Monday, July 24, 2006

Babies everywhere!

A belated congratulations to Allison, Greg and their family on the arrival of their fourth child last Thursday! Anyone who survives pregnancy in Texas during this latest heat wave deserves a medal. In this case, Allison was fortunate to get a medal who probably sleeps in short spurts and poops a lot. The best kind.

I've been watching (only kind of obsessively - is that possible?) the final few weeks of Karen's journey to motherhood. After years of infertility treatment and all of the attendant fun and games that go along with having your RE on speed-dial, she and her husband are adopting from China. Their referral will be in the next batch that go out - which could be any day, I gather. I've followed her story with a bit of self-centered interest, because before I got pregnant with Rocco, DT and I had decided if we didn't get lucky fairly quickly, we were going to pursue adopting from China. Since I really didn't think we would get lucky, I had already started immersing myself into that world - I joined the relevant Yahoo group, started reading adopting-from-China blogs, looked into groups for adoptive families in our area and DT and I researched and chose an agency. I was full into the easy part of adopting, like fantasizing about how it would be when we traveled - would WonderGirl go? DT's mom? But she doesn't speak Chinese and DT's dad does... would we take him? The whole darn family? Just us? How old would our baby be? Counting backwards from likely dates, was she be born yet? In any case, we ended up going down another road, which brought Rocco into our lives, but I can never help remembering that if he wasn't in our family, we would be about as far along in the process as Karen is. She has had delays out the wazoo and pain and anxiety that I can't even imagine. She is still waiting to see her daughter's face for the first time, and we've had nearly a year with Rocco already. There's not much I can say about that, but here's what I can say: there will be a pair of teary eyes looking at this computer screen when she posts that she's gotten her referral. That's one family that has waited too damn long to be together.

2 comments:

Jenny said...

Karen's is one of my favorite blogs, and I'm waiting breathlessly, too! :) Unfortunately, my story parallels hers a bit more than yours -- we are currently trying to adopt domestically after failed treatments -- and she has inspired me many, many times.

Ruth said...

Jennyn, I hope that your family grows also, sooner rather than later. When I was in my I'll-never-get-the-right-number-of-chromosomes-into-an-egg phase, I was just overwhelmed by the idea of adopting domestically. It's so unfair (ha! like we'd expect anything else) that when you're already down after failed treatments or failed pregnancies, the path to adopting seems mined with so many difficulties as well. I'll be rooting for you, too.