Update...ish

Not much to update here...

We've slowly been telling family and friends about our decision to adopt. Well, technically we're only telling the family and friends that we put on our homestudy reference list...because the homestudy agency will eventually be contacting them and we don't want them to be caught off guard.

I can't completely explain why I want to wait so long before we tell anyone. The reasons I've been using make sense. It's just that those theories don't tell the complete story. My two reasons are:

1. The adoption process is a long time. I don't want people coming up to me and asking about it a million times when I don't have any more info to give. My memories of pregnancy are everyone(including people I don't know) coming up and asking, "Are you pregnant??" "When are you due?" "Do you know the sex?" "Do you think you can handle 3 kids?" followed by everyone grabbing my belly. Now I know getting a child through adoption and getting a child through one's own pregnancy are 2 completely different scenarios, but they usually have the same end result, and many parts of the process are similar. Which leads me to my other reason for not telling people yet:

2. As with any pregnancy, there is always the chance that things won't go as well as is hoped for. Just as pregnancies can end in miscarriage, adoption can end for many different reasons. I don't want to tell everyone we're adopting, just for it to not work out, for whatever reason.

My other reason for not telling people - and the reason I don't usually share - is that I'm not quite prepared for negative reactions. I know that there will be someone, at some point in this process who won't approve - whether because they think we have too many children, we can get pregnant, so why adopt, or anything related to mixing races. I'm sure there are other problems people will have, I'm just not prepared to be confronted by them. I need to be more educated and more prepared.

So...back to the few we have told. They are some of our closest friends and family and I knew that none of them would have problems with this process. It was so exciting to finally talk about it with someone! And, of course, they all agreed to do whatever they needed to for the homestudy agency.

I'm hoping to go on Wednesday to be fingerprinted, change my driver's license, and get my passport. Wish me luck!!