Ever have one of those days that starts out awful and just gets weird?

So this morning all of our kids were up by 6am. Joy.

I got the older two to preschool and took Penny with me to get an oil change.

Turns out our car needed a lot of other stuff too. So that wound up costing $400.

I went to pick up Abby since she gets out of school a while before Nick does, but when I got there the teachers said Nick was really upset. They thought he had a hangnail because he wouldn’t let them get a good look at his finger. It was actually a 2 inch long splinter that was jammed all the way underneath his fingernail, all the way down to the cuticle. Ouch!

Luckily one of the other preschool moms is a nurse and she got it out, but it took me and the preschool director holding him down to get it out. (Thanks again Renee and Michele!)

It was actually kind of cute afterwards because he was really excited to get to wear a bandaid on his finger just like daddy. (Eddie smashed his finger trying to fix our garage door opener last week.)

When it was time to take Nick home I told him he could have anything he wanted for lunch since he had a rough day. He picked Burger King so we went through the drive-thu and brought it home.

Then the dog ate his chicken nuggets and he cried some more. (He still had a few so it wasn’t a complete tragedy.)

In the mean time the baby had a huge diaper blowout.

Then Nick informed me he’d had an accident. The poop kind.

Thankfully, then everyone took a nap for a little while.

After getting changed after nap time because they still wear pull-ups to sleep, neither Nick or Abby wanted to wear pants. I’m way too tired to fight about it. So Nick is running around in toy Story underwear and Abby is wearing a pull-up and a turtleneck. And one sock. It’s a fashion statement.

Then my pantsless children started having a very loud conversation through the window with someone who was apparently standing at our front door.

The loud conversation woke up the baby, so I took a crying baby to the door where a young man, maybe 19 or so, politely said to me, “Hello, ma’am, I was wondering if you’d be interested in my meat today?”

“Um, I’m sorry, what?” (Mostly naked children still hopping up and down and yelling from the top of the steps)

He pointed down the block to a truck he was driving. Apparently he was a meat delivery man and was finished his deliveries and offering to sell me his left-over meat at half price.

I’m sorry, I don’t buy meat from strangers selling it out of the backs of trucks. Especially when the big pitch is that it’s the meat no one else wanted. Did we really wake the baby up for this?

“uh no thanks. I just went to the grocery store yesterday.”

Then I went to the top of the steps and found the dog eating the Lincoln Logs, which were now in a million tiny pieces. Because, really, what I wanted to deal with today was more splinters.

I’m not complaining because I have way too much to be grateful for this week. Like our time with Eddie’s parents who took us all out to lunch yesterday. Our settlement on Friday. The church’s clothing exchange on Saturday where I always find a few nice things for my kids. Being in a position to not have to buy meat out of the back of a truck. Those kinds of things.

But this one?
She goes to the highest bidder.

November is National Adoption Month & next week I’ll be sitting on a panel to share our story. I got an email a few days ago containing some questions for our panel, and most of them were similar to the ones I get all the time. “How did you know you were ready?” “What are the steps I need to take?”etc. I thought this would be a good time to share our story here as well.

As to the first question, honestly, it was just a deep, gut-wrenching need that I knew to be a calling from God. I didn’t hear any voices, I just felt a very heavy void and I knew in my heart that this was the way to fill it, the same way that you know eating a sandwich will help you fill the void in your stomach when you are hungry. It was primal and instinctual and I didn’t see it as my choice to make. At first Eddie didn’t feel called at all. In fact, he told me more than once he thought I needed to see a psychiatrist. We’d only been married for about 6 weeks and we were only 22. It was a test of our marriage, but I was very convicted I couldn’t go wrong following what I believed to be a calling from God. So I did what any good wife would do, I nagged. A LOT.

As to the steps to take, they are very different in every situation. We went through foster care in the state of Florida, because that’s where we were living at the time. Private and international adoptions are very different, other states are different, and most adoptions in Florida are different than the way ours went down. All I can tell you is our story. And it’s a long story, one that spans over the course of several years, so I figured the easiest thing to do would be to share it as timeline. Then I will post a Q & A session with some of our most commonly asked questions.

