About Having Kids and Having Plans

I had an interesting conversation with the guy who came to my workplace to update insurance information this week.  He appeared to be about my age or maybe a couple of years older and wasn't married (or at least wasn't wearing a ring).  I met with him after school on Friday, so the weekend was on everyone's mind.  Our conversation went something like this (between signing on the dotted lines, etc.):

Him: So, do you have any big plans this weekend?
Me: No, not really.  I have two little girls at home, so they keep me pretty busy.  We'll probably just hang around the house.
Him: You have two kids already?  How old were you when you had your first? (Apparently I look like a baby.)
Me: We adopted my daughter when I was 25, and now we have a six-month-old.  
Him: Wow, you must have been really mature to have adopted a child at 25.  I'm nowhere near mature enough for that.
Me: I suppose if you wait until you're ready, you'd never do it.
Him: That is an interesting point.  Your lifestyle sounds so different from mine.

My lifestyle probably is a lot different from his.  Before we had kids, waking up at 4:30 on weekdays and 6:00 (if I'm lucky) on weekends sounded absurd.  I would come home after work on Fridays, grab a glass of wine or a snack, and watch two hours of "Say Yes to the Dress" before Andrew even got home.  I stayed up late, and most weekends were packed with social activities such as movies, car races, or parties. 

After Piper was born, I knew I had never loved any human except my husband more than I loved her, and I had also never been more exhausted.  Having a newborn takes every ounce of your attention and sleep because they literally cannot do anything for themselves.  So, we planned to wait until Piper was in Pre-K, when childcare would be free and she would be more self-sufficient, to start the adoption process again.  God had other plans, and Caroline was born shortly after Piper turned two.  And that is when I figured out the true meaning of "busy" and "sleep-deprived".  When people say that the adjustment of going from one child to two is far greater than the adjustment of going from no children to one, they really mean it.  There truly is never a moment (except sometimes in the middle of the night, and even that isn't guaranteed) when someone doesn't need something. 

I probably wasn't "really mature" when we adopted Piper (I'm probably still not!).  I've heard lots of people say, "I'm too selfish to have kids" or "I enjoy my personal time/space too much" or "I'm too busy for kids" or "Kids are too expensive," and I would say that probably all of those things are true- about the people talking and about me.  I'm selfish, I do enjoy my own time, kids are expensive, and a full-time job in itself is enough to keep anyone busy. 

Having kids is hard, and my life is so different than it used to be, but it's also one of the most joyful things I've ever done.  Sometimes I wish for a morning to sleep in until 8:00, a date with my husband, or, my goodness, just one quiet moment(!), but I don't ever wish for my old life back.  My children force me to be less selfish, better with my time, more patient, and less tight-fisted with my money.  At the end of the day, they've taught me to be a better person in general, and at the end of my life, I know I won't look back and think, "I wish I had had less time with them and more time doing my own thing."  Some days, I think my heart will burst from a little smile of Caroline's, and then Piper says, "I love you, Mommy," and it does.

Children might not be for everyone, and I certainly don't think that there should be an expectation to have a certain number of kids.  Some people are great with five kids, and I am not one of them.  But if you're waiting until the stars align or until you are "ready" for a first baby (or a second or third), just know that you're always going to be selfish and immature and that your parents were, no doubt, selfish and immature when they had you, and they probably had no money at one point and they probably seemed boring and socially inadequate when you and your siblings were little...and you made it and they made it, and everyone learned a whole lot along the way.

Why and How We Celebrate "Gotcha Day"

(Side note: Wow, it has been two months since my last post.  This is not for lack of inspiration, but really, I don’t know how people with multiple children and full-time jobs manage to do anything but work, take care of their families, and possibly squeeze in a trip to the gym.  Hence the absence of blogging for several weeks.  I know you’ve been missing me.)

Just like all other issues surrounding adoption, everyone seems to have an opinion about “Gotcha Day.”  Y’all, I tell you, the opinions WEAR. ME. OUT.  “Here’s why you shouldn’t adopt a baby of another race.”  “Let me give you this book of a million reasons why open adoptions are the answer to everyone’s problems everywhere.”  “This is exactly how you should tell your child about his adoption, or why you should never tell him about it at all.”  The stuff people say can be quite appalling, even when well-intended, and I know that the last thing anyone needs is yet another post aimed at lambasting people whose opinions differ from theirs.  When raising a family, there are rarely ever black-and-white answers that apply to all people.  All of that said, my husband and I have put a lot of thought into why we want to celebrate “Gotcha Day” with our daughter, and this post isn’t meant to be critical but helpful.  There are legitimate reasons for deciding either way.  Your family, your choice.

