our incredible birth parents....

had dinner with us last night. they really wanted to get together one time in between our initial meeting and the delivery. we were thrilled to get to spend more time with them. we talked about the hospital plan they'd decided on.....she'll call me when she's in labor and we'll get to head downtown right away. as soon as the baby's born we'll get to see her. it's so exciting and i can't believe we're actually at the point in this process that we can even be talking with someone about a 'hospital plan.' we also spent a lot of time just getting to know them....and it's so unbelievable to discover the similarities we have....like the fact that chris and the birth dad share the same birthday!!!!

i know i've said it before but we just feel so blessed to have been able to take this journey. a few things to pray about as we get closer and closer.......

we really, really love these birth parents. i love kids their age....i spend every day with them.....and it breaks my heart to know that they will be going through pain in a few short weeks. while i'm so desperate to bring this baby home it is crushing to know how much this will hurt on their end. all through our adoption classes our social workers told us that bringing an adopted baby home from the hospital is incredible....so wonderful....and at the same time your heart absolutely breaks for the birth parents. i never thought it would be this true...probably because i never expected to feel the way that i do about them. pray that god would give chris and i, the birth parents, and their parents the strength and wisdom we'll need in the coming weeks and months......and years.

i feel so inadequate as far as the words i have to say to the birth parents while we're in the hospital......pray for our conversations.

and of course.....chris and i ask for prayers for a healthy little girl who we can spoil for years to come.......we have a few pictures of her already.....

choosing life is incredible......absolutely incredible......and ultimately.....divine.

february 11th.....

i told chris that last night, february 11th, i got to do the best thing i've ever done besides marrying him. it's a night that we will remember for the rest of our lives.....

we met our birth parents.

that line is full of so much meaning for us. it's one that really leaves me speechless (something that's hard to do for a gallerini girl). we received a call on monday night from our social worker indicating that a couple wanted to meet us. a couple who met all of the criteria that we could possibly want and that we'd expressed to our social worker but knew we'd probably have to give on a few of the items since they were pretty specific. but....god is amazing and that list wasn't too much for him and this couple just couldn't be any more perfect for us.

so......we went to meet them last night. terrifying. there is no other word to describe how the anticipation leading up to a meeting like that is......walking down the aisle-no problem, job interviews-enjoyable, gall bladder surgery-delightful, my first day of teaching ever-routine....but this was just un-real. we met with our social worker and theirs first and talked about how the conversation would go and what topics we really needed to get hammered out.......then their social worker left to go meet with them......that was an eternity of 20 minutes......

when she came to get us to bring us upstairs everything just clicked for me....it felt like this was what i was supposed to be doing, one of the things i was made for. i thought chris was going to puke right up until we walked into the room but the minute we walked through that door and saw them all of our nerves just dissolved. we knew it was "them."

we talked about a lot things for about an hour....and laughed and joked around. one of the qualities i love the most about my husband is how funny he is and how much he makes me laugh and how sarcastic he is.......our birth parents share the same qualities and it felt like we were talking to old friends. i just kept thinking that this couldn't be real....it was too good.

there is so much more that i'd love to write here.....but we feel very protective of them....and want nothing but incredible things for them.....and want to conserve their privacy.......but let me say again--they are amazing.....

we'll be seeing them again soon...getting to know them better. this adoption journey will never be over for us....but we've come to absolutely crave it and are so excited to see what else it has to offer. it has changed so many of our opinions about how adoptions work and what "normal" means and what "best for kids" means and how excited we are to build our family.

and.....that won't be far in the future.

because on march 16th....our little girl is due.

my nemesis....conquered

i am finished with my delightful scrap-book as of ten minutes ago....so these pictures are hot off the presses....now, i don't want anyone to get the wrong idea....i have a lot of respect for you ladies (and possibly some very confident men) who enjoy this hobby.

i get it...i mean what's not to love about cutting out countless pieces of paper to realize you are just one piece short of what you really needed so you get to run back to the scrapbook store for one 50 cent sheet of paper, or laying out an entire set of pages and finding one misspelled word that you already wrote in silver ink so you are forced to do the whole thing over again, and your cat constantly climbing up onto the table, counter, roof (wherever you think you can finally get away from him) and walking through paper glue and biting the corner of a picture, or sliding a finished page into the plastic sleeve and the plastic sleeve slides under all the pictures and rips them off the page, or having piles of paper, stickers, glue, scissors, etc. laying all over your kitchen table for weeks on end as you work on this glorious masterpiece.

