The Beginning. Sort of.

So because I'm absolutely brilliant, I made a comment in my last post about how I should have started this blog back in January but then I never said why. Which I will do in a moment. First, a little bit about me. Coz this is my blog and it makes sense to mention a little bit about me.

My name is Diana. I am a 42 year old mother of 3, with a 4th on the way. No, I'm not pregnant but we are adopting, which I will talk about momentarily. I am happily married to Brad for 2 years and we've been together going on 6 years. We have 19 year old Moon Unit, (almost) 14 year old Dweezil, and 10 year old Frank (names changed to protect the innocent). They are the bi-products of my previous marriage. Brad was not married previously and has no children of his own.

About 3 years ago, we unexpectedly found ourselves pregnant. Well, I was pregnant, not Brad, but you know what I mean. We had some mixed emotions on this. Brad had convinced himself that he did not want children, since he'd had some bad relationships and didn't think he would ever have any. I guess you could call it a defense mechanism. It's easier to accept not having children if you tell yourself you don't want any. And after having 3 children of my own, I had become quite convinced that I didn't want any more. Suddenly, here we were with the prospect of having a baby! It was overwhelming but after a while, the idea sunk in and we started to get excited about it. But when the 4th month rolled around, we miscarried. I won't burden you with the details because we have come to terms with this finally. Suffice it to say that it was a pretty horrible experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

We have tried unsuccessfully since then to get pregnant again. In the last 20 years, I have gotten pregnant 3 times accidentally but when I have tried (since the miscarriage and with my youngest son) to get pregnant, it just doesn't seem to happen, without a whole lot of help. Is this the definition of irony? I think it is.

For reasons that I can't explain, I have wanted to adopt a child for as long as I can remember, since I was very young for sure. I was unable to convince my ex to adopt and at first, I was unable to get Brad to agree to adoption either. But as time passed and we continued to be unable to get pregnant, he started to change his mind. We looked at first at infant adoption but that is an extremely costly process. I know it's totally un-PC to say this but I have come to feel that infant adoption is essentially legalized baby selling. I understand that there are a lot of legal things that need to happen in passing a child from one family to another and that good families need to be found to care for the infants but to me, that doesn't explain a lot of the costs associated with adopting an infant. I digress; this is one of my many soapbox issues.

So we started looking into adopting a child from the foster care system. I mean, here are hundreds, possibly thousands?, of children who have had a rough start in life who need permanent homes, who need to know that someone out there loves them. They need loving families to care for them, too. They are just as worthy of a permanent home and family as are the newborn children.

We (read: I) started looking at the photolistings of children in foster care, waiting to be adopted, across the country. I found a couple of adorable children in Oregon and they are what started the ball rolling for us. We made the decision when we saw them to start moving forward on this process, getting our home study done in January and making our inquiries. Little did we know what we were in for.