And by popular demand (and I do mean popular, and I do mean demand), here are some of the first photos from the hospital, and a few at home. Finally! My apologizes for the delay. Kate and I have officially discovered the baby time vortex. As far as I’m concerned, it’s yesterday right now and tomorrow is coming today.

This is just a photo post, but here’s a quick status update: baby is healthy and awesome. Parents are coasting on sleep dep. and joy. More photos to come in a few days. Thank you so much to everyone for well wishes. Kate and I feel humbled by the show of love and support.

Born July 28th, 2010. 8lbs, 14oz. Healthy and gorgeous, with all 10 fingers and toes. And she’s ours!

How it all happened: Today at about 4pm we got a call from our social worker telling us that there was an “instant baby” born yesterday. This means that the birth mother hadn’t contacted the agency until after the baby was born. We agreed to show her our family book, and about two hours later, she’d picked us and we were on our way to the hospital. We meet her birth mom and family and got to hold her. Man, did I mention she’s gorgeous? We don’t get to bring her home until Saturday, but we’ll get to spend all day tomorrow with her at the hospital. We’re very much in shock and so happy!

More later when things have calmed down a bit. As of right now, it’s 2:00 AM and this is how we feel:

Dear friends and family,

Hello! We’re writing now for two reasons:

1. To give everyone a brief update on the status of our adoption
2. More importantly, we need just 15 minutes of your day to help us get $12,000 for the adoption. Seriously, no joke.

Status update

As you know, we are currently in the process of adopting our first child. We started in the Spring of 2007, and have been hoping and waiting ever since. We experienced a major setback when Vietnam closed their doors to American adoptive families. We quickly rebounded and moved on to domestic (aka American) adoption. We apparently have terrible luck since domestic adoptions have slowed dramatically in the last year, and there is still no end in sight as we enter year four of our journey.

So basically our status update is “everything is the same as it has been for the last year and a half.” Kind of anticlimactic, we know. People often ask “what’s going on with the adoption?” Here it is: we’re simply waiting to be matched with a birthmother. No more, no less. There is just a major shortage of birthmothers which is causing the long wait.

15 minutes of your day

We are hoping that 2010 will be the year that we become parents. Three years is a long time, and we are worn out with waiting. But more importantly, 2010 is the last year that adoptive families will be eligible for the Adoption Tax Credit. This is a tax credit given to adoptive families after they have completed an adoption. It currently covers costs up to $12,000. Considering that our adoption bill will add up to somewhere near $25,000 when it’s all said and done, the tax credit is basically our financial lifeline. Unfortunately, if we don’t complete an adoption by December 31st, 2010, we may not be able to take advantage of the credit. Without the credit, completing our adoption will be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible.

Fortunately, there are two bills in the House and Senate – H.R. 213 and S2816 – that will reinstate the credit if passed. If you would like to help not only us, but thousands of families and children throughout the country, we’re asking that you take just a few minutes to contact your Senators and Congressmen and let them know that you support these bills.

We’ve been informed that e-mail or telephone are the best way to let our reps know that you support the bill. Snail-mail tends to take a long time and often doesn’t even make it to the right people. Don’t worry, we’ve made it ridiculously easy. Please follow these steps:

Easy Peasy

1. Copy the pre-written letter of support from this Web site:

   http://adoptiontaxcredit.wetpaint.com/page/Letter+or+Phone+Call+Script+to+Representive+from+Adoption+Supporter

2. Go to the contact Web pages for your representatives:
   http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
3. For each representative: paste in the pre-written letter, edit the letter to add your name (both in the first sentence, and the sign-off!), and click send
4. Done! The entire process should take no more than 15 minutes and means the world to us.

Thank you for all your love and support throughout this process. We can’t wait to send you the e-mail letting you know we’ve completed our journey!

Thank you,
Kate and Joel

P.S.
For the law nerds, here is more info on the bills:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-2816
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-213

Well, this is not a happy post to write. It has officially been one year since we entered the waiting family pool at our agency, and it feels like we are starting to prune up. We knew that it could easily be a year before we were matched with a birthmother, but we were hopeful that it would not take that long.

Unlike our Vietnam disaster, nothing is shutting down. Things are still working, just painfully slowly. Our agency is doing what they know how to do to get all of their families matched, but the fact of the matter is there are not very many birthmothers and there are a lot of waiting families. In the past year we have not seen nearly as many birthmother profiles as we thought we would. Along with a general shortage of women choosing adoption for their child, we have chosen not to show our family book to some women because it just didn’t feel like a good fit for us. We have shown to probably 8 women in the past year, none of whom decided to work with us. And while we are happy for the families that were matched this year, we are feeling pretty blue about the whole situation.

We have not lost hope, we will eventually bring our child home. It is just taking so much longer than we ever imagined it would. We are ready to bring our child home now, but we have not found them yet. Here’s hoping our next blog entry will bring happy news.

We’ve shown our book to 2 expectant mothers so far, and neither one chose us to parent their child. We were officially “in the pool” in early July, that puts us at about 6 months in right now. So if we are consistent with the agency’s timeline of 3-12 months to be matched, we should find our birth mother within the next 6 months.

We are constantly feeling a strange mix of excitement, anticipation, hope, confusion, and disappointment. What a wild journey this has been so far! We are still feeling optimistic most of the time and are looking forward to meeting our mystery child. We’re also very anxious to know when it will actually happen.

I want to thank all of you who inquire about our progress and have given us support through this whole crazy thing. Here’s to good news in ‘09!

The internet is an amazing thing. Completely by accident, I connected with an artist/mother across the Atlantic Ocean who is starting her own business. I happened upon Joanna’s flickr page one day and was immediately drawn to her wonderful artwork. Among other things, her art is reminiscent of images I’ve seen in children’s books of the 50s and 60s. I really liked it, so I bookmarked her.

Flash forward a few weeks when I revisited her page to look at any newly posted art. I found an image that stopped me in my tracks. It was a children’s shirt with two acorns on it. The shirt on it’s own is awesome. A perfect example of Joanna’s artwork I’d come to love. But I was also excited for another reason. Our friend Chad has a shirt which is legendary in our peer group. It is a dark green polyester shirt with opalescent snaps and a embroidered acorn on the back. It’s known only as “The Acorn Shirt”. I simply had to have this children’s shirt for his 14 month old daughter Vivienne so they can match. I posted a comment to her flickr page asking where I could get one. Joanna promptly responded and we connected via email. She offered to send me the acorn shirt for free. Wow!

A couple months went by and the official Web site for her company, Little Bird, was launched. The site currently features their autumn/winter line of children’s shirts and they are beautiful. Go check them out now, seriously. I was a bit bummed because the shirts, once converted into the current US currency of twigs and bottle caps, were quite expensive. £18.00 per shirt + £7.00 shipping converts to roughly $40.00 USD for a single child’s cotton shirt. It appears that, at least for now, these shirts are in the realm of grandparent purchases or European customers only. That’s ok, I’ll keep an eye on the site and hopefully the US economy will rebound a bit to help out the conversion rate

So I was bummed about the cost. But that’s because I completely forgot Joanna said she would send a free shirt. I was reminded of this when a package arrived out of the blue. <Forehead slap> “Oh yeah!”

In addition to the shirt, there where also some great stickers and Little Bird balloons. It was a fun collection of goodies. The shirt is of outstanding quality. I was expecting a standard Heinz shirt with a custom print on it like the t-shirt stands in the mall, or cafepress.com. NOT THE CASE! 100% organic cotton, quality printing on the front, and all the tags were custom “Little Bird” tags. Nice touch!  As was explained in the marketing materials, the shirts have a medium fit to them (not loose, not tight). It fit Vivi quite nicely and it was clear she had complete freedom of movement. It is a very nice cut. Obviously, this is a high quality garment.

Kate and I were meeting our friends for a shopping date. We asked to come over early and stipulated that Chad had to wear his Acorn shirt. We didn’t say why, just ordered him to wear the shirt.

The Little Bird shirt was a big hit. Everyone loved it, and is extremely grateful to Joanna and Little Bird for sending on a free sample. Vivienne had a good time with her new swag. And of course, she now matches her dad in style.

Thanks Little Bird!

We did, however, spend some of this time shopping for our “instant baby” bag. In the event that we get a midnight phone call that there is a baby available and we get chosen by the birthmom, we have to be ready to go and pick the baby up at a moments notice.  If this occurs, we have an emergency baby kit. Thanks to our friends Rian and Amanda, we have a great infant car seat. We also have diapers, wipes, formula, bottles, blankets, and clothes.  And of course, my favorite piece to shop for were the clothes.

I LOVE baby clothes!  It’s not just the fact that I’m in baby fever mode right now, I have always loved baby clothes, even back when I was going to be a rebel and not have kids.  It’s just that whole miniature thing. So, for your viewing enjoyment, here are the outfits we bought the baby for the emergency kit.  Those of you who know me best will understand the gray outfits, and why I actually squealed in Old Navy when I saw them. These are the first official clothes we have purchased for the baby.

For the last several months our cat, Gary, has been the worst cat ever. He has been jumping on counters, swatting at us, scratching on the couch, running around like an idiot, yowling at 4 am, and being overly needy and annoying. This may sound like normal cat behavior to you dog folks out there, but in reality Gary is a pretty cool kitty. He is a bit needier than the average cat, but he is extremely well behaved and mellow.  He knows what surfaces are his to jump on and which aren’t; he is quiet when we sleep, and usually only talks when he’s hungry; he never scratches the furniture, only his post. We couldn’t figure out what was going on, it was really quite disturbing to us.  Then, the behavior stopped abruptly, he was good old good Gary again. Why the sudden change? Was he sick? Was it the weather change? And then we figured it out, Gary had been reacting to his people’s stress, our adoption stress. And now we aren’t feeling that any more, and neither is he.  Why, you may ask, has our stress level gone down? We are feeling good about our baby again.

We have made the shift towards anticipating a different and mysterious little person who will soon complete our family. There are so many great things to look forward to. We get to meet this person’s biological mother, that is really cool. We’ll know what she looks like and talks like, we’ll be able to answer all of those tough “where did I come from” questions. We will potentially be at the hospital when this little creature is born! That wasn’t even a remote possibility before. We’ll be bringing home a newborn rather than a 6-9 month old, which means we’ll get to experience all those wonderful changes that happen in those first important months. And most of all, we are feeling confident for the first time that our child, whoever she or he may be, will finally be coming home to us.

Joel and I have been much happier people the last month or so. I put that all down to one word, hope. We have spent a long time without it, and now that it’s back we are ecstatic.  So, much thanks to our soon to be child, for giving your mom and dad hope again.