all that to say...that i'm excited to be finished with this. i really am proud of it and it's so strange to think that this will go from our hands into the hands of someone who will be our birth mom. chris and i have talked a lot about the pictures we've chosen to put in this and would laugh about the context of the photographs and then wonder what someone else will think about them...if they'll notice something about "us" that we didn't notice or pick up on something that really speaks to them that we couldn't possibly have imagined and most importantly if they'll get a glimpse into who "we" are and if we seem to be a good fit for their child.

our home study report is still not officially filed...BUT...the reason that this book will be turned in tomorrow is that we received an e-mail from our social worker on monday requesting that i bring our book down if possible by tomorrow, the 26th, because there is a couple that she's very interested in showing our book to. they are due in march.

they are due in march. they are due in march. those are five crazy words that don't really have any finality for us....as of right now. but they could. and that has really gotten us thinking this week about how real what we are doing is. when we started this process at the end of september that's all it was....a process....and now we're being confronted with a possible end to that process. not that adoption is ever over....it's our reality forever....but those preliminary hoops, so to speak, could be coming to an end. we'll have to wait and see. the anticipation is so exciting and so very cool....we just can't wait to see how it all plays out!

we did go and register yesterday.....and just in case anyone was wondering babies r us has a special registry list for parents who are adopting....it's even labeled "domestic adoption registry list." and the strangest thing.....adopted babies need the same stuff that non-adopted babies need....who would have thought?

but i digress....below are a few snaps of our finished book.....

funny thing about journeys...

it has been so encouraging for maggie and i to read your comments, to feel your love, and add even more members to our journey. we've just about worn out our mouse double clicking on the comments link below each entry. this child will not only be loved in our home, but given the outpouring of our friends and family, it's obvious that baby terryn will be loved by all of you as well.

thank you for loving our child and us...it hasn't gone unnoticed.

for those of you who call my beautiful wife a friend, co-worker, acquaintance, sister, daughter, pass her on the freeway....i implore you to speak honestly and truthfully when she proposes another round of "name that baby". please remind her this child will be on playgrounds, in school buses, classrooms, sports teams, and one day enter the work force...i think you understand where i'm going with this. speak up now, or you'll be forever culpable to the endless ridicule...who could live with that?

i promise i'm working on this scrapbook.....

everyone asks, "sooooo, how are you coming on your scrapbook?" my response is, "sooooo, i've got about four pages done. but, that's better than nothing right? it's so hard for me. i've never really enjoyed this past-time. i'd much rather take the pictures and then put them in frames or blow them up really big and put them on a wall. my mom and my sister got the crafty (and i don't mean church gym craft sale crafty) side of the creative d.n.a. and i like to think that i got the good taste side (they both have that too--they have everything!)....humble, i know. so, i keep running into these crafting road blocks where i look at a page i'm working on and think it's missing something or it's too much or i can't think of a good caption for a picture or i can't think of what to do next or i take a facebook or etsy break and then lose the mojo. but, to prove to everyone that it is getting done i've included these pictures to show you that it's definitely a work in progress.

we're patiently awaiting our home-study to be finished. we haven't received the report in the mail yet. once we do and "sign-off" on it we'll be officially on the "list" and then i'll really feel the pressure to get this book in. but, we have nothing going on tonight....it's snowing like crazy, i'm making a pot of chili, chris is watching some really interesting cop/prison in-mate/how to remove fish hooks from your hands/how things are made/gang activity in antarctica/mating rituals of llama's, etc. television so i'm hoping to accomplish a lot.

and....not to make a promise i can't keep....but chris has told me that he's going to make a debut on this blog soon. stay tuned for witty writing from my funny husband.....maybe he'll let you know what he thinks about the names i've chosen.

now i have no excuses....

