Bringing Home Baby: 9 Things I Wish Somebody Would Have Told Me 9 Months Ago**

AWC >  Adoption > Bringing Home Baby: 9 Things I Wish Somebody Would Have Told Me 9 Months Ago**
 

(**not that I would have listened….and neither will you…or maybe you will and I was just too stubborn)

This month marks Little Dude’s nine months on this earth and in our family.  You might have noticed that it’s also been about that long since the last time I blogged.  Coincidence?  I think not.  So to mark the big day (well, the one before the big day.... i.e., his year birthday) here’s my list of nine things I wish somebody had told me nine months ago:

Bringing Home Baby - Part 3

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AWC >  Adoption > Bringing Home Baby - Part 3

He’s here! He’s home!

Within days of finishing writing my last entry for AWC, we found out that Little Dude had stopped growing in the womb.  And then the doctors found out that S was actually losing fluid.  Apparently it wasn’t too much of an emergency though and the doctors decided to induce the next morning.

There was a flurry of activity as we prepared that night.  My husband had to call in to work to start his paternity leave. Bags were packed.  I packed, unpacked, and then repacked the diaper bag.  Jon installed the car seat. I wish I could tell you we went to a movie or out to dinner or something, but honestly, I can’t remember.  That night is a fog in my memory.

Bringing Home Baby - Part 2

AWC >  Adoption > Bringing Home Baby - Part 2

We took some time off.  The miscarriage exposed fault lines in our relationship that we hadn’t even known was there so we took some time to work on our marriage and ourselves.  Oh yeah, there was another deployment in there too.

Finally in the fall of 2011, we moved forward with the adoption process.  We originally were going to adopt internationally from Haiti, using Carolina Adoption Services as our agency.  We love them, by the way.  They’re all awesome.

We moved again and had to update our home study.  Not long after that we found out that Haiti had stopped all adoptions as they tried to get Hague certified.  We were stuck.  It was a possibility that they would bar our agency from Haiti adoptions as the country was looking only to work with a handful of US agencies.  We weren’t far enough along to get “grandfathered” in and yet we were too far along for it not to affect us and delay our process.

Bringing Home Baby - Part 1

AWC >  Adoption > Bringing Home Baby - Part 1

The walls are painted.

The bedding is washed.

The diaper bag is packed.

The car seat is installed.

Here we are…within just a few weeks of birth mom S being induced.  Just a few short weeks until we become first-time parents.  And, hey, let’s face it.  It could be shorter than that simply because she could go into labor by herself.

My Kind of Town, Chicago is!

AWC > Travel > My Kind of Town, Chicago is! by Angie

"My kind of town, Chicago is My kind of razzmatazz And it has, all that jazz" -- My Kind of Town, by Frank Sinatra

Standing in front of the Shedd Aquarium, looking back at the Chicago skyline.

Click Here to view the Military Discounts I found in Chicago

Adoption Update / Boston Marathon

I had originally planned today to write about our weekend.  The man and I drove the hour down on Saturday to see S, our birth mom, and spend some time with her.  It was a nice time, lunch, a college baseball game, and then a quick dinner before we returned home.  I originally planned to talk about how we got to this point in our journey to build our family.

Introducing Angie

AWC > Introduction > Angie

Like most women, my mind is almost always racing.  I can go from thinking about war to why my dogs smell so bad to what’s for dinner to what the heck my neighbor is doing in about 0.9 seconds flat.  It should make for some interesting blog posts and I am super excited that I’ve been asked to contribute here at AWC!  With that said though, there are probably some key things you should know about me.  

The first, obviously or I wouldn’t be here, is that I’m an Army wife.  I met my husband back in 1999 and we’ve been married since 2001.  Many Army wives stumble their way into the life, but I knew exactly what I was getting into.  My dad retired as a SGM when I was 13 so I pretty much knew what it was all about from the beginning.