So much has been going on that the spring/summer is flying by! We are already half way through May and holy cow where did the time go?
And yet, everything is going so fucking slowly. We found out the expectant mom we have matched with is having a girl. We are going to hopefully have a daughter. With roughly 9 weeks left, it's taking so long already! Haha!
I have been spending my time sewing little girl dresses and trying to figure out if I'm crafty enough to attempt pants. I am also working on getting the nursery set back up. The reality is we've been at this having a baby game for 5 years. Five fucking years people. So our nursery has been set up for 4.5 years and after each failed attempt to start a family it just gained another layer of dust. So in an effort to stay positive and let myself be okay with either outcome of this roller coaster, I have been in the nursery cleaning it up. It is coming together slowly but surely.
Other than baby watch 2015, my partner and I have been staying busy by traveling everywhere and visiting friends and planning other trips. We have been so busy moving around that my poor house looks like a bomb went off in it. We haven't had time to sit down and clean anything. Even today, I am taking 15 minutes to write up this blog post, but then it's off to the races again.
With so much to do my writing has suffered. I really want to have time to sit down at my computer and just put things together. I have so many ideas and I really want to put pen to paper, but I just haven't made time. Oh you read that right, not that I haven't had time, I just haven't made time. I need to get back to writing being a priority. I want to make sure I have the bare bones of several writing tasks for when baby comes home and I'm in the house while she sleeps. That is on my main to do list.
I hope you are having a busy and productive summer as well!
Until Next Time!
Showing posts with label Kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kids. Show all posts
Friday, May 15, 2015
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Are you gonna make your baby gay?
Once upon a time there was a soon to be dad waiting in line at a big box chain baby store to buy an item on sale with a coupon. It was early, he chose early on purpose, to avoid the crowds. Apparently everyone else had the same idea as the store was packed. As he was standing in line, a woman soon to be dad (STBD) worked with came up behind him. As he knew her, they struck up a conversation.
Granted, STBD hadn't seen this woman in a couple of years but learned that she was having her second child in 2 years and she was super excited. He was super excited for her! As the line inched slowly forward, the conversation turned to his pending adoption and the excitement that maybe the third time would be the charm for him and his partner.
And then it happened.
The woman's face scrunched up slightly. STBD realized that she may not have known he was gay... how, he wasn't sure, but their work place had been at a religious organization so it may just not have come up. The woman inquired slightly as to "the Partner" in the sentence. She recovered quickly from her minor face scrunching and congratulated STBD. But the conversation quickly got awkward.
Then she nailed the coffin shut on the conversation.
"Are you going to make your baby gay?" She was serious. "I have read that gay parents are more likely to have gay kids." It took everything in STBD's power to not react out of anger.
Do people seriously still think that you will turn out exact like your parents? I mean, my parents are straight, I'm not. My partner's parents are straight, he's not. Why is this still a question? The reality is my sexuality has nothing to do with my future children. My sexuality is nothing to do with kids. This idea that homosexuals are out to recruit children is so outdated that it's insulting at this point that people still follow that line of thinking.
I am not having children to "make them gay". I am not having children to recruit more into the ebil homosexual lifestyle. I am having kids for the same reason everyone else has a child, because I want to have a family that includes children. Pretty plain and simple.
Now, that said, my partner and I ARE gay. And pretty damn proud of it. So our "lifestyle" will not be hidden from our children. We will be out and proud with our daughter (and future daughters or sons, whatever we may get) and she will know that her dads both love her. She will attend pride parades with us, she will not be shied away from the fact that her dads are gay. Chances are she will be exposed to more gay people than "normal", but simply because we find strength in numbers.
But no matter how many pride parades we take her too, or how many gay friends we have, we will have no influence on her sexuality. You either are, or aren't. No amount of parental influence or shunning has turned me straight and the same is true for our future children. No amount of our influence will turn our, or your, children gay.
However, I don't think we'll be hanging out at new parent things any time soon.
Until Next Time.
Granted, STBD hadn't seen this woman in a couple of years but learned that she was having her second child in 2 years and she was super excited. He was super excited for her! As the line inched slowly forward, the conversation turned to his pending adoption and the excitement that maybe the third time would be the charm for him and his partner.