the last thing that chris and i (and let's be honest...i) have to do is put together a "scrap-book" that potential birth moms will see....we wanted some current pictures that were just "us" to put throughout the book....so, i enlisted the help of one of the best photographers that i know--lisa ruff of elite photography here in grand rapids. i grew up with lisa....and what's really cool about her is that she introduced me to chris one snowy day in college after the two of us (lisa and i) got into a car accident. that's a good story if you're ever interested! anyway, she's become such an amazing photographer and i would recommend her to anyone that needs any photography done ever......you'll just be blown away--check her out at elitephotodesign.com. she took these amazing pictures of chris and i and put together this slide show. so now that i have all these incredible pictures to choose from i have no excuses regarding why my scrap book isn't finished. i've got one week of christmas break left--it's time to get on it! (make sure your volume is turned up on your computer too....lisa didn't know this....but the song she chose to put with the slide-show is the jason mraz song that i heard right after we decided to adopt and i thought to myself....wouldn't this be a cool song to put with pictures describing our adoption process...and ending with pictures of our baby? such a cool coincidence!)

we're still alive...

i know...i know...it's been a while since we've updated our blog...but rest assured we are still in the midst of bringing baby terryn home (i'd fill you in on potential names so we could be more personal than "baby terryn" but we're in a long and bloody battle over them....i'll bring chris to the good side eventually--we took a vote at thanksgiving and ellen and i are on the same page). we've been busy getting almost everything finished throughout the course of the last few weeks. we ended our adoption classes on november 18th; our 8th anniversary. i was happy to see them end. i think that they have been the hardest part of this process so far--while the goal of the classes was various aspects of adoption they tended to focus on the "worst case" scenarios and left me feeling a bit jaded about my role in an adoption. needless to say we had a lot of "talks" about the intent of the classes and whether or not they were projecting the emotions i was taking from them.

following our classes we scheduled our home-study. this was four different meetings; one with each of us alone, one at our house, and one with us together. i was imagining a white glove inspection, investigating what kinds of prescription drugs i had in the bathroom (you know i've got some good ones too), looking under beds, and measuring how big the babies room would be. however, it was so easy and so much fun to have our social worker over for dinner.

so with that finished last thursday night the rest of the process really lies with us. we need to create a "life" book. a picture book that details our life for potential birth-moms. this is what our adoption agency will show moms as they choose who they think would best fit their expectations for adoptive parents. this is honestly one of the things i've been most excited about and i love the idea of someone looking through this book, making some connection with it, and feeling like this could be a good fit. it's really very cool for me to think of a birth mom making that decision for her child. there are so many decisions she won't be able to make for her baby once it's born so i love the fact that she can make this life-altering one for her child. this process is just so incredible the more i think about it, and so deliberate.

but....i need to get started on this book. it's a daunting task for me.....i have so many things that i think are great about our life...things i want to share....but it could get so over-whelming so quickly for someone. i mean, really.....how many pictures should i include of my sister snorting in my ear (you know there are a ton of them ellen) or my dad pretending to be george foreman or chris kissing sparrow (he's man enough to admit to it....i think)? so, that's my big job over christmas break.

i told my social worker that as soon as she gets that book from me she'd know we were ready to have a baby. whether that means she calls and says a baby was born an hour ago, a baby will be born in a week....a month.....two months, there is a three month old, etc. that will be her signal.

to close this entry i just want to take a second to credit the agency we've chosen to work with...a lot of people ask because i haven't mentioned it specifically on the blog yet. we're working with catholic social services. there are a lot of reasons we chose them....probably the most honest, but certainly not the only one, answer would be their fees. they work very hard to make sure that the adoption costs are reasonable and that after tax credits for adoptions couples won't have paid a lot out of pocket. i think it's a huge testament to what they are doing....they are placing babies in homes to be raised....bottom line.....their costs reflect exactly what it costs them to file appropriate paper work, write reports, cover legal proceedings, and offer adequate counseling services for all involved in the process. not every agency can tout that claim....it's interesting to compare their costs to other agencies who charge twice as much and from what we've heard from others don't always offer as comprehensive of an educational program. i would recommend them to anyone considering adoption. i really can't say enough positive things about catholic social services at this point in the process. they've worked hard to make this open and honest and most importantly to me....something really intimate.....something that really feels special and life-changing. they aren't just checking boxes off on a sheet of procedures....they really have gotten to know us and pushed us to think about why we believe what we do about adoption, what we're looking for, what we see in our future, and so much more.

we hope everyone has such a merry christmas..........we're excited to celebrate with family. it could quite possibly be the last one without our new addition....which in a way could be kind of sad since my mom has always threatened to end christmas stockings once we had kids.......she'll reconsider.......right mom?