A little background information on “Gotcha Day” and our family’s history:  

“Gotcha Day” is traditionally a day set aside for adoptive families to celebrate the time when an adopted child officially became a member of their family.  It is most commonly celebrated with international adoptions and adoptions from foster care, since the child is typically older in those cases and most likely did not live with the adoptive family from birth.  “Gotcha Day” can, however, be celebrated by anyone (like us) who has adopted a child.  

After years of infertility, my husband and I adopted a newborn through an agency in Oklahoma City and were able to be present for our daughter’s delivery.  She came home with us from the hospital, but she was technically under custody of the adoption agency for six months, at which time we appeared before a judge to finalize the adoption.  This is the day that we now celebrate as “Gotcha Day” because it is when she took our last name and was declared to be in our custody.  Piper’s birthday is in June, but we celebrate her “Gotcha Day” on December 30.  We also have a biological child, Caroline, who was born earlier this year.  Now that you know all of that…

1. Yes, we call it “Gotcha Day”.  Some families find this term offensive (I suppose because it can sound as though one acquired a child in the same way that a car or a house would be obtained) and elect to name the day something else, such as “Family Day”, “Forever Family Day”, or “Adoption Day”.  We like “Gotcha Day” because it is the day that we officially “got” custody of our daughter.  Though Caroline wasn’t born yet, she “got” a sister that day.  “Adoption Day” is also fine, but we weren’t fans of “Family Day” or “Forever Family Day” because Piper’s birth mother is also her family, and we felt like those names minimized her role in Piper’s life.  In my opinion, whatever you call the day is just semantics.  Words mean different things to different people. 

2.  We don’t do big gifts.  We have a special dinner at Zio’s (where we went after her finalization) with a dessert of her choosing.  We look at pictures of her birth and finalization day and retell her the whole story of her adoption, as she has heard many times before.  Birthdays are reserved for big gifts.

3.  Caroline won’t have a “Gotcha Day”, but we still plan to celebrate Piper’s.  Some people say that this is unfair to the biological child, but just because something isn’t “fair” (meaning that both people have it) doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth a celebration.  My brother isn’t married, but we celebrated my wedding.  I’m not a National Merit Scholar, but we celebrated his accomplishment.  We both graduated high school and college, and everybody celebrated.  Big life events deserve a party.

4.  We use “Gotcha Day” as a day to celebrate our daughter’s birth mother.  Though Piper is very important to our family, Anna is, too.  “Gotcha Day” is about more than just Piper, and we always want her to know that.  There is a bigger story behind “Gotcha Day” than taking an oath before a judge and signing some papers; there is the story of a brave 17-year-old whose life is forever valuable to us.  As my mom says, “A person can never have too much love.”  Piper gets to have our love and her birth mother’s.  That’s worth celebrating.

5.  We need to be reminded of God’s goodness.  I am forgetful.  I have the best life, full of countless blessings, and I daily forget what He has done for me.  There are times when I sit back and ponder the wonder of adoption, but I need a tangible reminder of it sometimes, too.  “Gotcha Day” is a day specifically set aside so that I can remember.    

6.  We want our girls to know how special they are to us.  “Well, shouldn’t they know that every day of the year?” you say.  Yes, they should.  But, see #5.  I am forgetful.  Furthermore, there are days when I’m tired, busy, lazy, and (embarrassingly) not intentional.  “Gotcha Day” is an opportunity to seize by reminding Piper that she is special and that we are thrilled to have her as a part of our family.  It’s something tangible for my distracted soul, sort of like Christmas.  I should celebrate the birth of Christ every day of the year, but I am forgetful, tired, busy, lazy, and not intentional, and I need to set aside purposeful time to make much of my Savior. 

7.  Like all other aspects of adoption and many other aspects of life, “Gotcha Day” is simultaneously full of joy and loss.  Just because something isn’t purely joy doesn’t mean that we must remember only the loss.  Though I don’t fully understand the hurt, I realize that Anna went through horrible pain and loss so that we could have Piper.  We went through years of sadness and loss in dealing with infertility, too.  The day after Piper was born was the most wonderful and terrible day at the same time.  My heart hurt for Anna and her boyfriend, yet I was so thankful for their gift that came home in our arms.  Celebrating “Gotcha Day” doesn’t minimize the pain.  It helps us recount the whole story of how God started building our family- joy, loss, and all.  It’s the same reason that we celebrate September 12^th in our family- the day that our marriage was shattered and also it was saved.  It’s also the reason why we celebrate baptisms.  Our adoption into God’s family came at a great price to Himself.  Loss and joy.  Celebrating the whole story.     

8.  “Gotcha Day” didn’t rid Piper of her identity.  She will always be spunky, stubborn, Mexican, hilarious, and beautiful.  She got a new last name, but it didn’t change who she was.  I changed my last name when I got married, but I was still the same person.  I, like Piper, gained a new name and another family to add to the one I already had.

