Well...its been a while!

But I told you guys I am awful at blogging! So you were forewarned! The raffle went great! I'll post a list of the winners later on today! We were able to raise enough to pay for our Home Study! We will start that process after the holidays. Things are just too crazy right now. We can't wait to get a move on! Nothing else is new here. I did reunite with an old friend the other day via e-mail. Its been really awesome and I'm glad she e-mailed me. I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas!!!

Well hello there!

Not much new here...We are still in the ticket selling phase of our raffle and thats going really well. We've sold 147 so far. We've done far better than I thought we would! We are over halfway to paying for our home study which is amazing. I saw Robert yesterday and gave him a couple of the business cards printed up with our blog info, an e-mail address and phone number to contact us at on the college bulletin board. Never know...there might be a girl in a situation who doesn't want to abort but also doesn't want to parent her child...we could help each other. I want to get a few cards to the rest of the family as well. Never know when they might hear of someone who wants to look into adoption.

In other, non-baby/non-adoption news...my mouth really hurts today, lol. My orthodontist appointment yesterday has gone and left me grumpy today. Alright...off to do some work for me! Talk to you all later!

Our Adoption Profile

We submitted our adoption profile to the agency...we are waiting to hear back from them on if there are things we should change or not. Here are some screenshots of what it will look like (if we don't have to change it.)

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I think thats all of them...we are pretty happy with it. Once the agency approves, we have to have 5 copies printed up and then have them wirebound. Alright...thats all I've got for the moment.

OH! I still have tickets to sell! I've sold up to 113 so far. Get yours today!!!

Not much is new...

Not too much is going on here. We started selling our raffle tickets and have had a great response. We've sold 60 so far! We plan on selling a bunch more! While I was being talked into a flew shot today, I got to see the scarves Zephyr made for the raffle. They are so pretty and I don't want to give them away, lol. But of course they'll be given away to the winners. Zephyr WILL be making me my favorite one though, lol! Stephanie got us a facial to add to the list of prizes! Thats exciting. I can't wait til the drawing in November! Alright...thats all for now. Night!

Edited to add: 62 tickets! Thank you Katie!

Raffle!

Well, our raffle flyer is complete! Check it out!

We will start to offer tickets for donations on October 1st and I'll be able to mail them out to everyone starting on the 4th. They are on order and will be here on the 3rd. I can't wait to get started!!!

Monday's Adoption Seminar

Well, our seminar was really long but really good. There were 4 other couples there besides us and we were the only couple who had already been accepted to the agency. We found out that they have 50 couples in their waiting family pool and they do not like to accept more than that at any given time as they typically place around 50 babies a year...so as one couple leaves the pool, they'll introduce another, if that makes sense. I'm glad we are already in. So the meeting started with us meeting Patricia who is the lawyer and basically the head honcho of the agency. She's the head of the board that accepted our application so she recognized Matt and I and that was nice.

She started by going over all the initial paperwork...it was lots of legal talk that I didn't overly understand and she broke it down section by section explaining each piece. That was really helpful and she really took her time to make sure she answered all the questions everyone had. She went ahead and told us stories about adoptions that had taken place and the outcomes. She went into detail about birth father rights and made sure that we knew that if a birth father raised some sort of red flag after the baby had been placed (before she has no say) she will fight to the end to make sure we get the outcome we want. I can imagine that she would be scary in court, lol...I wouldn't want to go up against her. Definitely glad she's on our side!

So towards the end of our 5 hours, she started telling us about the different things that can hold up your adoption...or make it take longer. In terms of the stuff we choose on our application: If you choose a specific gender, it will increase your time. If you choose a boy, they won't show your profile to anyone who is carrying a girl or who do not know what they are having. That cuts you down...a lot. Age can affect your wait time but they seem to primarily deal with newborns. The race of the baby will most definitely increase your wait time for placement. Also, if you want a baby who was born to a mother with no medical issues and no drug use, that too will increase your time. After listening to all that, we decided to change a couple things on our application. We changed our choice on age...we told them that we prefer a newborn but wouldn't totally say no to a 1 - 3 month old baby. Matt said 6 months but I couldn't do that. Personal reasons on my part, so I compromised on the 1-3 months. We also changed our decision on mental health issues and drug use where the mother is concerned. We don't want a totally cracked out and severe mental issued mother but if at the beginning of the pregnancy, she wasn't aware and maybe smoked a little pot or something...those things happen. The baby's more often than not turn out fine. She gave us several instances where she dealt with baby's who had more severe drug use from the mother and they were healthier than a mother who had never used. We are comfortable with those changes so I guess we are ok with that.

