Nature vs. Nurture

Sunday is laundry day at our house. Every week, as soon as we get home from church, Dude goes down for his nap and I start on the mountain of dirty clothes that has somehow accumulated in what feels like the blink of an eye. On a good day, there are only 4-5 loads to do, so the last trip outside and into the basement laundry room is over by 7:00 or so. On a bad day, I'm not finished until well after I want to be in bed.

Fortunately, yesterday was one of the good days, so by 7:30 the last load was in the dryer and waiting to be brought upstairs and folded. I had left the laundry basket out in the living room, since Dude likes to play with it, so went to get it and head downstairs. Except it wasn't in the living room. Nor was it in the dining room or kitchen. After some searching, I discovered that it, along with the slippers I had been wearing for the trek outside, had been put back in our bedroom where they're normally kept.

My first thought on seeing this was along the lines of Again? Seriously? Why does he always do this?! You see, my husband is a compulsive neat freak. I cannot count the number of times I've gotten something out, and he's put it away before I even get a chance to use it. He is no longer allowed to touch my purse or anything that is even remotely connected to my work, since the memorable day he "put away" my work bag without telling me and I ended up being late because I couldn't find it. I therefore felt quite justified as I went to find TC to scold gently remind him not to put things away before I'm finished with them. Until he told me he hadn't touched anything.

As it turns out, it was our son who felt compelled to put the basket away, along with my slippers that had been sitting next to the couch waiting for the next trip downstairs. I couldn't believe it. Now I'm living with 2 of them!

As I continued to work on the laundry, I found myself wondering whether this was something Dude had learned from his dad (nurture), or if he came from a long line of neat freaks and therefore has a genetic predisposition towards neat freakishness (nature). The interesting thing about adopting is that we'll never really know, since "General Neatness" doesn't seem to be a category in the biological parents' standard histories. :) It's funny how many characteristics Dude shares with us, which has led me to believe that either: a) nurture is a lot more influential that I originally thought, or b) we have a lot in common with Dude's biological parents. Or maybe both?

In any case, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll be spending the rest of my life looking for things that have been "put away". *sigh*

I'm back!

Did you miss me? I'll spare you all the "sorry it's been so long" blather - suffice it to say that there have been some major changes taking place in the Blooming household that have made blogging time virtually non-existent. The best kind of changes :)

For those who haven't already heard, TC and I were placed with a beautiful baby boy way back in October, and life has been quite a trip ever since! In three short weeks (which was the amount of notice we had before we brought him home), The Dude managed to completely alter life as we knew it. And I wouldn't go back to the way it was for all the chocolate in Belgium!

I'd love to post a picture of him here for you to see, but because the adoption hasn't actually been finalized we're prohibited from putting his image anywhere on the internet. The entire process is almost done - we're just waiting to hear back about when our court date will be. Then we go to court, watch the judge sign a piece of paper, and he's completely ours! I'll be keeping you updated now that I'm back at work and caught up from my parental leave.

Hooray!

Change of plans

I think I may have to amend my initial intent for this blog - life is still a bit too crazy for daily posting, so why don't we try this instead: Once each week I will post about something that happened for which I'm thankful, and then as I have time I'll add whatever other little posts strike my fancy.

Something exciting did happen this past week, which I'm incredibly thankful for. After 6 months of paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork, we finally have some movement in our ongoing quest to adopt. Last Thursday we met with a social worker from our local Children's Aid Society to review our application and conduct the preliminary interview. There's still a long way to go before we're placed with a child, but at least this means they're considering us and the process is moving along. The next step is to be assigned an adoption worker who will be with us throughout the process, so here's hoping that won't take too long ;)

Limbo

I haven't been posting too much lately, for no particular reason other than that not too much has been going on. It feels like we're in a kind of limbo, waiting for the effects of the actions that we've taken over the past couple of months.

