As our long silence has probably clearly suggested to you already, we were not selected for Amber.  We can’t be too bitter about it because whatever attachment we felt for her, it was imagined on our part, or at the most mearly representative of our longing for a daughter in general since didn’t really know her.  We learned, however, that most regions within Texas simply do not contact you if you are not selected for a child; no news is not good news.  Now we know.  The good news for Amber, however, is that (we hope) this means she does now have a family to love and raise her, and this is, afterall, the whole point of all this. 

Well, I’ve been going back and forth about whether I should post about this or not, but am throwing caution to the wind–at least as I compose within the editor page; we’ll see if I actually publish this to the web.  Early last month, just about the time our license showed up in the mail, I went to my annual exam.  It was like a little reunion after having spent so much time at the doctor’s office last year.  I even got to have a nice reunion with the trans-vaginal ultrasound or as my on-line girlfriends like to call it, “the dildo cam.”  I’ve just shocked some of my family, but I trust they’ll never mention it to me.  Anyone who has ever done multiple IUIs (you can Google it if you don’t know what that is) like we did a year ago, will have become intimately familiar with this bit of modern technology, and could probably even use one themselves if necessary.  I’m a 15x veteran myself, so I can actually just interpret these things myself these days.  Anyway, last month at my annual exam, my doctor decided we needed to reacquaint ourselves with my ovaries and uterus and so we did and found I have a fibroid.  Have you had these?  I’d welcome any stories unless they end with phrases like “and she died.”  Not to alarm you, they are benign tumors and mine isn’t causing me any problems.  But, as I mentioned how many ultrasounds I’ve had in the previous year, we’re all thoroughly versed in what my uterus was doing 9 months ago, and this is new, so it’s not unlikely that the fibroid is growing.  And should it grow too much larger, it would have to be removed were we to get pregnant.  The chances of that (getting pregnant) happening are about 3% we’re told, but we had planned to someday do IVF and up our chances to about 45%.  Now, however, the prospect of having surgery to remove the fibroid if it gets too big to maintain a pregnancy has pushed ”someday” up to “May.”  Or so we were thinking two weeks ago……

All of this seems like a very bad introduction to our (hopefully) exciting news that we submitted our home study!  I’m not sure what we can/should say about this since it’s so early in the process.  We were sent her profile (a picture and two paragraphs); we sat and stared at it for a long time, stared at each other some, then stared at it again, then decided to throw our hat in the ring.  Ciff has interviewed eight landscapers over the past 6 months about the drainage problem in our yard and has yet to find a satisfactory solution, so when he was convinced within less than 24 hours about adopting this eight-year-old girl, I knew we were onto something.  And in his normal, concise manner he said, “yes, I think we should do it,” and so we did. 

The deadline for families to submit home studies is March 10.  So, people we don’t know, who wrote a home study for us that we haven’t read will mail this home study to people we haven’t even met.  “They” will read this home study of ours that we were assured was “good” (another uselessly vague term they bandy about during adoption) and they (the selection committee) will meet on the 25th and choose prospective families for Amber, whom we also have not met either but actually know more about from the two paragraphs we’ve read than we do about the people making this decision for all three of us. So, the 25th is the big date looming before us when we will know what lies ahead–IVF or adoption.  We’re very much hoping for Amber and an added blessing that my fibroid won’t grow so won’t require surgery so we can “just” do IVF at some point in the future, when it seems right–after I’ve completed reading the Little House on the Prairie series with Amber and Cliff has coached her first season of little league.