What about the baby situation?

A lot of people already know this, but some of you might not. Kirsti (that's my wife) and I decided that we were going to adopt a baby (a girl, to be specific). We're adopting through the county, and we have gone through a long process in order to get ourselves approved for adoption. The thing is, it's been taking a long time, as we've been waiting for over a year now.

If you don't want to read the rest of this, then take this away from this post: We're fine.

We knew going in that it could be a long time until we got our baby. To be honest, we didn't expect it to be quite this long, but we knew it wasn't going to happen overnight. Has it been frustrating? Yes. Does it even make us a bit sad at times? Yes.

I won't speak for Kirsti, but I'll say that I'm okay with all of that. It's most frustrating when people, most of whom mean well, bombard me with questions about it. Luckily, I don't get that very often. I'm assuming that this is because most of my friends are guys, and guys tend to not ask a lot of questions about these sorts of things. It's not like they don't care. I just assume that they're like me, and they figure that I'll tell them something when I'm ready to tell them something. Anyway, the kinds of questions that are annoying are the ones when people ask me why it's taking so long. Or, they ask me why I don't call to figure out what's happening. As if our social worker has a baby girl sitting on her desk, but she's too busy playing solitaire to call us and let us know about it.

I will admit that there was a bit of a fear that we had fallen through the cracks and that our files somehow got shoved to the bottom, never to be seen again. I'll admit that I didn't call our social worker very much. This is mainly because I genuinely have to work up the willpower to use the phone (yes, I'm weird - I know) and have a conversation. I don't like calling somebody unless there's a reason or some sort of a point. As for calling the social worker, there didn't seem to be much of a point. I mean, what would the conversation consist of? "Do you have a baby for us?" "Ummm...no, not yet." "Okay, bye."

Still, I went ahead and called earlier this week, and that was a good decision as it has renewed my faith that we're doing the right thing. The social worker told me that we hadn't fallen between the cracks; it was just simply that there were a lot of people ahead of us. Also, since we're specific about what we want, that narrows down our options (we also want her to be a year or younger). We're also going to be adopting a child who is primarily Caucasian. (This could be the subject of another blog post entirely - it's an issue that I have mixed feelings about, but I can assure that the reason isn't because we somehow don't like people who aren't crackers like us.) She also told me that we're pretty much at the top of the stack, and we already looked like a good choice, but now that we've been waiting so long, we look like an even better one.

So, has this been hard? Yes. But do you know what keeps me holding on? The fact that once I have my child, none of this will matter.