We're now finished the home study process in our ongoing adoption saga, and have been approved as adoptive parents (yay!). We've decided that our first choice is to adopt through our local children's aid society, and I contacted them a few weeks ago to get things rolling only to run into a bit of a brick wall. Apparently, before we can be considered as adoptive parents, we have to attend an information session, which isn't too big a deal as it's a one-night thing. Then, because we've already done our training and home study, we can meet with the social worker right away and start being matched with potential children. Except that the next information session isn't until October 19th. So we wait.

In the meantime, because we did our home study and training through a private adoption agency, we also have the option of submitting a profile for that agency to use. What that means is that we need to put together a little book with pictures and a brief rundown of our life story, explaining why we'd be good parents, and give it to the agency. Then, when a birth mother comes to the agency, they provide her with the profiles of couples that meet whatever criteria she's set out, and she chooses which couple(s) she wants to meet with, and eventually which couple she wants to give her baby to. So we're currently sorting through our pictures, and waiting for some to come in from our folks (turns out we don't have to many pictures of ourselves, since we're always the ones behind the camera!), and trying to decide which ones should go in the profile.

Until we get all of that done, we wait. And surprisingly enough, I'm okay with that. I'm learning a lot about patience in this whole process, and trusting that just because things aren't necessarily proceeding the way I'd like them to doesn't mean that they aren't proceeding in the best way possible.

Slowly but surely...

Okay, so things have been a little quiet here lately. To be completely honest, life has been a little overwhelming. The process of being recommended as adoptive parents is mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting - and we're still not quite there yet. The last 2 weekends have been spent at a training course, ostensibly designed to help prepare "resource families" for some of the challenges they face and make them aware of all the processes involved. I also think it's designed to scare the bejeezus out of you.

But it's done, and we have the certificate to say that we're sufficiently trained to become adoptive parents. One more hoop successfully jumped through. One more favourable judgment of our parental worthiness.

The adoption saga continues...

It seems that we have entered another busy season! Work and life have gone a little crazy, but it doesn't stress me out nearly as much as it used to. I think I've finally come to the realization that the world won't end if I'm not able to get everything done on time, or at all. As long as I'm spending time with the people I care about, the rest will either get done when it gets done, or I'll realize that it's not as essential as I had thought it was :)


Part of the craziness is because of the ongoing adoption process, which is pretty time-consuming. We're finally finished our end of the paperwork, and are now waiting for all the security checks and references to come in. In the meantime we're in the interview stage of our home study, which involves a series of meetings with our adoption practitioner to talk about our families, our current situation in life, our relationships, and all our hopes/dreams/plans insofar as they relate to raising a family - essentially, everything he needs to know to get an idea of who we are and whether or not we'd be good parents. The last interview will also involve an inspection of our home, just to make sure there are no sharp pointy things sticking out of the walls or rats running around. At the same time, we have to take a 4-day training course, done over the next 2 weekends, designed to help prepare us for the issues surrounding parenting an adopted child.


The whole process is pretty intensive, and it raises a lot of questions that are kind of surreal. One of the things we have to do is determine what specifications we'd like for our children with regards to age, gender, race, and/or number. And how do you answer a question like "Are you willing to care for a physically or mentally delicate child?" If I were pregnant, it's not like we'd be choosing any of these things - they'd all be pre-determined, and we'd love them no matter what. But to be completely honest, nobody wants their child to have physical or mental difficulties. Does that mean such children are less deserving of a loving home than 'normal' kids? What level of 'willingness' is required? For what degree of 'delicacy'? How equipped are we to provide the necessary level of care?

Needless to say, there's a lot of thinking, talking and soul-searching going on in our household these days :)

I wrote this post back in April, mainly because I needed somewhere to express some thoughts, but I couldn't publish it yet as it contained some things that we weren't quite ready to make public. We're finally at the point where it can be shared, though, so here it is.

TC and I are infertile. We've been trying for more than two years now to have a baby, with no success whatsoever. It's been a hard process, though a learning one. At first we were so ignorant of everything that was involved (besides the obvious), but when it seemed like things weren't happening very quickly, I went out and learned as much as I could about what needs to happen to conceive and what the best ways are to ensure that the necessary stars align. All to no avail.

