Grand Plans

This part of the adoption paperwork has been so fun. We have to make a photo album to share with our kids. They will get it when we accept a referral so that they can become familiar with the family, friends, and place that will become part of their lives. Here are some of the pages we are including in the album . . . we’re still waiting on some family photos. I’ll add those as soon as we get them.

black and white or shades of gray

balance or sacrifice

Obviously, these issues are not either/or. Zach and I have come to a truce. Neither of us are going to assume that we have made our minds up about how to establish ourselves as the primary care giver to our children.

We started struggling with this issue when we watched our adoptive parent training videos. The videos made it clear that it is extremely important to be the primary care giver to our children. They defined the primary care giver as the person who spends the majority of the child’s waking hours taking care of him/her. This raised an alarm, in me particularly, because Zach and I  had planned to continue working after our initial 12 weeks of Family Medical Leave. If that were the case, it would be very hard to call ourselves the primary care givers if someone else was taking care of our children for 8 working hours a day, 5 days a week. Granted, we have the summers free, and the 3 months of FMLA, but it is not clear if that amount of time, whether in one chunk or intermitently, is enough time to establish ourselves as the primary care givers.

So, the conversation about being a stay-at-home parent has begun.  I NEVER thought I would be having this conversation. My friends from Houston will attest to this. I would talk with them about working vs. staying at home, agreeing that their personal choice was great for them, but would never work for me, as I adamantly defended a  woman’s right to work. But here’s the problem. I was talking from the point of view of a working woman, not a mother. And now I want to be a mother. And Zach wants to be a father. And we believe that parenting adopted children will be very different from parenting biological children, based on what we’ve learned from the research presented to us.

So, how do we mesh these desires, to both be the kind of parents our children will need, and continue working in capacities that are very rewarding? That is the struggle we are trying to alleviate by Monday morning Not necessarily to come to any ‘grand plans’ about sacrificing our careers to stay home, but having a better idea of what we agree are workable options for our family. And why Monday morning? Because this will make a difference in our Home Study report which will be completed early next week.

If you would like to send up some urgent prayers on our behalf . . . maybe we will have a new grand plan by Monday morning

Well, I thought the end of paperwork was closer than it actually is. After talking to the agency today, I realized that there is much more we need to do. In fact, there are a total of 35 documents we need to have for our dossier, and we have 15 so far. But, the documents that we still need won’t be hard to get; it’s more a matter of finding time during the day to make phone calls and write letters. There’s not really a lot of running around that needs to be done. So, I still think we can potentially complete everything by the end of April, but with more effort than I first thought.

And, just ’cause they’re so cute, here is a picture of Ava and Grace that my brother sent to me today: