Stress ceiling

Yesterday we had our first "formal" meeting with our psychiatrist. We found her through Leah @ A Red Thread. Dr. Coleman rents out Leah's office space. We had the option to use a psych through our placement agency however we would never meet the person as she resides in CA. What an investment? NOT. So instead we are using Dr. Anne Coleman; she is an adoptive mom of two gorgeous Chinese girls, not bio siblings and an adoptee herself. She's amazing; we spent about an hour and forty-five minutes talking through our life as a couple = our infamous first introduction and the history from then on; how are families have reacted to us adopting; are we prepared for the potential issues (attachment, grief, loss, anger, ambiguity) that could arise in adopting older children; are our families prepared to handle this as well; what we think is appropriate discipline for our children; how do we deal with stress and what is our stress ceiling...etc... So many stories to share and so little time, I remember back in Speech class at CCRI when I had to stand up there and discuss my topic on "most admired person in my life" or what not it seemed that 5 minutes lasted FOREVER! Now in speaking about this ENORMOUS adventure we are embarking on and seeing my husband so excited when he discusses the aspect of having children to another adult, this is the best ride EVER! The best part about all this for me right now is the silent communication Matt and I have; when we are asked a questions whether it be a couple question or a individual question we both look at each other with an awareness of what is going to be told exactly. Driving back and forth to NH many moons ago to see Matt was a great experience, but the coolest part was the amount of phone conversations we had during the weeks apart when we knew what we both wanted and when; we were not like most couples who got to hang out all the time every day so our relationship was initially built on asking a lot of questions and answering things that you would not normally answer to early on in a relationship...its cool to be on the same team without even really recognizing it until now.

Picnic

Yesterday we attended A Red Thread Adoption annual picnic. At first I was bit apprehensive in going because I thought that seeing all these families with the kids would make me a bit anxious for us to get ours...NO WAY...it made us both inspired. Inspired to see how many families Leah has been able to directly impact; a one person show impacting over 100 individual families. She knows all their names and all their stories...nothing short of AMAZING! Inspired to see how happy these families are and how diverse the domestic and international adoptions have become. Children were walking up to us introducing themselves and telling us they spoke Russian or are from China and/or that they are adopted. I loved how open it was; when my Mom and I talked about my Gram Holt's adoption, my mom said it was a topic not discussed outside the home and her mom did not tell her until her wedding day. Wow times have changed!! These kids are empowered at such a young age, SO awesome!! Inspired that although we have chosen to adopt before having bio children almost all of these families did not have this choice and they chose to move past their sadness, disappointment, frustration and provide a home to a child that did not have one. And inspired to button up our last pieces of our dossier and get this party bus moving along.

We went to our first psych eval meeting; we have four more to go. With this time frame we are thinking we will have everything to Colombia by mid-October. I am sending in our finger prints this week to the FBI. Then we need to make an appointment to have some tests done by our Doctor and get a letter of economic capacity from Matt's employer. That's it!!! It seems like it has been a lot of paperwork but we started this journey in April and we are only in August!

I began reading more into what defines "waiting children"; this is a phrase used typically for children with some form of special needs. We knew early on that we wanted to have healthy children as with Damien and Devon (Matt's godsons) being terminable with their Muscular Dystrophy we did not want to add to this. I found out that a sibling group of 3 and/or children over 8 years old are considered "waiting" in Colombia...what to do?!?!? Our dear friend Tom said to us when we began this journey, "what if they call you with a referral and say we have two but there are three other siblings who are being separated...you guys would never say no, Casey may but Matt won't..." What path are we going to take? :) Sean and I always said we wanted our kids to have A LOT of cousins like we did growing up (17 first cousins)!