We went to the doctor and did all the testing only to discover that there's nothing wrong with either of us as far as they can tell. And yet every month I suffer through symptoms that could be caused by either PMS or early pregnancy, only to discover once again that I'm not pregnant.

Once we passed the one year mark, I used to get really down for the first few days after I realized we weren't going to be parents yet. It would hurt to see someone going by with their small children, not that I begrudged anyone their ability to have children. I just couldn't help but watch them and long for one of my own.

People would ask us when we planned on having kids, not realizing the hurt they were causing by reminding us of our infertility, or the choice they were forcing us to make between lying to be polite ("Not yet, maybe later, we're not ready yet, ha ha ha...") and being brutally honest ("We've been trying for a while now, but can't seem to conceive, thanks for bringing up something that's none of your damn business..."). We've always opted to be polite, even if it meant lying, mainly because we realized that everyone who asked meant well - they just didn't know better.

Our close friends and family knew. We'd told them that we were trying, not long after we first started, and most of them are terrific. But not all of them. I think one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do was keep my mouth shut through that seemingly interminable Christmas visit to my in-laws, where no effort was spared to make us aware of the fact that they wanted grandchildren and could we please hurry up and fix whatever we were doing wrong. If we hadn't been able to vent to some of our closest friends, who lived nearby, I don't know what we would have done.

I've come to terms with the fact that we seem to be unable to conceive, though no one can tell us why. I didn't realize this before, but apparently 1/3 of all cases of infertility are unexplainable. Medical science in its current state cannot always diagnose the problem. We are part of that third. Not that that has made it any easier. In fact, it makes it harder, since there is nothing we can pin it on, no scapegoat for our childless existence, nothing we can try to fix.

There are other options, I know. We decided early on in our relationship that if we weren't able to have children, our first choice would be adoption. There are too many children without families in the world for us to justify the expense of all the different fertility treatments that are available. I was ready to start looking into adoption almost a year ago, but TC wasn't.

Many of his favourite books contain themes about family and the intangible connections of blood. In the small community that he comes from, you are judged largely by the family you're a part of. Someone will do something, good or bad, and the general commentary will be along the lines of, "Well, that's what you can expect from a Smith - his uncle/brother/cousin/grandfather/etc. was just the same way." Your blood determines who you are, how you behave, what you become. He worried about not being able to really connect or understand any child that wasn't his own flesh and blood.

I had considered this reality as well, but in a different context. I come from a family replete with adoptions, and my adopted relatives have never been treated any differently, or even talked about as being anything other than family, which is what they are as far as we are all concerned. Which isn't to say that I couldn't understand where my husband was coming from, or that I thought his concern wasn't valid. It was an issue that I'd had to work through as well, it was just taking him longer to do so.

It also took him longer to accept the reality of our infertility. Throughout this whole process, he's been content to let me do all the research. He's just not that interested in learning more about it, and that's okay. Just because I felt the need to understand everything inside and out didn't mean he had to, and it didn't mean he wasn't working through it all in his own way.

After almost two and a half years, though, we're finally on the same page and have started looking into adoption, with plans to start the process in the summer.

Well, summer is now here, and the process has begun. And it's completely over-whelming. We're in the very beginning stages, which means lots and lots of paperwork. That's one of the reasons it's taking me so long to post our France pics :)

We have a stack of forms an inch thick to fill out, plus getting police and child welfare checks done from everywhere we've lived since we were 18, and being finger-printed to make sure we're not connected to any unsolved crimes, and collecting references from people to confirm we're not wackos, and medical reports so they know we won't keel over next month - I could keep going! I'm glad the system takes such care to protect the children it's responsible for, but I wish there was some way we could just tell them that we're healthy, non-crazy people and have them believe us :)

It's going to be a long process, taking anywhere from 6 months to several years before having a child placed with us, but at least we've started. And you can probably expect to see a few more posts about it before we're through!