9.  Celebrating “Gotcha Day” will be Piper’s choice as she gets older.  There may come a day when it is too painful for Piper to think about her adoption.  I pray she doesn’t, but she may be tempted with thoughts that Anna didn’t love or want her and had to “get rid of” her (quite the opposite is true!).  If that year ever comes, I’m willing to let Piper skip the celebration, and to hopefully open up a conversation with her about her adoption.

 

10.  Sometimes we’ll hit a home run, and sometimes we’ll strike out, and either way, the sun will rise tomorrow.  We don’t claim to parent the “right way” (as if there was one), and we may be failing miserably in the “Gotcha Day” celebrations, as well.  But we’ll all live to tell about it.  Anyway, it’s one day.  We have 364 more, just this year(!), to get something right. 

We’re all on the same team.  There is not a wide network of families who have adopted.  We need each other.  Let’s get our panties out of a wad and be kind to others whose opinions may differ from our own.  No adoption story is exactly the same, so our celebrations (or lack thereof) don’t have to be, either.    

Happy Gotcha Day, Piper Anna!

“Born not from our flesh but born in our hearts, you were wanted and longed for and loved from the start.”

Finalization Day 2013

Finalization Day 2013

Gotcha Day 2015 with her friend at dinner

Early morning hugs on Gotcha Day 2015

Piper and Dad at the Bagel Shop, Gotcha Day 2015

And this one, because I'm obsessed with our family, and it's the first picture we've had together in 2+ years.

Grow Where You Are Planted

I remember when I first moved to Norman for college in the summer of 2006.  I despised everything about the town except for the university.  I hated that I would walk by a beautiful house on one street and find a dump within 50 feet of it (what zoning?), thought it was weird that there were bus stops and people actually waited at them to catch the city bus (where is your new BMW?), and lamented the loss of my Lifetime Fitness membership because most gyms in Norman are not big, corporate establishments.  Growing up in suburban Dallas with a bunch of rich, white folks left me with little tolerance for much that was different from the people and lifestyle I had grown accustomed to over the past 18 years.

During my years at the University of Oklahoma, I met my husband, who, much to my dismay at the time, is from Oklahoma.  We married and settled down in Norman, a place I swore I would leave as soon as I graduated.  I’m still here, almost 10 years after I arrived.  And, by God’s grace, I’ve grown to love this place.  Continue reading here.

On Productivity and Perspective

After a whole summer plus almost seven glorious weeks at home enjoying my little ones, I'm headed back to work tomorrow.  I have mixed emotions, naturally.  I feel so much purpose in my job as a Pre-K teacher.  And I love my own children.  I told Piper this morning that we were all just going to go to Momma's work together tomorrow.  She seemed to think that would be fine.

I am productive at my job.  If there is one thing I can do well, it is cranking out lesson plans.  I can efficiently gather materials for centers, execute small group instruction, and write individual behavior and education plans.  I have my "off" days, like everyone else, and I am not under any delusion that I am the best teacher ever to exist.  But I know how to get things done.

Home is a different story.  My two-year-old was just getting pretty good at entertaining herself for a short time when I gave birth to Caroline.  Y'all, it took me three hours to make dinner on Friday.  Three hours!  This is about how long it takes to do anything anymore.  Get out the onions to chop.  Toddler wakes up from nap.  "I want a snack."  Start chopping onions.  "I need to go potty."  Finish chopping onions, get out meat to brown.  Toddler begins coloring on the table with chalk.  Baby wakes up (girl can scream when she's hungry).  Start feeding baby.  She spits up in my hair, for the third time today.  Finish feeding baby.  Blowout!  All over my jeans that just came out of the laundry (which is forever overflowing)!  Toddler is playing in the cleaning supplies.  Finish browning meat.  "Piper, you can't put your hand on Sissy's tummy when you're trying to stand up!"  Calm two crying children... You get it.  This is normal life.  Days full of nonstop activity, yet I rarely have anything to show for them when my husband walks in the door at 6:00 p.m.  I write things on my daily to-do list, and they may or may not be done three days later.  A prime example is the fact that, so far, it has taken me 53 minutes and approximately seven interruptions to write this blog post.

I have had to completely change my perspective on how I view this season of my life.  My children cause interruptions, but they themselves are not interruptions.  They are gifts.  I have found that, 95 percent of the time when I get frustrated with the way my day is going, it is because my plans (which usually are self-centered) have gone awry.  Andrew was getting ready to go for a run a few nights ago when both girls woke up screaming.  His response was, "Well, I'm basically not going to get to do things when I want to do them anymore, ever, right now."  We're both coming around to accepting that.

