the eelfang chronicles

Last Friday I was really excited to be headed a girls only party (appropriately named “Girl Party”) at Hillary’s house. Todd had arranged to hang out with guys, and they had the table saw out when we rolled up to prove the point that they were going to be doing Man Stuff all evening. I fetched Naomi and Mandy and after a tearful goodbye from Naomi’s oldest boy, we sped on over, ready to gourge ourselves on candy, chips and celebrity gossip magazines.

It was quite a surprise, then, when we climbed the stairs and there were balloons, a pile of prezzies wrapped in yellow, and a roomful of wonderful girls yelling “surprise!” in my direction! It took me a few minutes, and indeed the whole night, to wrap my head around being thrown a surprise baby shower. Hillary and Cerra had planned unique shower games and yummy food–eating a lot at showers is key. It was truly special (and super sneaky!).

After a few hours and a few early birds taking off, the rest of us spent another long night playing Rock Band (also key at showers, right?) and talking about parenting, adoption, etc. I swear, beware when you ask me about “how it’s going,” because I inevitably go off for thirty-seven hours!

But back to my friends: they’re the awesomest.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working really hard on being as prepared as possible. I’ve studied magazines and books, highlighting and circling relevant passages, searching out helpful blogs, organizing my work in spreadsheets, and just doing some real heavy soul-searching to figure out what’s important to me. They say you can never really be prepared, but for every day that passes, I feel more and more comfortable with my decision – that drafting a top tier wide receiver is a priority in this year’s fantasy football draft due to positional scarcity and a relative parity in running backs after the top eight.

Meanwhile, our “what eelfang needs” list remains untouched…

For whatever reason, our enthusiasm and momentum fell off shortly after getting in the pool. I guess it felt almost like we had reached the finish line of a long, long voyage, and now we got to take a break. The odds of getting a call in the first few weeks are so small that it felt like we could take an evening off to watch a movie, or work on projects around the house, or study fantasy football stuff, or whatever it is we wanted to do to return to a “normal” life after a busy past few months. But then one evening led into the next, and the next…

It’s not like we haven’t done anything, per se – Betsy sewed a baby sling for us, we’ve started to gather together some furniture, and we have a few supplies gathered. We’re slowly making our way down the path towards preparedness – but at the pace we’ve been going, we’d be ready for The Call some time early next decade.

Which is why the call we got on Friday evening set our hearts racing.

We were out with some friends, hanging out and talking in a loud and busy bar when Betsy’s phone rang. She took it outside to talk to whoever was calling, and I just kept socializing and having fun. She returned back to the table, grabbed her purse, and whispered in my ear, “We’re getting a screening call right now.”

A bit of terminology – a screening call is very different from The Call. With a screening call, a counselor at the agency is determining what families would be open to having their profiles shown to a potential birthmother. This call is usually triggered by some sort of extraordinary circumstances – health issues, difficult birthfather situation, substance use during pregnancy, etc. The screening call goes out to everyone who expressed openness for similar situations (you express that openness on the Screening Tool, which deserves a post of its own) – if your openness range roughly matches up with the intensity level of these circumstances, you get a call to see if you are open for the specifics of this particular case. Depending on the situation, a screening call could go out to 50 families and they’ll all say yes, or it’ll go out to 5 families and only two of them say yes. The call itself really means little about whether or not you’ll be getting The Call soon – if the 50 other families also say yes, you’re at only a 2% chance of getting The Call as a result of the screening. Of course, you never know the numbers of the people who also said yes, and it’s hard to remember those when emotions are running high, but that’s the way it is.

I mumbled some sort of excuse to leave the table, and rushed outside to sit next to Betsy while she talked to the counselor. Fortunately, Betsy had paper and a pen in her purse, and I was able to follow a lot of the conversation from the notes she was scribbling down. The baby had been born on Thursday, and was ready to be released from the hospital on Sunday or Monday. There were a few (seemingly minor) health complications, and the birthmother had her own set of requests about the adoption process that would have been an adjustment to our expectations.