And then it happened.
The woman's face scrunched up slightly. STBD realized that she may not have known he was gay... how, he wasn't sure, but their work place had been at a religious organization so it may just not have come up. The woman inquired slightly as to "the Partner" in the sentence. She recovered quickly from her minor face scrunching and congratulated STBD. But the conversation quickly got awkward.
Then she nailed the coffin shut on the conversation.
"Are you going to make your baby gay?" She was serious. "I have read that gay parents are more likely to have gay kids." It took everything in STBD's power to not react out of anger.
Do people seriously still think that you will turn out exact like your parents? I mean, my parents are straight, I'm not. My partner's parents are straight, he's not. Why is this still a question? The reality is my sexuality has nothing to do with my future children. My sexuality is nothing to do with kids. This idea that homosexuals are out to recruit children is so outdated that it's insulting at this point that people still follow that line of thinking.
I am not having children to "make them gay". I am not having children to recruit more into the ebil homosexual lifestyle. I am having kids for the same reason everyone else has a child, because I want to have a family that includes children. Pretty plain and simple.
Now, that said, my partner and I ARE gay. And pretty damn proud of it. So our "lifestyle" will not be hidden from our children. We will be out and proud with our daughter (and future daughters or sons, whatever we may get) and she will know that her dads both love her. She will attend pride parades with us, she will not be shied away from the fact that her dads are gay. Chances are she will be exposed to more gay people than "normal", but simply because we find strength in numbers.
But no matter how many pride parades we take her too, or how many gay friends we have, we will have no influence on her sexuality. You either are, or aren't. No amount of parental influence or shunning has turned me straight and the same is true for our future children. No amount of our influence will turn our, or your, children gay.
However, I don't think we'll be hanging out at new parent things any time soon.
Until Next Time.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Having kids
I try not to talk about having kids much anymore with people I know. I think people just get tired of hearing "Oh yeah, kids kids kids". It gets to be too much for a lot of people, especially people who have never had issues having children, and who wants to burden your friends beyond what they can handle.
As a result, I often sit on my hands and just wait until we have something to announce before talking about it. Well, right now, we have a beginning step to announce. We are finally updating our damn homestudy.
We started trying to adopt in 2010, right after we exchanged rings. So our first homestudy was done in December and we immediately jumped into any avenue we could to start our family. We worked with the foster system (and ended up not pursuing that route for multiple reasons, but we hope to open this avenue at some point in our lives), we looked through children already available for adoption from adoptuskids, and we finally settled on private infant adoption. Only we found so many problems with the system. We worked hard to find a good homestudy agency and worked twice as hard to find, what we thought was, a good child placing agency.
Our first adoption attempt took us to far from home! How exciting to get the call that the baby was born, was a beautiful and mostly healthy little girl, and that we needed to hop on a plane and get out there to meet our daughter. Only it didn't happen like we thought. We arrived in her state, we made it to the city of her birth, and bright and early the next day we arrived at the hospital... only to be told by the NICU nurse that the mother changed her mind. We were so stunned. Yeah, we knew that was a possibility, but we had spent so much time making sure we were doing this right, ethical, properly, that we never dreamed we would be left sitting in the waiting room with empty arms.
We called our placing agency and they called the hospital and it all just fell apart. We sat in the hospital for a couple hours, waiting to speak to the risk supervisor and the hospital social worker and the lead NICU nurse... and we watched the baby's mother invite people in to meet the baby. We listened as people had conversations next to the nursery door about how awesome it was that the baby was born.. and we realized at that moment that maybe mom never planned to place. And our world was shattered. We were so naive, and no we weren't anymore. The world taught us an expensive and heartbreaking lesson that day.
So we came back home and rebuilt our life here. We stayed out of the adoption game for almost a year, despite wanting a child so desperately. We healed ourselves before jumping back into the arena, with the same placing agency.
Thus began our second attempt. This attempt was more fraught with despair from the beginning. We were matched quickly and the baby was due not too long after we matched. And then the little boy was born and we learned that from the beginning we were being scammed. Through our agency. Not by our agency by any means, we are not indicting them publicly at all. Needless to say, that fell through as well.
