Most of you who will actually read this probably already know what has (and hasn't) been going on lately, but seeing as I haven't posted anything in three months, I thought an update is well past due.
For the past four months, whenever anyone asks about the adoption process, my response is usually something like, "We could get a call any day now," meaning that maybe the agency would call us to set up a match meeting with a birth mother who liked our profile and if it went well then the baby would come a few months later.
About a month ago we received a call from our social worker about a baby that had already been born. She let us know the possible ethnicities of the baby and brief medical information, and she asked if we would like our profile shown. My initial reaction was, "I'm not ready for this!" It was a HUGE wake-up call. I hadn't believed that our life could change quite so quickly. But this baby was already in the world. If this birth mother chose us, we could have a baby as soon as the next day. I had been saying it could be "any day", but I didn't realize until this first call that "any day" could literally mean today or tomorrow.
We said yes to showing our profile (the first time it had been shown to anyone) and went out and bought a car seat and stroller that very night. After all, if we were going to become parents the next day, we needed to be able to get the baby home. By the end of the next day we hadn't heard any news, but I was definitely more excited than nervous or scared. (Sean had been nothing but excited from the beginning.) It was a weird place to be, knowing and trusting that God would place this baby in his/her forever home, wondering if it would be with us or not, wondering if our lives were about to change drastically in an instant or stay exactly the same.
Over the next couple of weeks we received occasional updates letting us know that the birth mother was still making her decision. As time went on, I felt more and more certain that this was not our baby, but continued to pray for his/her birth mother and the life changing decision she faced. Eventually we learned that having her baby placed in a family that loved their dogs was of high importance, and since we have no pets right now, we knew we were no longer being considered and we later learned that she did end up choosing a family with dogs.
I feel like a lot of people think this must have been devastating for us to not be chosen, but really it wasn't that bad. We knew that if this was our baby, it would work out, and if this was not the baby God has for us, we would just move on. There are other things in this process that are by far more difficult to deal with than this "rejection" but I can write more on that later.
We've asked to be updated on the status of our profile at the end of each month, and so far, this has been the only time our profile has been shown due to factors that we have currently indicated we are not open to pursuing. However, we received another call today regarding two different situations and have said yes to one of them, so we shall see...
Whoever does read this, thanks for being interested in what's going on. It means a lot.
