Firsts

Tahdah! A blog is born.

Firsts are strange things. They can be horrendously traumatic to the point of reducing grown men to quivering piles of terrified goo like those left behind in the dark forest by the Cowardly Lion. Firsts can be sensible, like a single helping of pie and foregone seconds to avoid feeling like you should be whipped for your carte blanche pastry depravity. They can be wonderful too, like the first time Luca, our Labrador daughter figured out that her farts come from her and was no longer startled by them. We were so proud.

Hopefully, this makes a great first post in a blog about the road to becoming a first time parent and adopting our first human child. 

Maybe this is a blog just for me and the Spousal Unit (Jonathan). Maybe it's for another adoptive parent or perhaps a birth-mom. While I have no idea whether or not anyone will ever read the incoherent ramblings of a daddy-wannabe, I figure, much like the average Facebook user, that everyone wants to know my business. 

After all, I can't be any less important than that YouTube kid who got a gig as a correspondent because he was so torn-up about Brittany Spears. Why not, I say?! Surely the journey to being a dad is more important the ever-prevalent duck-lipped self-pics taken by folks in front of bathroom mirrors that seem so popular these days.

In any case, the story is worthy of being recorded. If nothing else, it will have merit as a memory-aid when I'm a 100-year-old great-granddad sitting in my chair with my pants up to my chest making strange sucking noises as I try to clear my lunch from my dentures. Well, up under my chest, since by that age even men have to move their breasts aside to clean their navels. 

Like so many other ideas I have in life, this blog was a bit late to come to fruition. I tend to have a million ideas a minute, only half of which make it out of my skull. Of that half, a small fraction end up on paper while the rest end up lost on folks who have difficulty navigating the muddy landscape of my thought process, much less the complex, but delicate social architecture that is conversation. I digress.

SO, time to catch you up. This whole journey started in a long time ago when the Spousal Unit and myself started talking about his inability to carry a child as a solution to our desire to bequeath the first future Intergalactic Supreme Overlord to the world. Despite his uterine ineptitude, we were both determined.

At first we considered renting a womb. Since the dude at Enterprise seemed convinced that they only rent vehicles, we looked into surrogacy. Too scary. Too expensive. Plus, we imagined, there were bound to be surplus numbers just sitting on the shelf, maybe even tenderly used.

That's when we began researching adoption. Whoa! The amount of information and misinformation swirling around the almighty google  was staggering. We did our research and decided on open adoption. Then on an agency. First we had to travel to Dallas for the initial informational session. As it turns out this was a fruitless step for me because when sitting before a speaker I seem incapable of hearing anything but the teacher from Charlie Brown. I have the auditory attention span of a hyperactive squirrel marinated in Red Bull.

We came home, did some chatting, read up a bit more and scheduled the second trip; this time to Houston for: AN INTENSIVE 2-DAY WORKSHOP!!! I put that all in caps because anytime the word "intensive" is used to advertise I imagine the announcer at a monster truck rally shouting over the loudspeaker. Incidentally, there was some shouting, but it was a dramatic reenactment of the starvation scene from "Gone With The Wind". When we arrived at the hotel, one of us was hungry and the other wanted to skip dinner and go to bed. As God as my witness, exhaustion-induced theatrics ensued!

The next morning we made it through the Houston traffic (a level of traffic that made me wish I was driving a tractor through Beijing instead). Filled with anticipation over what kind of crystal-grippin, hippy weirdos would be joining us for the TWO DAY INTENSIVE, we were surprised to learn that the folks there were just as pleasantly domesticated as we are. In addition, there were FOUR gay couples and only ONE opposite-sexed couple. It was a royal flush.

Yeah, really! In Texas, the shame state; and I always thought Brokeback Mountain was sci-fi.

We learned a lot, signed our contracts, paid a lot of money, and made our first parenting decision - open adoption.