Christmas Holiday

I am starting to get excited that Christmas is right around the corner! This year we are having a different sort of Christmas, and heading overseas for a spontaneous Asian holiday! A new airline has just started flying to Perth, and we managed to get very cheap flights to Singapore a month or so back, so we are going to be spending eight nights over the holidays in Singapore and Indonesia.

We fly to Singapore this coming Saturday, and then catch a ferry across to Batam Island, an Indonesian island that is only 45 minutes away.

We will spend Christmas Day there, and then ferry back to Singapore on Boxing Day for a few days of sightseeing! We have already booked tickets to go to the famous Singapore Zoo and go on the Singapore Flyer, as well as a hop-on, hop-off bus and river cruise. I'm looking forward to playing the tourist!

This will be our last holiday for quite some time, as we want to spend next year focusing on saving money for when we are placed with a child, so we are taking this opportunity with both hands.

Public IVF clinic - an updated

Just spotted this article which talks about the dramas we have had recently with the public IVF waiting list. Frustrating, but at least for us it is not the end of the world. I feel for those people whose lives are now being placed on hold, where this is there only option.

WA's only publicly funded fertility clinic at King Edward Memorial Hospital has stopped referring patients for in-vitro fertilisation, amid claims of cost cutting.

The hospital says it has not referred any patients for IVF since July because it is tendering for a new contract with a private clinic, but doctors say it is more about saving money.

A spokeswoman said KEMH had an arrangement with a private provider to offer IVF treatment to public patients who met the hospital's referral criteria. "This arrangement now requires renewal to ensure the ongoing quality and sustainability of the service and KEMH is now in the process of determining an appropriate provider to continue providing these services," she said. "During this process, the Reproductive Medicine Clinic at KEMH is temporarily unable to refer women and couples for publicly funded IVF in the community."

The spokeswoman said couples attending the clinic would be sent letters explaining the process and would remain on KEMH's waiting list.

The hospital would tell patients, via their GPs, as soon as new arrangements were in place.

"The Reproductive Medicine Clinic continues to provide advice to and assessment of couples with fertility issues and, where appropriate, clinical intervention," she said.

To access publicly funded IVF services at KEMH, women and couples have to meet conditions about age, weight, number of previous children and the type of fertility treatment needed.

Australian Medical Association WA vice-president Michael Gannon said it was worrying that IVF had not been available in the public system for almost six months. "It has implications for the training of obstetricians but it also means infertile couples are waiting longer," he said.

Dr Gannon said there were wider concerns about plans to close down the KEMH clinic.

Source: The West Australian online

Preparing the nursery

I am planning this nursery to the gazillionth degree and am loving it!

My first decision to make was colour. The room was already painted a pale lime green (oxymoron I know!) from when we first painted it as a nursery when we bought the house 7 years ago. I thought that I was sick of it and wanted a fresh start, so tried some sample pots on the walls. Turns out I still love the green and hate the sample pot colours! Rather than repainting the wall that I painted the samples onto, we have decided to wallpaper two of the bedroom walls instead.

So that sent me down the rabbit hole of what theme did I want and what wallpaper we should get.  After lots of to and fro-ing, we decided on this gorgeous tree print!

So our nursery colours are green, white and cream, and the overall theme is trees and birds.

Then in a kids store, I came across this gorgeous Cocoon Couture Early Bird hook that you can hang things from. It was on sale - bargain!

Now I want the matching book ends, but unfortunately they will have to wait - this little birdy needs to watch the pennies and spread out the fun of setting everything up!

Some more things on my nursery wish list:

 

 

 

Skip Hop Treetop Friends bedding set

These gorgeous storage bins from JungleJackNursery on Etsy

Another Etsy choice - the Forest baby mobile from LovelySymphony

Now to get out my sewing machine and start working on a baby quilt!

Our adoption profile - a pic!

I realised that although I have mentioned what we had to include in our adoption profile, I didn't pop a copy up - let me remedy that now! It's not something to distribute hence it's just a photo, but we got to choose lots of pictures of us and our families and tried to make it personal for the potential birth parents to get a feel for who we are.

Hypothetical Future Baby

I've been reading this fabulous book I picked up from Book Depository, and some of the writing is like it came straight from my head. The book is called Hypothetical Future Baby by Claudia Chapman

It's one of the few books where I have dog-eared pages to go back and re-read because they resonated with me so strongly. I've included a couple of lines, but I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in learning more about the topic.

On adoption after infertility:

This couldn't be any less like having a baby the usual way.... I know it's a very specific, Western, middle-class experience of pregnancy that I am craving... I have been surprised by how much it hurts not to be part of the collective female experience of giving birth to the next generation. p48

On adoption not being a replacement for doing things 'the normal way':

I feel intense joy about the family that we are going to have, but I still find myself mourning the losses of what we won't have too, what we won't be, what I can't do. I expect our child will feel the same. However joyful our lives are together, he should never have had to feel the loss of one set of parents before gaining a second. p49

My Mum recently said to me that she was worried about how I am going to cope when we have a baby after we have built up all of these expectations. The book expands on that:

...the fact that I will  have waited so long for this child, and I really hope he or she will change my life for the better, but the consensus seems to be that parenthood involves a lot of hard work and sleepless nights and is not just about cashmere blankets and sunny days... At the moment I just can't reconcile that knowledge with my intense longing to finally meet my child, and the heartache that I don't even know when that will be. p89

The problem with adopting is that the process is so awful, you convince yourself the end must be really amazing to make up for it. But then when you get there, I suppose that parenting is just going to be really ordinary.  p119

So much of what Claudia wrote was on the mark, even though her experience was inter-country adoption from the UK. It's always helpfulto read others experiences and help me to plan and work out how we can be the best parents possible to our own 'hypothetical future baby'.

Preparing a place for our child

So we are jumping in, not foolishly or without thought, but because we want to be faithful to the plan and put it out to the world. We are adopting our son or daughter. We are preparing a place for them to be part of our lives and our family.

Part of preparing for this child, is physically creating a space for them - setting up the nursery. As a step of faith, we are preparing the nursery. Part of this is for practicality's sake. We will only have a weeks notice when we are placed with a child, and we will be running around like headless chickens during that time! We certainly wont have time to paint and decorate a nursery in that time.

Part of it is selfishness. I know that there are a lot of things that we are going to miss out on having an adopted child rather than giving birth to a biological child. There are no photos going home from the hospital, no 0000 baby outfits, no baby shower to celebrate my womanhood and future child, no ultrasound to find out the sex of the baby. The loss of pregnancy, birth and all that brings in today's world, isn't insurmountable, but I will miss it. But preparing the nursery - that is something I can do. I might not know the age of our child, or whether it is a boy or a girl, but our child will have a place that was prepared with love and care for them to rest their head. I can do that.