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.
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