Let's see..

How many major life events I can cram into a few months.

I would say the runner up would be

(1) Graduating from Harvard

(2) Getting married

(3) Buying my first house

(4) Moving to a city I had never before seen

(5) getting pregnant

(oh, and I think I got a dog in there somewhere, as well...)

I managed to cram all of those into six months but if all goes as planned Jeremy and I will create a new personal record as we attempt to:

(1) Sell house in Washington State

(2) Buy house in NC

(3) Quit stable job in Washington

(4) Move household contents from point A to B

(5) Travel to Ethiopia to meet and bring home our baby

(6) Start new more or less unknown job in NC

No wonder we are fighting so much! Should we wait to sell the house here before buying another one? Should we do this at all? Why not just stay where we are? We are both relatively happy and are really starting to feel like we have a community of people who we love.

I realize, when calm (which is by the way happening less and less these days) that we are moving to NC because it is a place where we can settle for the long term. There are jobs for me there if ("WHEN!!" Jeremy would inject) I go back to work. We have family there. People have 4 wheel drive so they can go off roading, not because it snows 12 inches in as many hours. I think (and believe) it is a place where Jeremy will find a community he likes and opportunities he misses here. I want our children to see diversity, which is sorely lacking here. So moving is most likely the right decision. Doing it at the same time as adopting may not be.

What the hell part deux

The short version is that after we talked, Jeremy went snowboarding the next day and I went to the midwife and had my IUD taken out. By the time Jeremy got home that night I had a nagging feeling that I was perhaps acting a bit rash, and the look on his face when I told him what I had done was enough to confirm my suspicion.

It sounds crazy, but I think I needed to do that, to be fertile, to have the idea of getting pregnant feel real and possible, in order to really come to terms with the adoption. I now feel settled and excited and ready for our baby to GET HERE (should be getting "the call" within a month!). I still have a lot of the concerns I had before but they don't feel as scary or final or doom-filled as they did before. A lot of my friends who had second children biologically say they had similar concerns about their second children, and that makes me feel better as well.

So we continue to wait for a phone call, get our house ready to put on the market, search for a house in North Carolina, plan a cross country move, a new baby, chase after a two year old... I'm not sure why Jeremy and I like to cram multiple major life changes into small windows of time but it worked for us when we got married, bought our first house, moved from two different states, graduated from residency and grad school, and got pregnant all in one year so here's hoping the second times as charmed!

(Picture is Hayden with his new fake picture smile, unrelated to text but so cute!)