Why Adoption?

To tell this story better, I suppose it is important to share that my husband Shad and I never anticipated having only one child.  According to my Mother, I have wanted to have a baby since the day my sister was born (I was the ripe, old, age of two).  Far more than any career aspiration, being a Mother was what I looked forward to the most in life. I always imagined having 3-4 kids. I wanted a big family.  My husband was envisioning something more like two kids. Whatever! I knew he wanted kids so, he passed the first big interview question of my Husband Test. Surely, during the future years of our marriage, I could manipulate him into seeing things my way! No big deal.

Perhaps I will post someday about the infertility rollercoaster, but for the purposes of this blog post, let's just fast-forward to 2003 when I gave birth to my miracle baby, Colby.  I will be the first to admit that I didn't fully appreciate what a blessing this colicky, incessantly crying child was.  We had been told by "the experts" that according to our test results, we had a less than 5% chance of conceiving without medical intervention.  I got this news shortly before my 31st birthday, and I didn't take it well.  Despite the enoromous amount of self-pity I chose to indulge in those next few months, I had the surprise of my life when on Valentine's Day, 2003, I discovered I was pregnant! Somehow this was accomplished without any help from the medical profession. Clearly, those rich bastards at the fertility clinic just wanted our money!  What a bunch of crooks!  We were about to spend tens of thousands of dollars at their clinic in MARCH, and we did it on our own in JANUARY!   According to the general population, the "reason" we were finally able to get pregnant was beceause we had finally just RELAXED and STOPPED THINKING ABOUT IT.  Make no mistake about it, there was nothing relaxing about this!  We were about to drop tens of thousands of dollars, folks~!!!  We used every trick I could find on the Babycenter.com TTC board (that's Trying To Conceive, for all you fertile types who never had to give this a second thought.)  I actually have a magic baby recipe that involves drinking Robutussin and a few other steps that I would blush to write about publicly.  I wrote the recipe down for a friend of mine once, and when it worked, I insisted she name the baby after me. (She didn't.)  Unfortunately, that magic recipe only worked for me twice.  

One miscarriage and 10 years later we still were the parents of one child.  Do not get me wrong, we were the parents of one special child!  Someone once told me that Colby was worth 10 children, and of course, I believe this to be true!  He is an amazing kid! He is happy, smart, well-behaved, eager to please and loving. It's not as though we felt short-changed.  He was "enough" and after some time, we were ready to resign to the fact that Colby was going to be an only child. We started imagining all the money we could save, all the vacations we would take, all the opportunities we could provide our child because we only had one. Colby, on the other hand, was not about to give up.  Some children are perfectly happy being the center of the Universe in the eyes of their parents.  Not our child.  Our child sat his diapered,  little, three year old butt in his car seat one day and cried and cried and full-on sobbed because (in his words), "EVERYONE has a baby except us!!!!"  Colby didn't care about fancy vacations and more tuition money. He wanted a baby.

So, back to the infertility specialists we went.....

I'll spare you all the ugly details of the fun that entailed, but the main idea of this story is that we could again drop lots of money on medical assistance, but at that point, I was old (not me, my ovaries). We didn't qualify for their special money saving LOW RISK program.....The highly advertised "Pay One HUGE Price and Get THREE Chances!!!!" (unless your test results suck, then you need to read the fine print.)

Sorry, old, infertile people! Here's the number to the local Humane Society, perhaps you could get a pet instead!  Or, if you are really a sucker for punishment, you MIGHT be able to adopt a baby. Good luck with that, and thank you for the all the money you spent to get this fancy folder about all the procedures we can't even offer you unless you have endless amounts of money to waste on a "Maybe Baby".)

Time to research adoption......