From there we dropped our placing agency. Two failed adoptions and the bullshit we dealt with during our second failed attempt just showed us that this agency wasn't for us. After giving ourselves time to heal from this second placement, we opted to go for surrogacy and all that entailed.
To avoid this post becoming too long and depressing, our transfer failed. No baby, no children.
We tried a few other things, but right now those are too personal to throw up in public on a blog. We have healed, but we aren't ready to spend too much time talking about them. I am not ready... I should use I and not we sometimes.
And that leads us to today, where we are right now. And we are nervous. But we are excited. We have found a new placing agency that we feel conducts itself ethically and we have few expectations this time. It is scary to deal with all this shit again, but also exciting.
So one of the goals of 2015 was to have children. This is mostly outside of our control, but we are taking the steps we can and hope that 2015 will continue to be our year. We won't give up because failure is not really an option for us. 2015 is the year of goals and dreams coming true.
Until Next Time.
As a result, I often sit on my hands and just wait until we have something to announce before talking about it. Well, right now, we have a beginning step to announce. We are finally updating our damn homestudy.
We started trying to adopt in 2010, right after we exchanged rings. So our first homestudy was done in December and we immediately jumped into any avenue we could to start our family. We worked with the foster system (and ended up not pursuing that route for multiple reasons, but we hope to open this avenue at some point in our lives), we looked through children already available for adoption from adoptuskids, and we finally settled on private infant adoption. Only we found so many problems with the system. We worked hard to find a good homestudy agency and worked twice as hard to find, what we thought was, a good child placing agency.
Our first adoption attempt took us to far from home! How exciting to get the call that the baby was born, was a beautiful and mostly healthy little girl, and that we needed to hop on a plane and get out there to meet our daughter. Only it didn't happen like we thought. We arrived in her state, we made it to the city of her birth, and bright and early the next day we arrived at the hospital... only to be told by the NICU nurse that the mother changed her mind. We were so stunned. Yeah, we knew that was a possibility, but we had spent so much time making sure we were doing this right, ethical, properly, that we never dreamed we would be left sitting in the waiting room with empty arms.
We called our placing agency and they called the hospital and it all just fell apart. We sat in the hospital for a couple hours, waiting to speak to the risk supervisor and the hospital social worker and the lead NICU nurse... and we watched the baby's mother invite people in to meet the baby. We listened as people had conversations next to the nursery door about how awesome it was that the baby was born.. and we realized at that moment that maybe mom never planned to place. And our world was shattered. We were so naive, and no we weren't anymore. The world taught us an expensive and heartbreaking lesson that day.
So we came back home and rebuilt our life here. We stayed out of the adoption game for almost a year, despite wanting a child so desperately. We healed ourselves before jumping back into the arena, with the same placing agency.
Thus began our second attempt. This attempt was more fraught with despair from the beginning. We were matched quickly and the baby was due not too long after we matched. And then the little boy was born and we learned that from the beginning we were being scammed. Through our agency. Not by our agency by any means, we are not indicting them publicly at all. Needless to say, that fell through as well.
From there we dropped our placing agency. Two failed adoptions and the bullshit we dealt with during our second failed attempt just showed us that this agency wasn't for us. After giving ourselves time to heal from this second placement, we opted to go for surrogacy and all that entailed.
To avoid this post becoming too long and depressing, our transfer failed. No baby, no children.
We tried a few other things, but right now those are too personal to throw up in public on a blog. We have healed, but we aren't ready to spend too much time talking about them. I am not ready... I should use I and not we sometimes.
And that leads us to today, where we are right now. And we are nervous. But we are excited. We have found a new placing agency that we feel conducts itself ethically and we have few expectations this time. It is scary to deal with all this shit again, but also exciting.
So one of the goals of 2015 was to have children. This is mostly outside of our control, but we are taking the steps we can and hope that 2015 will continue to be our year. We won't give up because failure is not really an option for us. 2015 is the year of goals and dreams coming true.
Until Next Time.
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