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

LOVE THIS POST?  

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.