The First "Trimester"--May 16, 2014 to September 12, 2014

I am a weird combination of Type A and B personalities.  I have the capability of "going with the flow"; however, I love setting up a plan complete with charts, notebooks, visual aids...the works.  As a result, the first "trimester" of our adoption process was right up my alley.  There were books to read, questions to seek answers to, things to research...but more importantly there was something tangible I could do!  For the previous 3.5 years we had done everything we knew to do to grow our little family, and, while it was lots of fun:) I was energized with a new set of "to dos".   As a part of my research I found a great article that helped us see the phases of adoption paralleled to the trimesters of a pregnancy.  For most couples the first trimester lasts three months, and we weren't too far behind that with four.

We worked on all of the logistics (picking an agency, home study, etc.).  Which doesn't sound very exciting, but it was nice to actually have something to do on the trying-to-become parents front that we hadn't already tried to do before.

We also used this time to turn our guest room into a nursery.  Depending upon how we are matched, it may be a call in the middle of the night or 6 months in advance.  Either way I wanted the opportunity to experience the excitement of preparing a room for our child without pressure or stress, so we put it together during my summer break.

Adoption in the 21st century is focused on openness between birth parents and adoptive parents and providing expectant parents with avenues for choosing adoptive parents that they feel will be the best match for their child.  To that end our next steps were developing a profile, website and video that helped expectant parents get to know who we are and provide avenues to reach out to us:

Lifetime Adoption Website

We also found a second smaller site to post this information:

Adoptimist

The process of putting everything together was a huge undertaking, but I really enjoyed it because we were actively doing something to move one step closer to our child...wherever he or she (or they!) may be.

Now we wait (hold on, isn't that what we have already been doing?!)...oh, that's right, this time it's official!