A Perkier Post

I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable with the weight of that last post.  It's what happens when you are sad all day and then on the internet when you should be in bed.  I should have taken it as a sign to not write public things when I showed up at my neighbor's house for a play date and hung out with my friend in her yard wearing a nightgown I've had since I was 12 and sweat pants.  At 4:00pm.


Oh my, but it's out there, and I can't redact it. (I just said redact because it makes me think of an episode of The Office.)  So anyway, I am sad.  However, today I am making good choices in my sadness.  I am choosing to know God's goodness, to enjoy Harper, to work hard tonight, to smile, and to be loving instead of ugly.  I also chose to wear actual clothes today.  So that seemed like a real step in the right direction.


I will also choose to engage in bits of happiness like this sesame street post I stole from my dear Kelsey.





... and this is a bit racier than sesame street, but pretty hilarious if you need that kind of thing.  So I am choosing to partake in this too.





Choosing to keep my head up,

Molly

this time last year

A year ago this weekend marks the one year anniversary of finding out we lost our battle to be Waverley's parents.  I don't know about you, but I really struggle with significant dates.  They really affect me.  The two things I hate most about this specific date are that I find myself reliving finding out that we lost over and over again, and that I am out of "safe memories."  Because of court appearances and the messiness of it all we actually had custody of Waverley through January.  I can say quite sincerely, though, that I haven't known peace since that day, and even though we still had her with us, we suffered with complete agony that could not be alleviated.  All of the memories of the rest of the things that happened before we lost her feel like rocks in my heart and stomach.  There were no more happy times.


A year ago on Friday Matt came home from work at 10 in the morning.  I looked up surprised when the kitchen door slammed and Harper said, "Daddy is home." I called out, "Matt?" and walked into the kitchen.  I don't know how I didn't know.  But I had no idea.  He was crying me and hugging me and saying, "I'm so sorry.  I'm so sorry. We lost.  We lost her, Mol."  I just stood there.  Frozen.


Everything I see -- pumpkins and halloween decorations, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, sweaters, coats, chili, winter jammies, cold and rosy cheeks, fires in the fire place, all of it makes me feel an ugly sense of misery that is hard to shake.  I feel like a lot of the time (not quite most of it, but a lot of it) I can be sad without being angry or bitter.  Lately though I feel angry and sour inside.  I should have been able to keep my little girl.  I should have been able to.

Home Study. Check.

Well! Last week we had our home study.  I would say it went very well.  We really liked the person that came out and visited us.  In true Matt and Molly style I over talked and Matt sporadically interjected a  thought or two.  In the next three-ish weeks our home study will be completed.  It is out of our hands at this point.  The agency is just compiling the information and writing it into the required format (required under Kansas law for the completion of your adoption).  We will have a chance to review, edit, and resubmit it.

During these weeks we will be working on our profile.  This is the document birth families review when they are selecting a family for their child.  The profile includes pictures of us, a letter we write to the birthmother/birth family, and information about what our interest, hobbies, lifestyle is like.

Hopefully there is something we will include that will connect us to the birth family.  A birth mother for instance might choose a family that lives in the country because she always day dreamed about what it would be like to live in on a farm.  That's obviously just an example, but you see what I mean.

It is important (obviously!!) that the birth family can gain some sense of calm or peace about the family they are choosing.  This is a first step towards that.  I just think about the choice this woman is making and how hard it must be to make initial choices about the future of your child based on a paper version of a family.  I am in complete awe of the courage and strength birth mothers exhibit.  We are currently praying for our birthmother and child all of the time.  She is making some crazy/impossible/amazing choices.

I am spending a lot of time day dreaming about what this new addition to our family will be like.  I am ready for some sweet baby smiles in my day.  For some reason I am completely convinced it will be a boy.  I cannot seem to even entertain the idea that it would be a girl.  I have been buying boy clothes.  This totally flies in the face of my generally rational and frugal ways.  I don't care.  I am too enthralled with the notion of having another tiny person in our house again to be deterred.  I am buying winter clothes for a tiny dude.  I'm hoping that it will be like a "if you build it, they will come" situation and that I can put these things to use soon.  I'm praying God will make it so.