This time is a season.  These girls are a blessing.  This work is good.  I might not have anything tangible to show for all I've done with my kids at the end of the day, but I get to mold young hearts and minds, teach them about the world around them, and hope that God will use my filthy hands to point them to Christ.  There could be nothing more productive or important than that.  And one day, I'm sure I'll miss these little people needing me so much.           

  

Enough.

Confession: I am a worrier.

In our culture today, worrying has become a relatively minor sin, or, as Jerry Bridges would call it, a "respectable sin".  Saying, "I am a worrier" sounds less offensive than, "I am a cheater" or, "I am a liar."  "Everyone worries" is a common argument.  In fact, many people (Christians or otherwise) would not consider worrying to be a sin at all.  The truth is that worrying belittles God.  Essentially, it is saying to God that we do not trust Him to take care of our future and that we do not believe him to be enough for our present.  (Continue reading here.)

"The days are long, but the years are short."

I might add that the nights are long, too, when you have a newborn and a two-year-old.  Otherwise, the above quote from my mom couldn't be more accurate.  Yesterday was the first time in 22 years that I haven't been to a first day of school.  That was weird.  I'll go back in October, but for now, I'm staying home with my girls and trying to figure out life with a new little person in it.  Piper goes to school part-time, but Caroline and I hang out at the house.  She's a very easy baby (as far as babies go), but I'm exhausted.  When Piper is home, she's a challenge.  I know that our sweet little girl is hidden somewhere behind all of the defiance, tantrums, and accidents, but there are certainly days when I feel my body physically release all kinds of tension after she is finally in bed (following nearly an hour-long bedtime routine) and Caroline is bathed, changed, and fed.  The days do seem long.

Then I look at this precious family of mine, and I realize that God knows exactly how much I can handle.  They're not perfect, I'm not perfect, and being a mom is plain hard sometimes.  The years will be short.  But there can be joy in each moment, if I choose to look for it.

 

Caroline

After having one baby, you wonder how in the world you could possibly love another as much as the first.  And then you do.  This is the story of Caroline Grace.

On Monday, August 3rd, at 2:23 a.m., I woke up out of a dead sleep, flipped on the bedside lamp, and told Andrew, "Uh, I'm pretty sure my water just broke."  Sure enough, it had.  The prompt little lady decided that she was ready to come into the world on her exact due date.  Oddly, my body was not ready and did not go into active labor on its own.  We waited to go up to the hospital until 9:30 because I had a doctor's appointment then anyway, and he sent me across the street to Labor and Delivery.  After a couple of doses of a medication to speed up the process and working through contractions for nearly 11 hours, I still hadn't made any progress.  Eventually, I got an epidural and Pitocin and was ready to push just three hours later.  After about seven minutes of pushing, Caroline was here.  (I'll spare you the rest of the details.)  According to the nurses, I should have about seven more babies.  Right.

Most things about Caroline's birth were not at all like the movies, but the moment she came out was every bit the same.  Andrew and I burst into tears immediately, and our hearts were so full of love that we thought they would explode.  Suddenly, all of the annoyances of pregnancy and the pains of childbirth were worth everything.

Piper was a miracle because she made me a mother for the first time, and this child is a miracle because she beat the odds.  Doctors said she wouldn't be here.  I remember staring at Piper in disbelief during her first days home because I couldn't believe that she was mine.  The feelings are identical with Caroline.

Being home has been hard, honestly.  Caroline is an unbelievably easy, sweet baby, and I couldn't be more thankful.  Piper has had a hard time adjusting, which I should have expected more than I did.  Every day gets a little less difficult, which gives me hope that our well-mannered, thoughtful two-year-old will soon make her return.  For now, though, our "new normal" is tough.  One of the best parts of this experience has been having Andrew by my side the whole time.  I'm dreading when he has to go back to work next week.  During labor and delivery, he was my rock, and he continues to be steady and patient during the trials of parenting and my flip-flopping hormones.  He reminds me that I'm beautiful when all I feel lately is swollen and sore.  I've been more attracted to him in the past few days than I have been since we've known each other.  Things will get easier, I'm sure.

We found out about Caroline just a few weeks following the hardest moments we have ever endured as a couple.  There was never any debate about her name; it literally took us about five minutes to decide what she would be called if she was a girl.  Caroline: "joyful song".  It is based on Psalm 126, and one of my favorite hymns that we sing at church:

"Our mouths, they were filled, filled with laughter

Our tongues they were loosed, loosed with joy

Restore us, O Lord,

Restore us, O Lord,

Although we are weeping, 

Lord, help us keep sowing the seeds of your kingdom

For the day you will reap them

Your sheaves we will carry, 

Lord, please do not tarry, 

All those who sow weeping will go out with songs of joy."

Truly, He has filled us with joy a hundred times over through this precious child, the perfect addition to our little family.