory classes to be licensed to adopt by the state.  During that process we will complete LOTS of paperwork, get a home study done, and gather everything to meet the requirements.  At this point we will not be licensed to be a foster home, but are only interested in being licensed to adopt children from the foster care system who are waiting and available for a permanent family. 

On this blog, I hope to share lots more in the weeks and months ahead about how we came to our decision, the things we've learned already, and the things we will learn along the way.  I'd love for you to follow along and subscribe by email to stay updated as we go through this process, and join us in the adventure.

This is happening!

Showing Up Creatively

"If you're not putting yourself out there, somehow risking rejection, you aren't really inspiring. You're performing."  - Jeff Goins 

 

Have you ever been working on your own thing, struggling through some sort of creative endeavor, and just become stuck?  More than stuck actually, paralyzed would be a better word.  I'm writing a book, but lately writing a book consists of generally avoiding my computer, even preferring cleaning the toilet over actually having to face that same troublesome sentence or half-finished chapter one more time.   So by writing a book I mean engaging in lots of negative self-talk, unwarranted criticism and general loathing of every word I type.

Creating something from nothing seems intimidating and like too much pressure, so I hide away.  I don't write, but I also don't cook, decorate, or take pictures.  I avoid making anything that I know I'll just be disappointed with later.  Even though great writing inspires me, when I get like this I don't even read.  I tend to avoid books or articles, especially ones on the same topic that I'm writing about, sure that mine will pale in comparison and they've already said everything I plan to say, only better.  Suddenly everything everybody else has ever written is Pulitzer Prize-worthy and my words are rubbish.  I find myself  amazed at the ability of other writers to finish a sentence or turn a phrase, and the actual completion of an article, blog post, or (gulp) entire book seems like an impossible feat to me.  I wonder, "How'd they do that?" even though I know deep down that they did it the same way I'm avoiding right now.  They did it by sitting down at the computer every day, forcing out one rough thought at a time, being accountable and vulnerable to share crappy writing with other people to get some constructive criticism.   They kept showing up, and they showed up enough times to assemble those thoughts into a finished product, completing what they started.

I get frustrated, knowing these things full well, yet still finding myself unable or unwilling to do them.  But then, weekends like this past one happen - I hang out with my brothers and their band and see them showing up, with migraines and no sleep and very little pay after nine years of trying to make this thing go.  And it's going, slowly but surely, it's going.  They are creating something, and following dreams, and showing up for what they were made to do.

I meet the other band who played with them this weekend and is even earlier on in the journey.  They are showing up after driving across states, in vehicles that need gas and with a baby along for the ride.  But they show up with unbelievable talent and creativity and such an incredible sense of humor and soul that it blows me away. Then they drive 19 hours back to their day jobs.

It wasn't just performing, it was inspiring because I knew what they were risking.  I knew how much work goes into what they do.  I knew they were showing up even when it sucked and they didn't feel like it, or were unsure of what would happen next.  It's easy to hide and not take the risk to create something because someone might be doing it better, or because it might not turn out the way you planned.  But, I'm realizing creativity and inspiration doesn't happen in one brilliant moment of perfection, but in showing up for all the not so brilliant ones consistently, working hard, and putting yourself out there.

I think this process of writing a book is teaching me a lot about showing up.  Thanks Citizen Way and I Am They for helping the lesson along.  You inspire me.

Here's a little video peek of their Arizona mini tour!