Our Progress (or Lack Thereof) Towards Adoption

You, my faithful readers, may have noticed that in the last few weeks, this blog has included no posts related to our progress on adoption.  That is because there has been None.  Zip.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nada.  And I feel that I owe you all an explanation.

I have not blogged about this - I don't know why I have been so hesitant.  Perhaps because I am afraid someone at the job that I hate will stumble across my blog and they will learn of my plan?  Perhaps because I am afraid that my mother (who I gave the address of my blog to but I don't think she has ever pulled it up to read it - but that probably deserves a post all of it's own - but I digress) will read this post and freak out.  Perhaps it is because I just don't know how to say it.

For the past year or so, Derek and I have been feeling trapped.  Trapped by the jobs we hate.  Trapped by the house that was meant to be an "investment".  Trapped by the town in which we live.  Trapped by our infertility.  Trapped.  Trapped.  Trapped.  We have discussed, at length, how we would love to pack up and move somewhere else.  Somewhere new.  Somewhere that offers the lifestyle that we want to live and where we could just start over.  I know, moving somewhere new won't change my fertility status and it won't make a baby magically appear.  But at least it will give us a fresh start.  By selling this house and moving away from here, we have the opportunity that perhaps Derek can take a much less stressful job and that, as a couple, we can be better parents to our future children that we can't produce on our own.
Well, here lies the conundrum.  The adoption process can take a long time.  For some people, it can take a couple of years.  When you are dreaming of moving somewhere else, you have to ask yourself "Do I really want to get started in this process that can take years and tie us to this place we dislike for even longer?"  We have been trying to figure out how we could start the process here and finish it in a different state and that was our plan.

But then, the misery with certain parts of our lives here grew larger and some incertainty about Derek's job came into the picture.  I began to worry about the extra stress on Derek to try to stick it out here and start the process.  I started to worry about what moving mid-stream would do to the time line.  Did I really want to go through all of the work to get started in Georgia just to have to repeat all of the work in the new state?  And what if we were matched with a BM who got freaked out by our move in the middle?  All of the what if's started to worry me.  BIG TIME.

So I sat DH down and we discussed an "exit strategy".  I told him that if we were serious about making this change, that I thought we should start planning for it now and move towards reaching that - set ourselves some goals and a timeline.  And we agreed to put the adoption on hold for a couple of months.  I am still looking at agencies and if we happened to find a BM that we could adopt independently from, we would still go for it if the situation was right.  But I am not tying us to this place any longer.

We were wanting to finish up a couple of items in the house so that we can maximize our profit when we sell this place.  So we are now one room away from having the main level of the house finished.  We thought we might make some touch ups to the garage.  We are going to replace the flooring in the basement and give it a paint job.  And then we are going to list the house and hope for a quick sale.

We also wanted to stick it out until a set date in the future because it was more beneficial with Derek's job to reach that date.  That date is quickly approaching.

Our thoughts are that if the house sales, we will have some cash to fall back on and we can move to our new location and find a place to rent.  We can find ourselves some jobs and look for a house to buy.  And once we get settled, we can sign up with the agency of choice.

So there you have it.  The truth about why we haven't really made any progress...Recently, I have been thinking (more times that I care to admit) that living our lives would be so much easier if we didn't have to plan it around how to procure a child.  Why can't we just have a baby the old fashioned way???