With love and visions of tiny blue sleepers dancing in my head,
Molly

Our Home Study Visit (it's tomorrow)

alternately titled Cuss Word, Why Did I Say Yes to This?

It is 11:38AM.  I just read an email I received from the woman writing our home study.  She sent it last night.  She listed three options (all this week) that she could come out.  She also gave us the option of picking a later/different date if those didn't work out.  I of course want to keep things moving (you might remember I am praying for a 2011 cherub).  So I just emailed back saying yes, come tomorrow at 8:30 tomorrow morning.  Do I hate myself?  Have you ever been to my house?  


This afternoon I have to do book keeping for my accounting job.  Later this afternoon I am going to my administrator job for a bit, then to a baby shower at 7.  When will I be going through every room in my house making it look amazing and welcoming?  Read about what people typically do for a home study here when my beautiful friend Kelsey shares her account of how she prepared for hers.  Was she completely neurotic, and did she go totally over board? Definitely.  That's what we all do.  We're adoptive mamas.  Some people light candles, put on lingerie, limber up, and woo their husbands into an act that could lead to some conception.  Not us adoptive parents. We scour kitchens and bathrooms with toothbrushes, try to create an outfit that looks stylish/responsible/loving, and make muffins trying to woo an adoptive case manager into wanting to match us perfectly to exactly the right adoption situation.


No problem I keep telling myself as I look around at my messy house and overflowing hamper.  I'll just try to host this visit in the garage.  It's the cleanest part of our house right now.  Or I'll just have her linger in the kitchen while I casually open the pantry and then just frame myself in its doorway because I cleaned it up last week.  With fresh paint and everything.  Which seemed brilliant at the time.  However now the thought, "why the hell was I painting the pantry when I should have been having the carpets cleaned and the broken window fixed??"  


I was planning on just doing some light vacuuming and dusting, and a minor pick up.  I smirked a few times thinking how overboard I had gone for our first two home study visits.  I affectionately reminisced about being a younger, newer mom.  I thought about how much I freaked out and how laid back I was this time about going through this process.  Until I read that email.  Now I am coming completely unhinged.  


Oh well, even if I stay up all night power washing the outside of my house in the night, it will be worth it.  If you feel like praying for us at 8:30 tomorrow morning that would be very cool.


Much love and a heart full of crazy,
Molly

kicking asses and taking names

We are feeling happy and hopeful for the future that is to come.  We are so elated to be adding to our family.  Harper has taken to frequently asking when she is going to have a new baby brother or sister.  We have completed the home study application and are now beginning to work on our profile (more on that later) and our to do lists.  The agency that will renew our home study estimates about a month to do the home visit, review the materials we've turned in, and write the report (The Home Study).  I know it would have to happen extremely quickly, but I would love nothing more than to have a baby to celebrate Christmas with this year.  It is my extravagant prayer.  I know it is unlikely, but I am praying it anyway.


Now we are starting to kick it into a higher gear to do some things that have been on our to do list way too long.  Today, Matt cleaned out the garage.  It was a DISASTER.  No cars could be parked inside.  A jungle of junk covered one entire side.  I wondered if a possum or raccoon could be lurking out there waiting for me.  Now for the first time since we've moved in, it's so cleaned out that there are two cars in the garage!  Yes!  When Matt crossed it off The List I thought with a gleeful determination, "We are kicking asses and taking names." Yes, a clean garage is critical to bringing home a new babe.  Critical I tell you. As is changing the tricky-to-buy-the-right-size-bulb Hall Light Bulb.  As is a freshly painted kitchen.  Babies notice things, people.

