Lately

There are a lot of things going on lately.

For one, we turned in our preliminary paperwork for adoption. I am SUPER excited. We were the first ones, so hopefully, we will be the first ones processed and the first to begin our homestudy.

I made up announcements for family and friends, and one to put on Facebook. I haven't ordered the ones we are mailing out, because I am still too nervous. They are really pretty, and have the adoption creed printed on them. We also linked to a website we created for our friends and family to follow our progress. It has less info than this blog, because I am not ready to share every gory detail with my entire family, and my husbands extended family too...at least not in that way.

At this point we are taking a break from fertility treatments. We are however, still doing some investigating. We are checking for other causes besides the PCOS for our fertility issues. If you have read this blog for a while, you know that we had this option towards the beginning of this issue, but we thought it was best to wait. Now I wish I had done it then. I am having an HSG this Tuesday, and Greg is having a semen analysis. Once we find out what is happening, the doctor will give us some options. At that time we will decide whether to continue with fertility treatments or to wait a little while.

Frankly, at this point, I feel frustrated with the whole process, and I feel like this can wait a while. I really feel that adoption is what we are supposed to do right now. I feel like our child, or children are waiting, and we need to go find them.

BACK to adoption,

We are trying to practice positive parenting techniques. We are trying to take this very seriously. We were both lucky to have parents who love us so very much, but for different reasons, we both had parents who brought us up in stressful situations. So, sometimes the parenting techniques weren't so perfect. Frankly, it wasn't really different from, as our teacher called it "Good old fashioned American parenting". If you did something wrong, you got scolded and grounded, there was a lot of arguing and that sort of thing. Through positive parenting, you achieve a happier household, and avoid coercion. I really think these techniques make a lot of sense. It was sort of an "Aha!" moment when we talked about them in class. It was like...oh, that makes so much more sense.

Since I am very new to this, I don't want to explain it improperly, so there are some great resources I found online at the bottom of this post. We try to practice a little everyday, although it is difficult since we don't have kids of our own. We just do the role-playing we find online. Hopefully, it will make it more accessible in our minds when the time comes.

http://www.deltabravo.net/cms/plugins/content/content.php?content.351

http://www.4kidsofsfl.org/document.doc?id=34 (this is the actual homework from the class, try using this for when you practice!)

http://www.safechildrencoalition.org/files/document/AdoptionHandbook120402111346.doc (This doesn't really have anything to do with the above post, it was just handy and I found it!)