Here we go…

Our Journey Into Parenthood:

June 2006-Eddie moves to Florida to start his first job after college. Steph follows a few weeks later, on June 19th, after finishing her first year as a teacher, to start looking for a teaching job. She finds a temporary summer job at a gym in the meantime.

September 2006-Steph and Eddie get married and are starting a new life in a new city, Tampa, FL.

October 2006- Steph starts obsessing about adoption & Eddie thinks she is nuts (She also started a new teaching job this month, which came with an incredible amount of stress, and is dealing with the ramifications of leaving her previous job, which did NOT end well. Those are both stories for another time.)

Winter 2006/2007- Steph spends 6 months nagging nagging non-stop and researching adoption.

March 16,2007- Nicholas is born in Tampa, practically 9 months to the day after Steph moved here. We believe this was not a coincidence.

April 2007- Go to orientation with the foster agency, Eddie reluctantly agrees mostly so Steph will shut up. (We don’t know it yet, but our son is 6 weeks old and living with his birth mom in the Salvation Army homeless shelter. He will enter foster care in just a few weeks.)

Summer 2007-Get fingerprinted, fill out paperwork, get approved for classes

September 2007- Take a 10 week parenting class, during which Eddie’s heart changes dramatically. (We don’t know her as his foster mom yet, but Debbie, the woman taking care of Nicholas, visits our class to share her story and we meet some of her children.)

Fall 2007- Several home study interviews

January 2008- Home Study is approved

Winter/Spring 2008- Wait……Our family is presented at a few “match” meetings (when the social workers meet to decide which family they think would be the best match for a foster child) but we are not selected. At this time, we think we are waiting for a child over the age of 6

April 17,2008- Driving to a meeting after work, Steph gets a call that there is a one-year-old little boy available. Because of his age and the fact that he is not a minority, he is not eligible for adoption through the state, although he is in foster care. It is considered a private adoption, we have already been chosen, there will be no match meeting, providing we can afford to pay $5,000 in legal fees and his foster mom agrees that we are a good match for him. We can meet him tomorrow. There will also be none of the normal services, like Medicaid until age 18 and, in the state of Florida, college tuition, since this is now being considered a private adoption.

April 18, 2008- We meet Nicholas and his foster family at a McDonald’s.

Mid-April-mid-May 2008- The social workers want the transition to be fast because he is so young. We’d been preparing for an elementary school-aged child for a year, now we have 3 weeks to prepare our home for a baby. Steph’s co-workers throw an adoption shower and are very helpful donating clothes and furniture. For a few weeks Nicholas is not allowed to spend the night with us, we start visiting with him every day for a few hours, moving up to more and more time.

May 14, 2008- Nicholas moves in.

May 15, 2008- Nicholas has to have a surgical circumcision. It had been previously scheduled, but the timing could not have been worse. His first day with his forever family & our first full day as his parents, we spent the morning in the surgery center, then Eddie went back to work and I spent my first day as a mother getting “baptized by fire” because the anesthesia made him very sick.

Summer 2008-Being a teacher, Steph is off from work and stays home with Nicholas. There is a 90 day trial period before we can go to court and make everything official. Social workers visit to check on us and Nicholas is still getting his medical care through the state because we can’t put him on our insurance until we go to court. We also discover we are pregnant with Abby and decide to move closer to family. Eddie’s company agrees to let him transfer to Pennsylvania after the adoption is finalized. Steph’s principal agrees to let her keep her job until it’s time to move. The Florida housing market has collapsed and there is no telling how long it will be before we can sell our house, but we put it on the market and Steph’s dad helps us buy another house in Pennsylvania.

October 1, 2008-We can finally go to court and sign the papers. We are even given a new birth certificate with our names on it. Nicholas is ours. It’s been 2 years since we started thinking about adoption.

November, 2008- We get an offer on our house. We are going to lose more than $50,000. We have to take it.

December 12, 2008- Family and friends help us pack and make the drive from Florida to Pennsylvania. We drive through the night hoping Nicholas will sleep. We get a flat tire at 1am. What should be a 17 hour drive winds up taking 23 hours. Steph is 5 months pregnant.