Ummm...I think thats all I've got for now. Oh! We are almost done with our adoption profile. I just ordered a copy today to show to the adoption agency to approve so I can order final copies. I have to make 5 copies so I'll make 6 just in case. Oh! And while there we also spoke with our adoptive parent coordinator, Denise! She's great too. (We really liked everyone at the agency, lol) We told her we were having trouble coming up with the initial $5,000. So she told us to start with the $1200 portion of that $5000 for the home study. The home study takes 4 to 6 weeks to complete so we can at least get that started while we come up with the rest of the money. We think we'll be able to take out a loan by December. I have virtually all of our bills paid at that point (I think we are seriously going from around $6,000 in debt (not including the house) to around $300 in debt by December. Things are tight right now but oh so worth it.

Alright, I'm still feeling crappy so I'm gonna go to bed now. I had a rough day with not feeling well all while having to move my office. Good times. Night everyone! Thanks if you stayed with me this long!

Fundraiser

We are putting together a fundraiser!  A raffle.  We have some great prizes and we intend to start selling raffle tickets at the beginning of October and hold the drawing at the end of November.  Right before Christmas!  We'll be selling tickets all over and all prizes (except for 1) can be shipped!  I'm thinking we'll sell the raffle tickets for $5 a piece and you will have a chance to win a beautiful jewelry basket (donated by Katy), hotel gift certificates (donated by our wonderful employer), a couple of other baskets (I'll be sure to post what those are and who they are from as soon as I know!), a photoshoot with Reign Photography and an assortment of gift cards. Our friends keep offering prizes so I'm sure more will be added before we are done. We are very excited to get this raffle underway. Its a fun way for our friends and family to help us out and get a chance at some fun prizes. This is going to be great! I can just feel it!

A Little Bit of Background

So Matt and I have been trying to start a family for quite some time.  Almost from the time we started dating...sometimes when you know, you just know.  Neither of us are going anywhere.  So that's basically 3, almost 3 and a half years of trying to conceive.  I've spent years getting up at the same time every single day to track my cycles by taking my temperature.  You learn a lot about your body that way but its tiring.  After a year and half, I called my OB/GYN and asked for a referral to a specialist.  We ended up at the Florida Institute for Reproductive Medicine.  That place is amazing.  The staff is amazing and really care about you and try to help in every way possible to help you conceive.  Matt had two semen analysis' done.  The results weren't great.  He had great count but swimmers were not shaped correctly and didn't swim.  (Probably more than most of you ever wanted to know about Matt, lol.)  So the chances of us conceiving on our own were/are slim to none.

For me, they suggested an HSG or a Hysterosalpingography.  Basically, they inject a dye into the cervical canal and they watch on a machine as the dye moves through your reproductive system.  This allows the Dr’s to see the shape od the uterus and to see if there are any blockages that can keep you from conceiving  The Dr who tried to do this test on my ran into an issue where he couldn’t get the catheter into my cervical canal.  It was later determined that I had a stenotic cervix.  It wasn’t letting anything in.  However, since my periods were regular he didn’t think I would have a problem getting pregnant as long as he was able to get the sperm where it needed to go.

So he started me on Clomid to be used with a trigger to make me super ovulate and then would do an IUI the next day.  We did 3 cycles of IUI with all the results being negative.  At that point, our Dr felt that I needed to have a laparoscopy.  They went in and found two very small spots of stage one endometriosis.  Those spots were removed.  While in there, they corrected my stenotic cervix and also did the HSG while I was knocked out and found that everything looked normal.  Once I recovered, we tried one more IUI with Clomid and again, the results were negative.  The Dr suggested IVF.  He felt strongly that we would get pregnant if we did IVF.  IVF is VERY expensive.  And there are no guarantees that it will work.  So Matt and I decided to take some time off from trying to conceive and try to decide what we wanted to do.