But it wasn’t our baby. After hanging up (and excitedly hugging), we talked to each other briefly, and both of us felt and quickly agreed that this was not our baby – not our time to say yes, not our time to be chosen. The baby will be going to another family (the right family) who will love them deeply and raise them, and I wish all the best for them. Even as I write this post, I know the new parents are holding their child and filled with love and amazement, and it’s awesome for them. Our turn will come soon enough, but it felt very clear that night that it wasn’t the time for us.

The counselor wanted to hear back the next morning, so we agreed to sleep on it just in case we were rushing to a judgment. “Sleeping on it” always seems like a weird way to think through an issue, as I rarely get good thinking done while unconscious, but I guess just the fact that I slept soundly with no nervousness proved that I felt really comfortable with our decision.

(Since I’m between jobs, the insurance situation was also extremely dicey, and it could have been financially ruinous to have said yes. (The counselor had overlooked the note on our account saying we were not open to children born before July 1^st). But that wasn’t what made our decision – it just made it a little easier to help keep wild emotions in check and make the right decision.)

But for as much as I felt comfortable saying that this was not our baby, I feel equally comfortable saying that this was our message baby. I think God arranged for the counselor to overlook the note on our account and give us that call, and to help wake us up that we really are in the pool and that we need to get ready. That it’s more important right now for me to compare pediatricians than it is for me to compare quarterbacks, and that it’s better for us to be working on setting up the nursery than it is to work on setting up summer parties.

Because next time we get that call, it might just be our baby on the other end of the line…

(Note: This will probably be the last time we write about getting a screening call – we’ll probably keep those private, if for our own sanity more than anything else. And yes, I realize that some people might scoff at the idea that it will be our baby at the other end of the line, but you haven’t met Eelfang yet – he/she is going to be so smart, he/she’ll be calling us up from the hospital to make his/her own screening calls.)

A little over two months in the pool. Still bobbing about. But to rewind a bit…

A week or two after getting in the pool, Todd and I decided to register for baby items. We’d already gotten a bunch of awesome things from Todd’s sister, and a whole room’s worth of furniture (dresser, handmade cradle, rocking chair) from my parents. I checked out The Expectant Parents’ Companion from the library, which has really great lists of essentials, nice-to-have’s, and lists for breastfeeding and bottle-feeding. After pouring over that and some other online resources, we compiled a list of around 30 items, and walked the couple blocks to Target to take the plunge.

Sadly, Target’s baby department was lacking. They had lots of cute clothes, but didn’t have any changing pads nor the cotton receiving blankets I had been hoping for. So instead, we drove over to Babel–, I mean, Babies R Us.

I’ve heard folks say that all babies need are a boob and a blanket. While I am not in a position to be that hardcore (unless there is such a thing as spontaneous lactation!), nor even necessarily want to be, there are also many opportunities to go overboard with Baby Stuff. We checked into BrU’s registry, and an employee gave us a pep talk that registering was going to take about 1-2 hours, and the result would be about 150-200 items. What?! I couldn’t decide if I should feel smug that we/our baby can get by with so much less, or simply inadequate.

We knocked out almost our whole list in one corner of the store, and of course caved to a few impulse items. It should be noted, though, that even though it seems like BrU has everything, they did not have any Sonic Youth onesies. We did register for a few other clothes, but it was odd not knowing size (preemie or Michelin-size like I was?), season, and gender. I’m totally going to be that parent who dresses their little girl in dresses and dinosaurs, but it’s a little harder to adapt girl clothes to boys…Plus we got a good tip later from other adoptive parents that clothes often get discontinued, so anything more than basics is something we’ll wait to register for until we know more.

So that was that. Now we’re to a comfortable pausing point on Baby Stuff, which frees me up to dwell on…well, more Baby Stuff. But that’s only because Eelfang totally needs a (insert cute handmade thing I saw on XYZ blog yesterday), right?

So, it’s been a long time since I last checked in here, but at least we have some good excuses.

Last Monday, Betsy started a new job. The story of what happened to her old employer is a long and sordid tale, but suffice to say, getting out of there was a very positive move for her. She’s now going to be working for a farm out in the Fall City / Carnation area - her daily work will be much the same, but it’s both a more interesting environment (working in a barn, surrounded by fields of veggies, parking in the mud with the farm dogs running around) and a more difficult environment (did I mention it’s in Fall City? We’re looking at about an hour-long commute on a good day).

