The Path

Sometimes, I look down at these beautiful girls, and still can't believe they are in my life.  Other times, I look at them, and it hits me...OF COURSE they are with me.  This is the way it was supposed to be.  This is how it was always going to work out.  My girls literally feel like an extension of me.  An arm I had been missing, or a leg I never really knew I needed, but now, I couldn't live without. 

I think of our journey, and sometime after we brought them home the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.  All the little naunces as well as the life changing events fit into a greater puzzle that all suddenly made sense.  It's amazing how that happens...how so many people in your life can tell you it will one day work out, but until it actually does you'd never believe it.

Around this past fall, we started to question adoption as a whole.  We started to think of other options, but in general we were just trying to keep an open mind.  But we had been burned by adoption, and knew it could very well happen again.  In spite of this when things started to pop up on our calendar for the Spring, and I would tell people we weren't sure we could go in case something happened with adoption.  Which is funny in itself, because we were being so picky with getting our profile shown, and had yet to have our profile shown to any birth mom's because they weren't feeling quite right to us.  But then a wedding came up for April (which we found out about months before). I told my friend we might not make it because something could be happening with adoption.  In another instance, my sister and her family came into town around my birthday in early February.  She said she wanted to squeeze one last trip in because I had been telling her we might get close on adoption.  I felt like a liar and hypocrite.  Here we were telling people we might be close on something, but we had yet to have our agency show our profile to anyone, and might not even be really pursuing adoption anymore...

But in the back of my mind I knew this Spring would be a perfect time to bring a baby home.  Kevin is going to back to his accounting firm in July (he's currently doing a fellowship, which is why we moved to CT).  He will be back to working those grueling hours, as opposed to the country club life he has been living for the past 2 years.  Also, we might have an opportunity to go to Europe this fall, and if I had gotten pregnant I wouldn't be able to go.  Which in itself doesn't sound like a great sacrifice, but for us, for me, it's a big one.  We started trying for a baby in the summer of 2006 when we got home from Greece.  We knew pretty early on, we were going to need IVF, which is a pretty big cost.  So we have not been back to Europe since that summer, and for me it's one of the greatest things about life.  Learning new cultures, seeing foreign sights.  We had already sacrificied so many things in the past 4.5 years, how much more would we give up?  Our lives felt like we were no longer living them, but just waiting. 
Kevin kept saying he wasn't sure about adoption, and I was right there with him.  But I felt as a mama to be that if we held a baby in our arms we'd be sold.  But I wasn't so sure either!  It still felt so far away for us.  But in February an extraordinary situation came up.  One we could not turn away from, and thank goodness we didn't. 

Now as we look back, it all happened as it should have.  Sure, the road was rocky and filled with Chicago sized potholes.  But here we are, with our 2 greatest blessings.  With our baby girls who are smiling up a storm.  One that is mellow, laid-back, and that stereotype of a perfect baby who eats her whole bottle and takes great naps.  Who seemed shy to smile at first, but now gives them away for free. The other, who is feisty, kicks a lot, cries the hardest, and seems to take it personally when I leave the room.  But her smile could soften the hardest criminal.  It's official, I have fallen in love. 

Kendall (left) & Reese (right)