We have a fair amount of work to do in what will be our nursery.  That thought makes me smile.  It's time to do the fun stuff now.  When Wavy's nursery had been empty, quiet, and still for about six months and I was sick of having to pass that awful closed door a million times a day I came up with something that has helped us so much.  We switched Harper into that room and filled it back up with a little, happy, person.  So now that room doesn't fill me with dread and pain each time I go by, and I won't have to try to use it as a nursery where it would have been hard for it to feel like anything other than Waverley's room.  So Harper's old room will be the nursery as it was when Harper was a baby.  That seems much more livable to me.   I am going to get a few new things that will make me feel like this is a brand new chapter in our family, and where I won't be fearful or anxious of our future until the finalization of this new child's adoption.  I'm sure a new contoured changing pad and a crib sheet or two can do all of that, right?


If you feel at all inclined to pray for us, I would ask that you pray for the future of our family in general, for peace for the birth family as they make their adoption plans, for the health and safety of this baby, for a speedy process to the baby, for a stable adoptive situation that we can finalize as soon as the courts allow.


Thank you!!


With love,
Molly

I Am A Medical Mystery

I really am.  I'm not talking about the fact that I have long legs but I can't run fast.  Nor am I referring to the fact that I have a freakishly small number of teeth due to my tiny mouth and large teeth and the pulling of enough teeth to make room for all of those big guys in my baby-sized mouth.  No.  I am talking about the fact that there is nothing and everything wrong with me.  Read on.  I promise I have not made up a single diagnosis.  These are all quotes from medical experts to me.


I am allergic to my own skin.  Yes.  I have these weird red circular spots that come and go from my hands, feet, and legs.  They look like burn marks.  They are under the skin and are untreatable.  Painful? No. Weird? Absolutely.


I was born with not a heart murmur but something similar.  It was a whole in part of my heart.  Am I blowing your mind with these technical medical terms?  It closed enough soon after my birth that I did not have to have open heart surgery to have it repaired.  I had regular check ups to monitor this problem until I was 11 or so.  Then they said it wasn't changing and wasn't too much of a problem.  Back in the day when we tried to get pregnant, the doctor made me have it looked at it again because they were worried about how it would affect me during a pregnancy.  When I went to my check up it was gone.  Which is impossible.  I'll come back to this in a minute.


I had a weird bump in the skin behind my knee.  It felt like a teeny tiny twig.   The doctor made a small incision to remove it (which left a bigger scar than the bump had been in the first place), and then dug around for a bit.  He put some things in a little metal tin and said there had been an explosion in a layer of my skin below the surface and he was removing the shrapnel.  Now you know I am telling the truth.  No one would make that bizarreness up.  


Next!  I had all these weird and random health problems one after the other.  I will spare you some of the graphic symptoms but included in the list were swollen ankles so big I couldn't even fit socks on -- I could barely walk, fatigue like you wouldn't believe, stomach issues, etc.  No one could figure out what was wrong with me.  For almost two years.  They checked every level of everything you can measure levels of.  I will note that all of my hormone levels were totally normal.  Then one day after some lab work I got a call to come in to the doctor's office, and they told me they thought I might have cancer but they weren't sure where, so I was screened for a whole lot of different kinds.  Side note: mammograms suck.  Then they realized it was just some cysts on my pituitary gland that secrete cancerous toxins.  Which I am happy to say I just take a pill for every day.  No problem.  (Hang in there, the point is coming!)  So! Once they figured that out, I became pretty healthy. 


We started trying to get pregnant.  It had taken awhile to get to the point where my body was healthy and this was a possibility to aim for.  Just to be clear, I was a lady with some weird issues, but who was at this point totally checked out and okay in every way.  (Skin shrapnel and being allergic to myself aside.)  I had a healthy heart, properly working everything, hormone levels all where they should be.  And no pregnancy.  I like to think this is one of God's most beautiful stories in my life.  He made sure I knew my body was as in good of a place as I ever could have dreamed it would be.  And no pregnancy.  Because!  That's not how we're doing it in my family.  Adoption is God's A plan for us.  He knew who our children would be before they were born.  And He made sure we knew they were from Him all along.  It blows my mind and fills me with joy.


