Paper Pregnancy Morning Sickness

Paper Pregnancy Morning Sickness

      Many families refer to the adoption process as being “paper pregnant” and I honestly could not agree more! 🙂 International adoption especially is filled with months and months of migraine inducing aches & pains emanating from your heart, into your brain where they tumble around creating great emotional conflict which eventually ends up making you sick to your stomach with worry.

     Instead of nausea / vomiting from hormonal warfare going on inside your body, you have a daily task master of of paperwork “to-do’s” that would send the most organized of us into an emotional tailspin. The first few months of your adoption process you are trying to set up a whirlwind of appointments; medical exams & forms to get filled out for EACH person in the household, background checks for EACH person in the household AND for every state you’ve ever live in, FBI background checks, Interpol/immigration background checks, employment verifications, home ownership/ lease verifications…etc. Then to top it all off, each must be no older than 6 months old (some pages 30 days or less) from being submitted to the proper authorities and did I mention notarizing & apostilling EVERY SINGLE PAGE? I mean, does the average person even know what an apostille is???

Its a pretty overwhelming experience when you look at it as a whole.

      As with any other pregnancy you just have to take it one day at a time. Some days you feel like an utter failure without an ounce of energy left to give and some days you feel like you’ve got everything lined up, ducks in a perfectly straight row and you could take on anything asked of you.

 

      In order to keep myself from going crazy, I give myself a weekly check-off list, one task, one appointment, one fee and eventually one checked off “to-do” at a time.  I take my master list of EVERYTHING that needs to get completed and break it down into smaller more easily digestible bites. The idea being that even if nothing else gets done but these few items, I can feel confident that the “paper pregnancy” is growing healthy and strong. *Peanut Butter cups not required but suggested for mental health purposes 😉

      If you can’t tell from the pictures my weekly check-off list for the next 2 weeks will be all about taxes. In order to get a home study and your dossier ready to submit you must have your financial information as current as possible. Now I have NEVER been one to postpone doing taxes but with bringing home Aria & Elias in late 2018 life gave me a run for my money. I filed our first extension ever in the history of our marriage. I was so busy putting my humpty dumpty children back together again that I just could not get myself into the mental place to “deal” with another thing. Then losing Aiden just a few months later I honestly just didn’t care.

So today I get to reap the consequences of my in-actions and I have to pay the piper. Fortunately we don’t owe the government anything and so its just my sanity I am sacrificing, lol.