HOLY SH!T

Two words: HOLY SHIT!

If you've been keeping up with the blog so far you know that we've done our research, been schooled by our adoption agency, coughed up some cash, been through the rigors of home study, created a "Dear Birth-Parent Letter", and been approved to adopt a newborn infant of the human persuasion. What you may not yet know is that on August 14th 2013, at 8:47 am, we received an email that has forever changed our lives. What follows is the story that comes after this paragraph.


Routine 
So much like any other morning, I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was awake and meandering through the kitchen in search of caffeine. I realize I am awake of course because one of the sadist, dictator-felines entangled in my path is amusing himself by attempting to trip me to a bloody-faced death on the cold tile floor. The Spousal Unit forgot to set-up the coffee gizmo to anticipate my need to keep down the blood levels in my caffeine stream. I grapple for a few moments with the idea of navigating the delicate process of coffee-making but in the end surrender to the complexity of it all; opting instead to defer to the Spousal Unit's superior brewing prowess.

As I wait, incapacitated and sprawled across the sofa, half-watching the spirited morning-doers read irrelevant minutia from teleprompters with unsavory grins of sunrise duplicity, I hear a BLESSED sound! The delicate swish of the coverlet and sheets being tossed aside as my savior casts off the shackles of sleep and is resurrected from his memory foam grave. I take a warming comfort in knowing that he will soon anoint me with a cup of the life-giving, hot, black nectar of the Colombian dark-roast gods!   

With the fire stoked, it wasn't long before I was able to drag myself toward the bathroom, stopping by the closet on the way to stare perplexedly into a sea of clothing only to be frustrated at the complete and utter lack of ANYTHING to wear. One shirt is too stiff, another too soft, another too shirty, and there is far too much color to choose from! One is charcoal, another is dark graphite, another is warm black, another is cool black, then new black and old black and after a good 15 minutes of staring, it's all just so overwhelming I opt to brush my teeth instead and try again later.

Grasping the Sonicare I discover that the pull start is a little sluggish so I clean the corrosion from the spark plug and add some starter fluid. Once running, the device turns the inside of my mouth into a frothing Whirlpool Deluxe polishing each tooth to a Cascade-like shine while blowing back my gums like Marilyn Monroe's skirt. Despite the device's herculean vibration it still seems to take a solid ten minutes for my mouth to feel clean.

On to the shower I go, grumbling to the reflection of myself as I pass by the mirror. AH! At last! Waking waters rush over my face and wash the night-glue out of my eyes so that I can see my hair disobey later in the mirror. Later, with body dressed, pants pressed, and that one weird hair that grows extra long from my right eyebrow plucked, I'm ready to face the day!   

Ready  

After wading my way through what must have been a parade for Idiot Commuters United, I arrived at the office. I prepared to attempt to motivate the department heads with my candor and charm for just long enough to get them out of my office so I could fart in private.

As our Sales and PR dude dished the daily low-down I happened to glance over and notice an email alert blinking on my phone. Thinking it was probably just another one of the incessant daily deal emails that flood my inbox on a daily basis, I reach to delete it when I noticed that it was an email to our open-adoption gmail account. Since up until that point the majority of emails to the account had been responses to questions I gave it a look.

What I read in that email, those heavy-weight words, literally knocked me out of my chair! I stood up so fast that the back of my knees knocked my chair into the credenza behind my desk. I read again with my mind racing and my whole day being thrust into one of the most vivid, technicolor moments of my life. The cat to the right seems to capture my state at the time that I read: 

"Dear Byron and Jonathon,

I would like to write to you and introduce myself. My girlfriend and I are interested in putting our baby up for adoption, and we liked your profile. [We]...are both really new to the adoption process and don't know much about it, so we wanted to write and start talking...

If you would like to know more and/or are interested, please write back."

Like with any nerdgasm, I began to hyper-ventilate. Bear in mind that I was jumping up and down, gasping like a geek in front of a room full of people who consider me their leader. My butt clenched so hard that any semblance of the aforementioned desire to fart in private had to have flown back to the recesses from whence it came. The department heads panicked worrying that their fearless leader had suddenly become the victim of some dormant extra chromosome being activated.

When finally I'd mustered the breath to speak the only words that came out were "BIRTH PEOPLE, PHONE", while pointing at the touchscreen and subsequently dropping it! I ran out of my office, through the conference room and into the lobby calling the Spousal Unit and attempting to avoid choking on my heart which had somehow found its way into my throat (probably the fart pushed it up there). Although he is normally capable of grounding me in such states, it turns out that he too was totally useless. All he could say on the other end was, "I know! I don't know!?! I KNOW"!

It is hard to describe the feelings that flew through us. Initially, panic. Then doubt. We had only been in circulation officially for 14 days and they said that kind of thing doesn't happen! They said we'd wait 8-12 months. Was this a test? Was someone playing a prank on us? SURELY this couldn't be real. Only, it is.

That night, we spoke with our birth-family for the first time. We worried they wouldn't like us for a whole host of reasons. Maybe they wouldn't like the way we looked. Maybe our values would turn them off. Would they be serious about their decision to place or would we invest our hearts and souls in a fool's endeavor?

As fears usually are, ours were baseless. To protect their privacy at this stage of the game we'll refer to our birth-family as Dick and Jane. Talking to each other put us right as ease. As it turns out there is a perfect reason why we only waited 14 days. Fate.

Dick and Jane are so much like us it's a little creepy. Jane is playful, hip, and just irreverent enough to be charming. She is a generous soul, funny, and enjoys cooking. I suspect that to say she has any one particular interest or hobby would be foolish, because like me, she has a curious heart and wants to see, try, and do new things all the time. She's down with open adoption, and confident because she's already done it. 

 

Dick is funny too, he has a dry sarcastic wit that if you're not careful he'll slip past you. He seems to have a servant heart, feeling truly gratified by helping and making a difference in people's lives. He's a gamer, a fellow-nerd, open-minded and tolerant. 

We've talked every night since our original call. The feeling they give us is sort of hard to describe. It's kind of like a cross between immense gratitude and the warm, slightly cautious excitement of bonding with someone special. They even coined a name for us which we JUST LOVE: "Nerds-to-be".
 

It almost still seems a little surreal (tearing up a bit here). How could we be so blessed? I know there will be fun times, challenges to face, emotional times, an even happier times than this, but we feel so happy, so moved, that  the doors to our hearts have truly opened to our new family.  

 

 

P.S. Look out for Bianca. She's kind of wild and crazy. LOL!  ;o)

Paper

Howdy Blog!

Today has been one of those days. It's like flying through the day in a tornado of tasks, where the world is so busy everything smushed between sitting in morning and evening traffic seems like it happened years ago. An alternative explanation for the blur could be that I am really rowing on the mother ship and life is but a dream implanted by a group of aliens hidden in the tail of an approaching comet. As this is unlikely and might make me sound as though I should be restrained by a butch, hairy-armed psychiatric nurse named Helga, I shall concur with the former. Suffice it to say, Monday.

The blur tends to creep up on occasion when I'm short on rest. As it happens I lack a lot of bed-wealth. Between the Spousal Unit, the canine, and the two tyrannical feline despots, I am limited to sleeping on a strip of mattress real estate approximately 3 millimeters wide. Now you may have occasion to think I am exaggerating, but to illustrate the sleeping habits of the Spousal Unit it may help to think of genetic experiment crossing a giant sleeping spider monkey with the flopping traits of goldfish out of water. Note the photographic evidence (left) wherein a jumbled mess of bed linens, flesh, fur and niece are sprawled across the bed like butter and syrup on pancakes.

Yes, the blur can be maddening and is usually a sign that the time for a break from the tornado is fast approaching. The blur is typically dealt with in a number of ways. You may find some of these great tips work for you.

VACATION! And while I welcome a relieving respite from my little wire wheel in the hamster cage, I also love my work. Leading a large, diverse, and amazing group of people warms my soul. They all keep me in check. When they notice that the bags under my eyes contain sufficient enough skin for Louis Vuitton to start a new luggage line they'll hound me until I take vacation. I love them like family and sometimes even want to kill them like family.

ELECTRICITY! While I've never personally utilized this tip, I can imagine that a strong jolt from a light socket would

PAPER! Paper has unique and mysterious properties. That is why the ancient Egyptians stole the technology from the aforementioned mother ship while its passengers built the pyramids. IMHOTEP, IMHOTEP (look it up, it means "We come in peace")!

Now we have experienced the magical properties of paper before. In 2000 the Jonathan became the Spousal Unit. In those days I worked as a nurses aide and we lived in the ghetto where you could scarcely make it from the apartment to your car without some seemingly desperate fellow offering to trade you a fully dubitously loaded Wal-Mart gift card worth $300 in exchange for $100 cash. While I admired the tenacity and hood-logic of these fellows, their business plan contained fundamental demographic targeting flaws; inasmuch as we probably wouldn't be living in the ghetto if we had $100.

One night we sat in the floor of our apartment with one unlit candle, two lit candles and a couple of rings. We played "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star, tied our right hands together with the drawstring out of a pair of sweats, lit the unlit candle with our two lit candles, exchanged rings, and read vows to each other. This was our REAL wedding day and it was a meaningful as anything (aside from our laughing at each other's clumsiness during the whole thing). It's interesting to note that all we needed then was each other, and the same holds true today.

In 2008, California a shift in cultural idiocy and for a LIMITED TIME ONLY we could do what everyone
else did. By then, we were making more money (imagine going from driving a hoopty with spray paint to a new ford). Since we could afford it, much like anyone buried under a mere mountain of debt at that time, we jumped on a plane to San Diego. Although Jonathan nearly fell of the wing a few times, we were able to land safely. We were married in the courthouse there and spent the days after in one of the most surreal states I've ever experienced.

What was different? Well for starters, there were a lot more people with long hair. Secondly, when people started approaching us at the courthouse we half-expected them to be carrying pitchforks and torches, but instead, with a glimmer in their eyes (this could have been from medicinal marijuana) they told us they were happy for us. So what was the difference? The PAPER.

I can't explain it. Don't care to. It is one of those things that is so sublime that nothing but direct experience will provide understanding, but that piece of paper, that so many people take for granted was like the grail to us. Much like Indiana Jones, we had to go through a number of booby traps to get it.

Paper has given rise to wars that have scarred nations because of the words written on them. Paper has ended wars because of the signatures of dignitaries scrawled across dotted lines. Paper has swept lovers off their feet, and even replaced the terribly uncomfortable corncobs that use to populate the outhouses of the south. Paper is a magical thing, indeed.

So yesterday, when I'd emerged from the blur to find an email with a digital version of a piece of paper, it's no wonder why I cried, felt so moved, and came to experience our journey to parenting as so much more REAL than before. See the last part of the paper below: