Where's your head at?

Sunday is my nephew Joey's Christening and my nephew Jake's 2nd birthday party. It will also be the first time I've seen a lot of friends and family in a long time as I missed Jake's 1st birthday (I had my fallopian tube surgery the day prior) and it seems my girlie bits like to schedule d&c's and other random girl medical crises during holidays and family get togethers. I'd been worried about this gathering since I first heard of it. I know who's invited. I know that 99% of them are either pregnant or have babies. I know what 99% of the people are going to ask me as soon as we get past the hey how are ya's. And that is...So, what's taking you guys so long to have kids? Or, I figured ya'll would have kids by now. Or, my favorite Are you still having problems getting pregnant? No- I'm 8 months pregnant with triplets right now, I just don't show much. I have Truthful Tourettes and have a really hard time using a vague stock answer like "Oh, we'll have kids when we're ready." Especially since we were ready over 3 years ago. So if you ask me about our fertility issues you're bound to get an earful. You're lucky I don't have pictures or we'd set up a slide show. And then, inevitably, I'd cry.

Not anymore. Now that it's a done deal, now that we're adopting, we've started the process, we've named her, we're on our way, things are better. I've been doing a lot of reading, praying, and studying material on adoption. A couple of weeks ago I had a remarkable day when I watched a dvd sent by an agency that really addressed a lot of my feelings and answered so many questions. I now know that I'm not the only one who asked "Why me, why us? Am I being punished for something? Maybe those poor choices in college hookups? What am I supposed to do if my whole life I wanted to grow up get married and have kids and now I can't?". Stuff like that. This dvd showed me that adoption isn't plan B. Like Oh you can't have kids so you've sunk to the bottom of the barrel and are going to adopt. Adoption is just as wonderful as birthing your own. I learned to stop saying things like "We can't have kids" because yes we can, we won't be giving birth to them, but we can have kids. And I realized that not everyone can or should adopt, that it takes special people. So even though my girlie bits are screwed up, God knows that my heart is good and He chose a Chinese baby for us to bring home. (By the way, Ling means bell, or tinkling of a bell in Chinese so Lingling is ok to say. I was worried maybe we'd chosen something weird like the Chinese word for upset stomach or cow turd, but we're ok).

Back to the party. Now that my head is in the right place, and I have friends and family to support me (Lisa is flying in for the weekend to be with me- how awesome is she?), I know that I can face those people, hold my head high, answer questions, and hey, maybe even educate someone just a little about how great adoption is.

Plus, my favorite cowboy is turning 2 and he needs his Aunt Shanny to be all smiles on his big day!