Too Blessed to be Stressed

     So I’ve been having some headaches recently (don’t worry, I saw the doctor, had an MRI, saw another doctor, now we’re all good…except that it kind of led to the blog being late this week. Sorry). And though they turned out to be nothing serious, it led to a lot of concern and attempts to figure out where they were coming from. More than once someone has suggested that maybe it’s the stress of the adoption process that’s at the root of this mysterious brain pain. And while that’s probably a decent idea, I feel like I need to set the record straight at this point; our adoption isn’t stressful.

    Ok, I’ll admit, there have been a few times we’ve been stressed. When we had our home study, we were worried we wouldn’t get the house clean. When we had our fundraiser dinner, we worried about not having enough food (or not enough people to eat the food we had). But all of our worries have been things like that; the things that are associated with the adoption, but aren’t a real part of the adoption process itself.

    Maybe we just haven’t gotten to the stressful part yet. There might be some of you who have adopted and are thinking about how naïve we are and that we don’t realize all the stressful parts that are coming. Maybe you’re even right. I think we’d be the first people to tell you that we aren’t experts on this, but to be totally honest, we’re having a lot of fun with this process. I mean, who else do you know that invites all of their friends and family over (and even some strangers) to dump cans in their yard? That was an awesome night! We had a soup supper a few months ago, which was also a great time. From the yard sales we’ve had to selling t-shirts, we’ve had fun with just about everything we’ve done.

    The common denominator in all of these things is the people who’ve been involved. Everyone we’ve had who’s helped us, no matter what we’ve been doing, has been such a blessing to us. If you dumped cans in our yard, donated items for our yard sale, bought a t-shirt, or even read this blog every now and then; we seriously can’t tell you how much you all mean to us. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve helped make this process so much easier on us and we appreciate that so much.

    Eventually we’re going to print out all of these blog entries to save for our future child. Hopefully that will allow him to learn a little about the process that got him home. He’ll learn a few other things also. That dad likes to ramble and use way too many commas. That we had a few odd fundraisers to help with the adoption costs. That this blog occasionally drifts into talking about IU basketball. But hopefully he’ll also see how many of you have supported us (and our blog) from week to week and how positive of an experience his adoption has been. Trust me when I tell you that those two things are definitely connected.