One foot in front of the other

For this post I thought I'd give a little update on how the training was going for the races I'm going to be running in September in order to hopefully raise a bit of money for the adoption process.

But first a quick update on the adoption process for us. This weekend we were supposed to have our last home visit, but our worker needed to reschedule it so that will be put off another week or so, no big deal. We will use the extra time to finish up that huge stack of papers on our dining room table.

First up this week was to finish all of our pre-service training in preparation for our formerly scheduled meeting on Sunday. A lot of readings and a "fun" online class later we're all wrapped up, and I can't say I'll miss a second of it. After that it was on to visit the doctor to have him fill out a form for us saying that in his opinion we were medically sound both physically and mentally to raise a child. Boom! Fooled him, I'm just a step above an adolescent mentally, and my wife might say that more times than not its like she already has a kid around the house to take care of. But he already signed the form and there are no take backs! Last on the list of must-do's this week was to head over to the DMV office for a FBI & BCI fingerprint background check to make sure we have no past secret lives that might disqualify us as parents.

This process was summed up nicely by me dear friend Marc.

I know I will turn out just fine, I just hope I don't learn that my sweet and beautiful Erin used to be a cut-throat black market international ivory trader and panther smuggler or something along those lines that might set of some red flags. Guess time will tell.

Ok, now on to the training. I'm happy to say that its actually progressing quite nicely. I guess the best way is to cover sport by sport.

My swim has noticeably improved, which I am most excited about. When I started this journey into the world of triathlon I thought "hey I can run and I've been in a pool, swimming will be golden". That was false, I was horrible. However, after a few months things have really started to shape up, I can actually get a mile (1640m) in straight without a break and can actually do it under 45 minutes. This seemed totally out of the realm of possibilities in January, which worried me due to the cut off times for Iron and Half Ironman races, but thats not until next year ;). My week generally consists of one open water and one pool swim, but the Canton Nat is closed for cleaning right now so the early morning pool swim is out. I am not sad about this, I like sleeping. So every Tuesday evening you'll find me on the beach in my wetsuit at Portage Lakes with a few teammates and friends getting ready to put some time into the lake. However some new friends of mine have convinced me that another open water swim on Sunday mornings at sunrise are a good idea, it is not, yet I still  go. More on them later.

Who knew it'd only be 65ish degrees in August, perfect time for a swim in a lake.

I haven't had as much time on my bike of late as I would want, mainly due to this issue with it needing to rain nearly everyday or at least the set times that I would like to take it out and put some miles in. This coming weeks forecast however finally looks like it might lend some better results. I have been able to get in a couple 20 milers and a longer 36 mile ride a couple weeks ago and everything feels fine. I've been able to slowly start to creep up my average speed, which I credit mainly to the new bike rather than me. But I feel confident in it and don't have many concerns about that leg of the race, I'm looking forward to that one the most I think.

Lately my main focus has been on the run, mostly due to the next month and a half of my life. I am entering the first stage of what I have lovingly deemed The September Death March. This starts this Saturday with a half marathon, then continues 3 weeks later with the Oly Tri and ends two weeks after that with the Akron Marathon full course.

A couple months ago I met some great new guys, the a fore mentioned friends with the sunrise swim infatuation, and I joined up with them for Saturday morning runs. They are all apart of a team called Active:Water and are running the Akron half and full in order to raise money for their cause. It is a fantastic cause by the way, I'll include some links, I recommend checking them out. They have all be incredibly supportive in our journey so I decided to run the marathon with them to show my support for their cause. While I'm not an "official" member of their team, I'll be with them each step of the race, just like they all are with us during ours. Maybe one day I'll get a shirt so I can match too, my team's red gear clashes with their blue. Good thing I'm usually in front, ha.

My shirt doesn't match, but whatcha gonna do.

Last Saturday I put in the longest run I've ever done, 16 miles. It was long and I hurt a bit the next day, but I did it. Many of you know Erin and I's journey to healthy living that started almost 2 years ago now. When I started then I had never been able to run a single mile before. Hitting 16 and knowing that I could still do more and I wasn't dead really meant a lot to me. Then, however I realized that I still needed to add 10 more miles to hit a marathon. Then I cried a little inside.

Last year my goal was to just finish a half marathon and not walk. I did it and surprised my self by finishing at 2:03. Saturday I will race the same race with my brother but this time trying to finish sub 8 minute miles in under 1:45. Also beating Matt will be worth it too!

We made up a little flyer that I'll attach to this post if you'd like to share it with anyone or have somewhere you'd like to hang it to help us spread the message that would be great. Otherwise positive thoughts and ice packs are more than enough. So lets start this march. I just figure an adoption is a hard long run, if I can do that, this silly little death march will just be a drop in the bucket.

Give this a click to download a pdf of our flyer.
Buttacavoli Adoption Fundraiser Flyer

Some links to take a look at:
Team Active:Water 
https://activewater.myetap.org/fundraiser/Africa/team.do?participationRef=3357.0.187852860
 Running 4 H2O
http://thomas-costello.blogspot.com/

 
Love wins,
Adam & Erin
http://www.youcaring.com/buttacavoli

The light at the end of the first trimester

Our baby is the size of a peach? I guess not all of the similarities between adoption and natural baby production are the same. But we're soon to end our first trimester of the adoption. Maybe our baby is the size of a peach or maybe its already the size of a rutabaga. That's the greatest wonder we have through this process, is our baby already growing or has conception not even happened for future baby yet. But never the less we're almost out of the first trimester of adoption, so that baby is coming, we just don't know when.

Erin and I were talking last night and she was saying that adoptions are even more similar to being pregnant than I thought. She said that even adoptions have 3 trimesters, they just aren't necessarily on the same strict time-frame that natural baby obtaining is. And it seems that we are now in sight of the end of our first trimester.

Such a small sampling of the paperwork

The way she divided them was that the first trimester consists of the initial process phases of the adoption; signing with an agency, beginning paperwork, creating our parent profile and completing our home-study. The first can seem to go on forever, but its a good time to prepare yourself and your home, because there is no way to know how long or short the next two can be. We receive different situations thru our agency via email and some of them if we were to apply and then be selected could mean the baby would be due in less than 2-3 weeks from that time. Crazy.

The 2nd adoption trimester would be the wait period. This is when we're complete and just waiting on someone to pick us to parent their child. We're hoping for a short wait, but are prepared for it to take as long as it takes.

The 3rd trimester, as she went on to explain, was once we were matched with our birth parent until the time that we took the baby home with us. Again this can be a few months to a couple days depending on the situation. Good thing she's so organized and has my list of baby related projects, or we might end up with a baby and no place to keep them!

A couple weeks ago we had our 2nd of 3 home visits from our social worker for our homestudy. The 2nd visit is where they separate us and individually interview us based on the novel of information we had to fill out about ourselves, as well as go over the first round of training mandated by the state. Its a long meeting. I'm pleased to announce we passed, turns out we're decent people. Who woulda guessed.

In 2 weeks we have our last meeting. During our first visit she said she hoped to finalize our homestudy by October. When we asked her again at our last visit she said we would be all wrapped up by the end of August if everything goes as planned. We were super excited by that news. Once that is complete we will be able to apply for our loan and all the grants we are pursuing, since you have to have a finalized homestudy in order to apply for any of those.

So thats how it stands now, a few more weeks of forms, paperwork, fingerprinting, doctors physicals and more homework and we will be out of our first trimester and into the most daunting and emotional part of the process. This is all the calm before the storm.

Bring. It. On.
youcaring.com/buttacavoli