I found a couple of grants that would pay for the majority of the IVF procedure.  We applied for two of them.  We were supposed to hear back from one of them in mid-June.  We are still waiting to hear on that grant so I’m not holding out much hope on that one.  The second grant we are supposed to hear about at the end of September.  We stand a better chance on that one but still don’t feel that we will get one of these grants.  We did a lot of talking…do we try IVF?  Do we just adopt?  Are we ok with adopting?  All sorts of questions are going through your head.  Matt just wants to start a family and at this point doesn’t really care how it happens.  I agree with him but as a woman I really want to get to experience pregnancy.  I kind of feel like I am getting robbed of something that I have a right to experience.  This feeling has been the toughest thing to overcome in our journey.  Luckily, Matt has been very understanding. 

We eventually decided to adopt.  All of my friends were turning up pregnant, family too.  And while I was very happy for all them (truly I was!  Even if I did have to take a couple days to come out and say congrats!) but very, very sad for myself.  I couldn’t deal with the disappointment anymore.  Month after month of waiting to see if my period would start or if I would finally see that BFP (Big Fat Positive, for those of you not up on the lingo, lol.)  It was too much to deal with, especially after one cycle where my period was four days late…I thought for sure, we’d finally done it.  So…I quit!  I told Matt I was ready to move forward with adoption.  Just because we can’t get pregnant doesn’t mean we can’t have the family we want.  Someone else’s child deserves as much long and as caring a home as my own child by blood does.  So we started researching adoption agency’s.

A friend of ours adopted her two children from an agency called, A Chosen Child.  They are based out of Orlando.  Their prices are very reasonable compared to some of the other agency’s we looked at and our friend really great experiences when she adopted both of her children.  She invited us over and showed us all her paperwork and her adoption profile and let us ask anything and everything we could possibly think to ask.  We are so grateful to have her guidance, help and support.  So we sent in our application with our application fee.  A couple weeks later they accepted our application and here we are.  Trying to scramble together more money to send in with the next round of paperwork so we can get even more paperwork, lol.

We have been slowly starting to put our future child’s room together.  We got a great deal on a nice crib and couldn’t pass it up so we figured why not start to set up the room?  We’ve also got some toys from friends with children who have grown out of them.  Right now, everything is gender neutral as we have no idea what sex our child will be at this time.  We’ve also started a book collection!  Its growing quite nicely and I can’t wait to teach our child how to read and enjoy all the books that I enjoyed as a child!  We have an adoption ceremony on September 19^th where we will learn more about the process and get some more questions answered.  I’ll take notes and be sure to post afterwards.  Well, that’s all I have for now.  I’ll post more later.  And I’m leaving you with a picture of the baby’s room and a picture of our book shelf full of children’s books!  Talk to you soon!

Well hello there!

Hello everyone!  Welcome to my little space on the internets!  Matt hates it when I say internets so I say it all the time, lol.  Anyhow, let me start by saying I'm awful at blogging.  I apologize.  As most of my friends and family know, we have been unable to conceive on our own to start a family so we are going to adopt.  I wanted to start a blog to keep everyone up to date on our long journey.  And to let our child, whoever he or she may be, know that we loved them long before we ever knew them.  So in the next few days, I'll probably start at the beginning and work my way forward to the present and then keep everyone posted on where we are in the whole adoption process.  This will be a long and draining process I'm sure, but the rewards will be so worth it.  Thanks for stopping through and checking me out.  I hope to not be too totally boring!  Talk to you all soon!

Oh!  Before I forget...I have added a chip-in widget off to the right of this page.  I've basically resorted to internet begging for help offset the cost of adoption.  It is insane how much it costs to adopt and infant or even to adopt privately.  If you can (and want too) help, thank you!  Thats amazing and truly appreciated it.  If you can't, that is equally as amazing as I appreciate you coming through, and reading our story.  Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers that this journey is as easy and painless as possible!  Ok...be back later for real now!