Then, on the drive home from her first day on the new job, our old car broke down. Betsy’s parents bought that car back in 1989 when it was brand new. Between various members of the family, they put nearly 19 years and over 240,000 miles on the car. However, after that amount of time, it was definitely starting to show its age - oil leaks needing a new quart every couple of weeks, squealing brakes, rattling steering, bad tires, etc. The final straw was a timing belt, and while we could have fixed that, it was really time to let that car go off to car heaven. So on the same evening that it broke down, we went out and got ourselves a new (to us) car. It’s pretty sweet to be driving something that was made this decade. Did you know that they are putting CD players in cars now? And with all four speakers working, too! Incredible.

And finally, I’m starting a new job on Tuesday in Bellevue. I’ll be leading a team of people who maintain and troubleshoot SharePoint websites for various clients - our big client being Microsoft. I’d been with my previous employer for nearly 5 years, so this is a pretty huge change for me - but one that I’m really excited about.

So, we haven’t been doing anything specifically related to adoption recently, but in another way, everything we do is related to adoption. One of the reasons why Betsy took her new job is that is has the potential to turn into a part-time telecommuting job in the future - if she was able to log even 10 hours of work a week when she’s at home with Eelfang, that would help out with the bills tremendously (assuming, of course, that she has the energy to work part-time and raise our child full-time - that might be a big thing to ask for).

For the car, it’s been a long point of contention between us about whether or not the old car was suitable for a family. Betsy, in her embrace of simplicity and not wasting things, wanted to drive the car until it stopped working, and only buy a new one when it was absolutely necessary. Todd, in his embrace of being neurotic and a worry-wart, was not at all comfortable with the idea of putting both his wife and his child in a car that was anything but supremely safe and reliable. The car dying now was as good of a compromise as we could hope for, and the new car was definitely bought with the idea of spending a little bit more for reliability, safety and a long-lasting future.

For me, I’ve been looking around for a new job for a while now. I had worked with my manager to try to expand/extend my current role, but it just wasn’t in the budget, and to keep growing my career, it was obvious that I had to look outside. Additionally, there had been a lot of changes in the past couple years, and I wasn’t 100% comfortable with all of them. I had been looking pretty aggressively last year for a new position, but came up empty.

Once we got in the pool, I assumed that I would have to wait until after the adoption happened. It would be difficult to find a new employer who was okay with my “I may need to leave for several weeks with only a few minutes notice” requirement, so I figured I’d have to grit my teeth and stick it out for a while longer. I stopped looking for a new job, and as these things often happen, as soon as I stopped looking, a great opportunity fell in my lap, and with a company that is extremely employee-focused and more than willing to work with my requirements.

Insurance is the one tricky thing - my old insurance will go until the end of this month, and my new insurance will kick in at the new job on July 1st. So while it works out okay for my personal insurance, it would be exceedingly difficult to add a new baby during that time. So Betsy and I took a tiny step backwards - we’re marking ourselves as being unavailable for any adoption where the birthmother would be due before July 1st. The last-minute placements, therefore, are off the table for the next few weeks.

That’s actually probably a good thing - we’re still working on putting together the nursery, interviewing pediatricians, and putting together our emergency “we need to go RIGHT NOW” kit. I’ll write more about those processes in the next post.

Last weekend, we held a “pool party” BBQ to celebrate finally getting into the pool. I really should have taken some pictures to commemorate and post here, but we forgot (one of the reasons why compiling the photo collage was more difficult than it should have been).

It was great to get to hang out with everyone. The weather was absolutely perfect, and while there was still a lot of yardwork I had wanted to get done, a lot of the flowers were in full bloom and the place looked nice despite the occasional weed. I cooked up some fajitas on the grill, and if you’ll allow me to break my false modesty for a moment, they were completely awesome and delicious.

Most important of all, it was a gathering of the community that will be part of the support system for us as we raise young Eelfang. We had established parents running around with their son on the lawn, excited talks with new friends who had just attended their two-day seminar to start down the open adoption path, and lots of other well-wishers and warm-hearted people who are almost as excited for us as we are. Being in a backyard packed with that many great people is a great reminder of how lucky we are to know our friends.

Halfway through the party, I got a call on my phone from a 206 area code phone number I didn’t recognize. Immediately, my pulse picked up a few dozen beats, and I thought “this is it - we’re going to get The Call in the middle of our BBQ.” When I answered, and it was our friend Casey, I tried my best to not sound disappointed - I’d normally be really happy to hear from him, but asking for directions to our house is not quite as exciting as “hey come get this baby.”

That’ll probably be the way I am for the next few months/years. Earlier today, I was teaching one of my classes, and my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I checked it out immediately, and it just turned out to be a low-battery warning. But I never failed to jump slightly for the next two hours while the phone repeated its battery warning every few minutes - when the warning and the inbound call has the same pattern, you just never know…

In retrospect, it does seem a bit weird to throw a party to celebrate that you are about to start waiting for something to celebrate. So maybe it’s better to think that is was just a “awesome backyard BBQ party”, and try to keep the tension low for the long wait ahead of us. It was a good opportunity to break out the new outdoor fireplace, to get together with friends, and to eat some good food. As for what’s coming next… well, I’ll make sure to keep my phone close to me at all times, but just enjoy the summer in the meantime.

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I’ll do my best to keep updating this blog while we wait in the pool. We won’t have much in the way of “milestones” to talk about, but there’s still a lot to talk about that I haven’t covered yet. Here’s my attempt at brainstorming a list of future topics:

• Being a rad dad (aka Why I hate Parents magazine)
• Registering for stuff (aka Why I hate Babies’R'Us)
• Experiences at the Agency-wide “waiting families” meetings (aka Saying all sorts of gossipy things about weird people we meet, thinking better of it and deleting it, and then saying that “everyone is so nice”.)
• Parenting philosophy (aka Why I should be nicer and stop being gossipy or saying I hate stuff)
• Book review of parenting books I’ve read
• Nature vs Nurture hopes and worries
• Transracial adoption and our family
• Naming disputes
• uh, submit your own suggestions below?

So, that should keep me pretty busy for a while. I’ll try to aim at at least one post a week during the summer (although I’m not making any promises), so I may end up repeating myself before too long. We’ll just have to wait and see, though.

Todd and I got a “welcome to the pool” packet in the mail from the agency today. Among the items was a bound booklet of Dear Birthparent letters. I started flipping through, and it looked to be current–us, plus lots of people who I recognized from the website, and some folks who didn’t choose to have their letter posted to the website…and then I happened upon two, count ‘em, two, letters from folks who we know outside the adoption world! We’re attending our first Waiting Families gathering in a couple weeks, and now instead of the usual shyness that was bound to take hold, I’m super excited in hopes to see their familiar faces there! Yay!

Dear Birthmother,

We have a really hilarious idea for a youtube video, and all we need is a baby to make it happen…

Wait… that’s no good. Let’s try again.

Greetings,

My human name is Todd, but you can call me Elynazarth, the elf druid. I am qualified to raise your child due to my 18 pt Wisdom score and a saving throw of 10 against colicky babies.

Hmm. Pretty good. But if we really want results, maybe we should go for something more action-oriented.

Hello

We payy CA$$h for babiEs - anY CONDITION why wait for better offer? send chlid now

Wow. Writing a Dear Birthmother letter is harder than you would think.

The Dear BM letter is one of the most important parts of getting selected from the pool. Once a birthmother has made a decision to place her child for adoption, the counselor presents her with a small book of Dear BM letters. The contents of the book are based on the “screening criteria” submitted by the adoptive parents - criteria such as readiness for transracial adoption, alcohol/drug exposure, and other things like that. Every adoptive parent whose criteria matches the birthmother’s circumstances is included in the book of letters. The birthmother selects a few names from the book, and views the full profiles (homestudy, auto-bios, photo collage, etc) of just those few families whose letter she liked. The DearBM letter is the foot in the door that gets the birthmother interested in learning more, and it’s therefore really important.

We started our brainstorming by looking at some of the other letters on the website and the examples included in our informational packet. But we ended up feeling pretty intimidated by a lot of those - it seemed like everyone out there spoke 3 languages, owned their own companies, competed on the Olympic gymnastics team, and developed disease vaccines while flying their own plane to deliver food to African villages while carrying a small child on their lap to teach them about the wonders of giving. Whereas for me, uh… I got 3rd place in my fantasy basketball league. That’s my big achievement for the year.

All we could do is talk about ourselves - but even that is tough. I’ve always struggled with writing cover letters for job applications, as everything I write feels “too boasty”. This letter was like a cover letter for the ultimate job, and I felt really weird trying to explain the awesomeness of my life. And Betsy is way more humble than me - it was going to be a tough task for the two of us to put together something we felt comfortable with. We made a handful of false starts, but never found something we felt comfortable with.

We returned to reading the letters. And on the second time through, I noticed something different. I tended to skim over the people with fantastic achievements, and instead focused in on the people with the interesting anecdotes. The people who professed their love for tartar sauce. The people who were outraged about the demotion of Pluto to a “planette”. The people who seemed real to us, and the people that we could see ourselves hanging out with. That’s really the point of the DearBM letter - it’s not to impress everyone in the world, but to talk about who you are to help you connect with the birthmother out there who has a similar personality and interests.

We also liked the way that a few people were bringing in quotes - either from friends or from each other. It seemed a lot more natural to us to write the letter that way. We each sequestered ourselves off in a room and wrote about each other, and returned to compare notes. If you are in a relationship, you might try that out someday - it’s a nice thing to do, even if you’re not adopting. While we often talk to each other about what we like in each other, there’s something to be said about seeing it written down on paper.

Once we had our quotes about each other ready, and a sense of what we wanted to talk about in the surrounding paragraphs, we sat down to put it all together. The editing process went pretty well. We work in pretty different ways, but once we got used to writing together, a lot of the letter just flowed out. We just tried to highlight who we are - appreciative of the simple things in life, excited about friends and family, interested in food and books and music, and all that fun stuff.

The picture for the letter was taken by our friend Mandy. She was really patient with us and very kind to come out on a freezing cold day in Edmonds, and the pictures turned out really good. Many thanks to her for doing that for us.

All in all, I think the letter turned out really good. What started out as a tough and scary project wasn’t too bad in the long run, and actually a lot of fun. And now, with us finally in the pool, you can check it out yourself!

After many stutters, hold ups and near misses, I am thrilled to announce that, as of last Friday, 4/18, we are officially in the pool! It is a good, good day to be Todd and Betsy.

During said hold ups, etc, when I was feeling especially impatient and raw, I tried to remind myself that getting “in the pool” is something of an arbitrary line in the sand. We could end up waiting a month to be picked, and then these last few weeks of frustration won’t feel like such a waste. Or we’ll hardly even remember them if we end up waiting three years! But! it’s still so nice to get on to the waiting already!

P.S. I also want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for your curiosity, encouragement and constant support thus far. You folks are awesome!

I was listening to Björk’s “it’s not up to you” the other day, and it struck me as being a very good description of what the whole process has been like. You can listen to the song here, if you are curious.

The song starts on a quiet note, with soft clicking beats and strings creating an uneasy sense of waiting. The lyrics start talking about how the thing she’s “always longed for… could still happen”, and giving images of a world that’s not quite the way she expected. I think we went through a lot of that while we were still trying to conceive. Even during the adoption process, when the tasks ahead of us seemed overwhelmingly complex and time-intensive, there were times when the road ahead looked unclear and difficult.

But out of the tension bursts a huge chorus singing “it’s not up to you”. And it’s a wonderful sound - it’s a sound of pressure being lifted, of self-doubt getting blown away, and of acceptance of the fact that there’s much in life beyond our control. On alternating days, Betsy or I will get so caught up in the process that we forget that very true fact of the family-starting process. The other one of us is always there to help bring the first one back down to earth, and there really is something freeing and wonderful about the recognition that we “can decide what to give, but (that) it’s not up to (us) what (we) get given”.