This Wednesday morning I am turning in our Home Study packet.  We're ready for our third child.  And we are so, so excited to see who God has for us.  It feels nice to cry happy tears for a change.


Love,
Molly

October

Since it's the first of October, I thought it would be the best time to write my official "what I did this summer" essay.  Joking.  Oh, about which part?  The part where I said it was the best time.  Not the part where I tell you about my summer a few weeks into fall.

This summer I struggled big time.  I felt completely out of commission the entire month of June.  Wavy turned three this summer.  I hit the six month mark of when I had last seen her five days later.

This new month of October marks the beginning of The End for me.  We found out late last October that we had lost our case at the hands of the Supreme Court of Kansas, thus essentially meaning we had lost our daughter.  This month the pumpkins, the fall decorations, Halloween costumes all remind me of the last weightless memories I have with both of my girls.  We could enjoy ourselves, family in tact.  It also starts the memories of the weight of grieving that ruling, preparing our family for loss, going to court a million last times, and trying to act normal and savor our last precious time with our girl.  I decided to try to fight the sadness of those memories tonight by posting some of the things that were fun for our family this year.  We have had some really hard times behind us and in front of us, but some great ones too.  Even while I was busy with my sadness, we had some significant family memories form.

And so we have, "My Summer Vacation" by me, a 31 year old lady with no apparent shame at this random post.

1.  Our anniversary.  9 years.  We had a great night.

2.  The 4th of July.  Harper was braver than she had been in past years and we actually took in a fireworks show.

3.  We house sat for some friends we love who have relocated to the inner city.  We spent about two weeks there which allowed us to spend a huge amount of time with some of our other friends who have relocated to that same street.  We spent a lot of time working on Harper's 5th birthday party which we were having with these friends.

4.  The Friend Family and Matt and I threw  bigger birthday party than we usually would.  It was fun to have the distraction of it, fun to do with friends, and fun for a milestone-ish birthday (5?  Does that count? I'm saying it does.)  Next year she's just turning 6.  So we'll probably just invite a few friends to an empty parking lot and give them each a piece of candy and a balloon and let them play for 20 minutes.

Invite

Sack races

Beautiful people that I know.  Always invite attractive guests.  It makes for better pictures.

Individual 5 cakes for the birthday ladies.  The girls are each wearing a corsage from a young male guest.  That's right.

Pictures of more adorable guests inside the Birthday Mamas' wall of fame.

 Cupcakes.  Yes, we threw an outdoor party in terrible July heat.  Yes, we had brought out these cupcakes 5 seconds before this picture was taken and 5 seconds later it was only on the table and not on the cakes.  Yes, we had tons of water activities that are not pictured because my computer ate them.

My dear friends who always make me happy that were nice enough to have a baby 9 days after Harper was born so that when we met we would have a great excuse to become friends (for the children) and then they would feed us a lot and throw parties with us.  Thanks, guys.

 A couple of weeks later we had a small family party for Harperlooti and opened presents.  Matt picked out this cake by himself.  Nice, right?

We went to California to visit family.  Harps loved the beach.

Lastly, a picture of Harper where the lighting is bad, and with that rad pose she is doing she looks like an ad for a cheesy 80's sitcom.  

Finally, I would like to say to those of my friends and family pictured here without their permission, I am sorry.  If you have to sue I totally understand.  I will be representing myself, and when I lose, you will be compensated with the only thing we own outright.  Our 1996 Volvo station wagon.  So yeah, I think we're done here.

If anyone besides my mom is still reading at this point (Hi Mom!) thanks for reading.  It always makes me feel better to write on this blog.  You are nice for humoring me, especially when the post is really random like this.

Love,

Molly