The Excitement is Building

The excitement is building. With each day that passes, I am more excited. In just two short weeks, we will be holding our son or daughter. I can't wait. I really believe this is going to work out. I continue to pray for R and the decision she is making. I know it is really difficult on her and I hope she will have some peace knowing that her baby is already loved by us. D has been carrying around his stuffed wolf (Jackson) saying that Jackson is the little brother and he is practicing to be a big brother. Its so darn cute. He has been pretending that he is Jackson's big brother for months now but now he is practicing because he knows it will be true soon. I know he is going to be a great big brother. I just hope all of the changes are not too much for him to handle.

I just removed the adoption ticker at the bottom of my blog that said 11 month 1 week and 1 day waiting for a match. Our total wait was exactly 11 months. It seems like a whole lot longer than that. We have some last minute hurdles we need to get accomplished. We need our homestudy updated to allow us to adopt an hispanic baby but that was supposedly in the works well before we matched with R. I talked to our social worker yesterday and he is going to move our update to the top of his pile. We need to have it pretty soon after birth so as to not delay our ICPC approval.

The interstate aspect of all of this is interesting. Being a lawyer, I am really into how all of this will work (although I know NOTHING about adoption law). Our two lawyers - one from Georgia and one from Texas - are talking to determine which state's law will apply with respect to relinquishment time, etc. The laws of Texas are much more favorable to the adoptive parents. We should know more on that soon.

I am meeting with my three bosses (my supervisor, his boss and the second person in charge of our department) today to discuss how my matters will be handled while I am on leave. I intend to take 12 weeks off (8 weeks paid adoption leave and 4 weeks vacation). I have been scrambling to get a lot of projects wrapped up before I am out and spent most of yesterday cleaning off my desk and deleting messages from my inbox. Hopefully that meeting will go well.