One of the best things about the adoption process has been the lessons we’ve learned about ourselves. It takes some people a lifetime to recognize that what happens in life isn’t up to them. We’re still in the process of internalizing that lesson ourselves, but I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to see this truth in action in our own lives and get that much closer to giving up the control we never had to start with.

So, been waiting on the edge of your seat since our last post? Wondering when we’re going to finally be in the pool?

Well, so have we.

The plan was to be in the pool by the end of last week. We sent in all of our material on Thursday, and some of it had to go down to Portland, so we weren’t surprised when we hadn’t received a confirmation call by Friday. By Monday and Tuesday, though, we were starting to get a bit anxious. Finally, we got an email from our counselor, who let us know that she had forgotten about some work on the back-end that still needed to happen, and that she was now looking at April 11th as the official “pool entry date”. So as of right now, we’ve got our swimsuits on, googles in place, ready to dive on in - and we’re just waiting for the whistle to sound.

Of course, getting in the pool might end up being anti-climactic. Once we’re in, the only immediate change is that both of us will suddenly be a LOT more jumpy whenever our phone rings. (Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that I’ll forget to charge my cell phone for days at a time, or that I don’t check my voicemails immediately? You’re going to be really happy when we’re in the pool. No guarantees on how long it will take for me to return calls, but at least you’ll know I’ll have listened to the message.)

There’s a whole new to-do list in front of us, though. If we were to get the call right now telling us to come down to the hospital, we’d be in complete chaos trying to figure out what we need to do and get ready for. Dan Savage wrote in his book that there’s nothing a child needs in their first week that can’t be bought on the way home from the hospital (other than a car seat), and while that’s reassuring, it’d be nice to have a few things in place and ready to go. I also deal with stress and confusion by making lists, so I have to put a few of those together to make myself feel better.

So we’re spending the next few weeks getting our ducks in a row. Like trying to figure out how the car seat fits in the car - not something you want to try for the first time with “The Call” adrenaline running through your system. Or finding a pediatrician - again, it’s hard to be objective with interview questions when you are holding a feverish baby in your arms already. And we started to put together a list of what to take with us if we need to take an urgent road trip down to Oregon - even down to which CDs to bring with us, because I know I’d be staring at our collection with blank, panicky eyes if I waited to the last minute to make that choice.

We should have plenty of time to make these decisions, of course. The average wait time for our agency is 10.5 months in the pool, and only 24% of placements are last minute - the majority of “first meetings” with the adoptive parents and birth parents is somewhere near the start of the third trimester. While it’s entirely possible that we could be in the pool for 2 weeks before a last minute placement, and have a child in our home before the start of May, that’s extremely unlikely, and we could end up waiting a couple years or more - we’d be very fortunate to have a child in our home before the start of 2009.

Even though I know it could end up being a while, there’s part of me that keeps clinging to the idea of a very short wait time. It’s hard to get a sense objectively of how our Homestudy material turned out - my hope is that we did a good job of showing how totally awesome Betsy is and what a fantastically amazing mom she will be, and that we sufficiently explained that her husband Goofus has the best of intentions and that his oddity is mostly benign.

Beyond that, we do have some “advantages” based on who we are. Those could be meaningless - all it takes is one lotto ticket to win - but we do get a few extra tickets to scratch just based on the fact that we are young, healthy, religious and heterosexual. It gives me a weird sense of guilt to think about that, though, as we’ve met some great potential parents already who don’t fit into those categories, and I don’t really like being given “better chances” just based on who we are and our backgrounds. But that’s just the reality of it, I suppose.

It’s hard to say when it will happen, though. I know Betsy tends to assume that we’ll be waiting for quite a while, where I can’t keep my mind from fixating on the stories I read of the one or two month waits. Both of us tend to picture ourselves adopting through a last-minute placement, but that’s the minority of cases. And it’s like the dating world - since so much depends on the chance thing that makes two people click, there’s no way of knowing how long it’ll take for the right person to show up, even if you have all the “advantages” in the world.
However long we wait in the pool, though, it’ll be the right amount of time. If we do get a call in the next month for a last-minute placement, that’ll be the right time. If we’re still waiting in the pool 3 years from now - it’ll be tough, but that’ll be the right timing as well.

I just want to hurry up and get waiting already.