Odds and Ends

It's late and I should be in bed.  I am on my third pack of starburst candy from our son's Halloween candy bowl and trying to wrap up a few odds and ends.  I feel like I have so much going on right now in our life and that it is going by so fast.  I'm trying to organize a holiday boutique for 10 vendors this next week, pick out and order Christmas cards, catch up at work,organize my bazillion photos saved on my computer hard drive and most importantly- finish our profile.

Writing our profile has been so difficult for us!  We are finding it hard to sit down and write all of that stuff about ourselves while not making it sound too cheesy!  I had a goal of having it done by December 1st and I really don't see that happening.  Matt and I had Friday off together and worked so hard the last two days trying to finish up the questions.  Tonight we pretty much finished them all and are almost ready to send in our first {very rough} draft.  That was way exciting for me and I did a little happy dance to the Michael Jackson video that was on VH1 at the time. 

I'm overwhelmed with thinking about getting the pictures picked out and finalizing our profile to look "pretty".  I have to depend on a few friends for help with these final pieces and so that means fitting things in with their schedule as well.

I haven't been as good at writing here as I want to be.  I think of things almost every day that I want to include but I don't have the energy to come in and write them.  They are little things that I run into- someone who shares something encouraging, someone who says something insulting or ignorant, or someone I meet that has an adoption story for me etc.  I hope to get better with these once I am finally "waiting" and don't really have anything else to be doing.

In other news, I received an email a couple of weeks ago from our adoption counselor.  One of them was an article about the "stages of waiting".  It was very interesting and even though we are not officially waiting yet, I know the feelings it discusses to be true.  They range from relief, joy, outrage, guilt, doubt, all the way up to exhilaration.  I know I was feeling relief tonight as we have our first stage of our profile nearly completed.

The second (and way exciting) piece of news from her was our Agency Update.  These are exciting to get but as you look at it I feel like there are so many waiting families and currently not a lot of babies on the way.  I was excited to get this but know I will be discouraged after waiting months and months and not being selected.  Recently, there were twins and a single placed with an adoptive family in August and currently 3 receiving pregnancy counseling with two of them reviewing their options (considering an adoption plan) and due in January and May.