New Thoughts on Family Making

So, we've had a crazy month in my little family. Caleb turned one, had hand-foot-and-mouth disease, fell on his head and broke his collarbone. RB got a sinus infection. I had my first post-D&C period which became a suspected ectopic pregnancy. Too much. Really, just too much.

RB is doing better, Caleb is almost all healed up and nearly walking, and I survived my period. One thing I didn't expect, though, was that when we were looking the possibility of dead baby #3, I realized I'm not sure I can deal with that. Sure, I am not real excited about being pregnant again. But the risk that that abysmal pregnancy could turn into not a live baby that I can take home at the end of it is really still there. I have no reasons for my two miscarriages. I don't know if I can take the diagnosis of habitual aborter that comes with a third. Seriously. Who in the medical community thought that was a good name for people who have recurring miscarriages?

At the end of the day, between the likelihood that I would be sick for 9 months (or however long I manage to carry another baby) and the likelihood that I wouldn't be able to carry the baby long enough to get it to viability, we've started talking about other options.

I've always wanted to adopt. There are just too many babies out there who need good homes. And we could be one of them. I have never felt like I would have to be biologically connected to a child to love it and bond with it. We just didn't pursue it right off, since my initial research showed that having been married less than 2-5 years put us in an unlikely-to-be-considered camp. I've since found that to fall in the not-strictly-true camp, but that's what started us on trying to have a biological child. Faster, less red tape, and a smaller likelihood that we would deal with the emotional roller coaster that is adoption.

But now we're on an emotional roller coaster regardless. And we've been married the amount of time at which many of the agencies in our area will consider us. So, we're reconsidering the possibility.

I don't want to give the impression that adoption is easier or somehow a fall-back option or anything like that. It just wasn't an option for us before, and it is now. I'm not even entirely sure if this is what we want to do. Heck, there are days we aren't sure we should even add another child to our brand of crazy. But I want to think it through and make sure we don't have a defaulted decision by aging out or otherwise delaying until it's impractical. I'm still learning all the ways that I have to be delicate in talking about something like this, but I have to start putting pen to paper in order to process this decision.