Saturday we drove from NW Indiana up the O’Hare vicinity for a family birthday party–many cousins, much fun. On the way up, I remember that we really need to get one of those plastic holders for our I-PASS….my arm got a little tired.
Popsicle Days, Poolside Nights
When we first moved into this, our “starter” home seven years ago, we often joked it was like we were on vacation. With the nice lake in our backyard (we could never live here with kids, they’d fall right in), and swimming pool down the street, some days it is hard to remember to get up and go to work in the morning.
Fast forward SEVEN summers, and here we are, two kids later, living in our starter-home-before-the-market-tanked townhouse. It IS a little nerve wracking to have that little lake out our back door. But the swimming pool down the street? It rocks. It rolls. It MAKES our summer.
We’ve just come out of a wicked heat wave, one where it was too hot to go swimming in the sweltering sun of high noon. We quickly found a great time to take the kids–swimming in the late afternoon/early evening is perfect. Everything is still toasty warm, but the sun isn’t actually scorching a hole in our inflatable boat.
The evening swims wear the kids out, but even so, bedtime has been pushed to close to 10pm. But I’m not complaining, because Sleeping Beauty will sleep…until….are you ready for this….10 AM, sometimes later.
By the time she gets up, it’s time to play a little, have a little lunch, eat some popsicles, run some errands, eat some more popsicles and then hit the pool.
I think this definitely qualifies as a vacation!
Making the Choice to Adopt
This week I’ve had some visitors from ICLW (click over to the left to learn more about this comment leaving fest).
The very first comment on my “intro” post for this month, has gotten me thinking. Michelle asked about coming to the decision to adopt.
I’ve posted a bit about how it felt at Grown in My Heart.
Here’s the thing: like so many otther things in life, I just knew. I can’t say when exactly we said goodbye to our imaginary bio child, but we did. Here’s the short version of our short stay in IF land. We didn’t really like it there, we found it involved a lot of poking and proding and sometimes surgery.
BgK and I both presented with a few IF factors, and our RE (who was wonderful and I would rec. in a heartbeat if you are in Indpls) sat us down and explained what our best shot was–IVF w/ ICSI. He gave us a lot of reading material, and I’m glad he did. I think it’s one thing to hear a simple explanation, and entirely a different matter to read a somewhat academic explanation of exactly what it happening to your body as you force ovulation, retrieve eggs, retrieve sperm, etc.
Anyway, after reading through about 75% of what he gave us, I put it all away and said no. Couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t. I was overwhelmed by simply reading about all the hormones. Overwhelmed by the possibilty of having multiples, or having an army of frozen potential babies in a freezer somewhere, or going through all of this and having none of it work. Completely overwhelmed and I hadn’t even read through the entire process yet.
So we started looking for an adoption agency. And we went to two different agencies–one for international adoptions from Russia, one for a domestic agency.
And when I heard we would more than likely be able to have an adoption placement of an infant, of newborn only days or weeks old, that was it. We knew then and there that was how we would become parents.
And it was.