February 2009- Steph is 7 months pregnant and hospitalized twice for early labor/contractions & put on modified bed rest. We need to hire a part-time nanny to take care of Nicholas.

April 21,2009- Abby is born.

That is our story. Some of the details might not seem important, but they turned out to be vital later when we discovered that Nicholas had many more attachment issues than anyone thought he would, considering he was only 13 months old when we were placed with him.

Regardless of the trails we have faced with him, or maybe because of them, Nicholas is just as much ours as our biological children. I’ll talk about that more in my next post.

I know I’ve been MIA from the blog for a while, sorry, life’s been getting in the way. 🙂

I’m 26 weeks pregnant now, we just celebrated Nick’s Gotcha Day (the anniversary of his adoption), my mom and I presented at a child development conference, I’m working more hours, and Eddie has been sick.

Although it’s not quite finished (most people would probably consider adding a door a pretty important step) our bathroom is finally looking good enough that I thought I could share the pictures with you.

Do you remember where it started?

Yeah, yuck. I really don’t know who ever thought brown shag carpet in a bathroom was a good idea. Or that brown as an overall color scheme for a bathroom is a good idea for that matter. It’s not. Also, that yellowish stuff on the top half of the room? Not wall paper. All the paper fell off before we moved in, that’s just the old glue.  Plywood streaked with old yellow wallpaper glue wasn’t adding much to my decor. We’ve been working on it slowly over time as we had extra money to spend on this project.

And now we are here:

Here’s what it looks like at the moment. shhh…the sink still isn’t hooked up yet.

Eddie did all of the work himself, except for a little help on my part installing the new floor and the toilet. The space was just too small for two people to be in there working together, plus he didn’t want me doing too much heavy lifting or being exposed to all the dust & fumes while I’m pregnant. He had to take a long break, like several months, off from house projects to study for his PE exam, but he passed. Yeah!

Our final cost came in around $900. (That includes the cost of the door, which we do have, it’s just not up yet.) I think that’s a lot, but then again, I’m really cheap. I guess any time you can spend under $1,000 for an entirely new bathroom it’s a good deal.

Walls $300 (Beadboard, adhesive, plumbing behind sink & paint)

Sink $30 (Craigslist)

Mirror $50

Accessories: $20 (towel rack, outlet covers)

New Floor $130 (vinyl and underlayment from Lowes. We had some left over from our kitchen. We didn’t spend this much on the materials, but some of the extra money went into the electric costs to add a new outlet.)

New blinds for window: $40

New moldings: $50

New toilet and Faucet $200

New Door: $50

Bathroom ladder shelf: $100 (Homegoods)

Total: $970

Most of the expenses you can’t really see. Eddie basically had to rebuild the entire wall behind the sink because the studs weren’t properly spaced to support anything & he insulated the crawl space behind that wall, added an electrical outlet, redid some of the plumbing for the toilet & sink…it all ads up. The only surfaces we didn’t need to replace were the window and the ceiling.

We also didn’t spend all that money at once. We stretched this project out for over a year.

So my job was to find affordable ways to make it look pretty. This little corner showcases some of my best deals. The pedestal sink was $30 on Craigslist. The mirror was $49 at the Pottery Barn outlet. (That’s $200 off retail because it was missing one washer. We were easily able to find a replacement at Lowes for about $2.) And the towels I bought for $5 each last year when Pottery Barn had a free monogramming/free shipping sale after Christmas.

Everybody gave me a hard time about taking the bead board all the way to the ceiling, but we didn’t really have much of a choice because behind the original paneling every wall was a different material. Plaster, cinder block, you name it. If we’d tried to frame out drywall against the cinder block, we would have needed to relocate the plumbing for the toilet and that’s not something within hubby’s skill set, so it would have gotten really expensive really fast. Plus, I had seen Gina do it, so I knew it would look nice. Eddie’s not thrilled that the bead board is just attached to the cinder block with liquid nails on the wall behind the toilet. He calls shortcuts like that “putting lipstick on a pig.” I call it good enough.

I’ll be so happy when our lower level is finally finished! We’ve been in this house for almost 3 years and we only use about half of our square footage because we completely avoid the downstairs. With baby #3 on the way, I really think we can use the extra space!