Great expectations

Each day brings with it an expectation of how the day will progress.  Get up, go to work, cook dinner, go for a walk with the dogs, go to bed. Occasionally there is a movie or uni study thrown in, but our lives follow a fairly steady pattern of activity.

For the last three months though, there has been something different. We have Great Expectations. The sort where you are waiting for something amazing to happen. It's coming, I know it is. I can feel it.

A beautiful friend sent me a surprise gift in the mail that made me anticipate that special moment even more.

The Squirrel bookends are the same ones that Siobhan has for her twins and they will go so perfectly in our nursery. It was such a wonderful surprise; I cried for a good five minutes when I opened the parcel and read the heartfelt card.

Not only was it a lovely gift, but it is a reminder that we are not on this road by ourselves. Murray's school colleagues are always asking about how we are going, and every facebook post that is even slightly excited is met by 'did you get the phone call!?'. That phone call hasn't come yet, but knowing that people are waiting excitedly with me makes it that little bit more bearable.

Holiday photos

With our holiday over Christmas, hosting a new years eve party at our house, and returning to work on January 2nd, I've been a busy little bee. My blog is suffering somewhat, but I promise there are more posts in the works!

For today though, some photos from our trip to Singapore and Indonesia will have to suffice. Enjoy!

The pool at Turi Beach Resort on Batam Island Indonesia. We stayed here for 4 nights

The signs outside our room

The open air reception

My first teppanyaki experience - awesome!

We spent Christmas Eve at the resort and they put on a lovely evening, even if the singers didn't know any of the Christmas Carols they were singing!

Spending Christmas dinner at a little Italian restaurant on Batam - one of the best meals I ate on the entire holiday

Our favourite day of the holiday was visiting Singapore Zoo

Back in Singapore, enjoying our club level cocktails

The white tiger was prowling and roaring when we visited - very scary!

We got to see the polar bear! Absolutely incredible!

The view from the infinity pool at the club level - We highly recommend staying at Oasia Hotel

All the beautiful Christmas lights on Orchard Road

Even the shopping centres have amazing decorations

We went on the Singapore Flyer which was nice, except that it was rainy, and I was suffering from dizzyness and low blood pressure- not great timing!

We still managed to get a nice photo though

Then we did a DUCW tour which is an amphibious truck that drives on the road and then turns into a boat!

On the cruise part of the tour

More zoo

More zoo

Even more zoo

Can you tell we loved the zoo!

Chinatown

Heading back to reality - goodbye Asia, hello Perth!

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.

A time to wait

It's been a huge six weeks for us. Even now writing about this feels somewhat unreal. After some back and forth over the perfect words to adequately convey how we would raise an adopted child, our profile is complete and is 'in the mix' as our adoption coordinator described it.

In the mix. As in, the phone call could come next month, or July, or the following year. We know how this game goes, we have had lots of practice at patience and humility. But we also have this confidence, this feeling. It will happen. God has set us on this path and this is it for us. 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.

The thought that our baby boy or girl is possibly being born right now fills me with intense love, longing and hope. I am praying for the birth parents who are making very difficult choices right now, and a child who is losing their first family, the only parents they have ever known. I am thinking of the grandparents and extended family who are also saying goodbye to this child. While it may be the best decision for them and the child, this is never easy.

There is no easy in adoption. The process is built on a first profound loss experienced by birth parent and child. That is not my story, but it is something that I constantly remind myself about. For as much as that phone call is going to be the most exciting day of our life, it will be the culmination of something much more difficult for someone else.

So now comes my burden. It is my time to wait. I've been waiting a long time already - 7.5 years of trying to conceive hasn't been easy. But if that is my burden, then I will gladly take it. It is worthwhile because I know I will be a mother. . I am not a patient person, but for this I need to be. So wait with me please. I need hands to hold and people to keep me excited and on the right path.

Preparing our adoption profile - the excitement continues!!!

This morning's meeting with adoption services was very exciting for the two of us. We had completed our two worksheets on open adoption planning and what special needs we would consider taking in, but we didn't really know all that much about what we would be discussing at the meeting. It ended up being mainly about preparing our adoption profile, and an opportunity to ask some questions about the process from here on in.

So first, the adoption profile. Basically all approved applicants put together a 3-4 page document which is a way of showing birth parents who we are and the life we can give to a child placed with us. It's an opportunity to express our personality and parenting plans, and our commitment to a new family. We were given a draft profile to get an idea of the sort of things that we need to include. They are now also encouraging photos to be used in the profiles to get a feel for what we like to do eg playing sport, going on holidays, pictures of extended family etc.

The main things we need to cover in the adoption profile are:

• Introduction of who we are, what our house is like, our pets and why we are adopting
• Religion - what we believe and how that influences our lives
• Our personal details - cultural background, where we grew up, education and our jobs
• What we like doing together - sport, holidays, fun stuff
• Extended family - who else is in our life, family, friends etc
• Education - public/private school etc
• Childcare plans - Stay at home for first year, will you return to work part-time, who will look after the child when you work
• What we believe is important when raising a child - how will we discipline them, things that we hope to do with them
• Views on naming an adopted child - There is a very strong push to keep the first name of the child, but we can potentially add a middle name of our choice
• Wishes regarding the adoption plan - How often we want to have contact with the birth parents, what level of contact (letters/photos/face to face) etc

And we need to cram that into only 4 pages! The example given to us is just normal typed Times New Roman with nothing else, so of course I asked if I had to stick to that format (font nerd here!). Our coordinator is happy for us to make it as originally and pretty as we want as long as it sticks to the four pages, so I'm hoping to make use of some friends graphic design skills to make it the most awesome adoption profile ever!

After chatting about the profile, we got the chance to ask some adoption related questions. The first thing we wanted to know was how many other approved applicants are currently in the pool for local adoption. There are currently around 40 approved applicants, which is a big drop from the 100 or so that existed when we first started this process in 2009. In addition to that, there is a much smaller second pool of applicants who are approved for children with special needs which includes us. There are a grand total of 5 approved applicants! Last year three of the six children that were adopted were considered to have special needs, which meant that our profile would have been shown to each of those birth parents had we been in the pool at that time. Those are amazing odds!

So what does 'special needs' mean. Really it can mean any child who has anything other than completely normal needs. It could mean they are slower to develop (developmental delay) such as crawling and sitting up at a later time than considered normal. They might need regular medication. One of the 'special needs' cases recently was a blood disorder that required twice-yearly visits for blood checks at hospital. That's it! Then at the other end of the spectrum there are children born with down syndrome, missing limbs, or significant intellectual disabilities. We have ruled ourselves out of a number of the higher care needs scenarios but there are still some significant care needs that we believe that we can cope with and provide great care for our child. With 6 children placed last year, that extrapolates out to 60% chance of a child with special needs within 12 months, or 8% of a normal care needs child within 12 months! Certainly better than our 'natural conception' odds!!!

We were told when we started the process that there were a segment of international students who place their children for adoption. The coordinator confirmed that this is still the case with some Indian, African and Asian children all placed locally from international students in the past few years. Often this is the result of pregnancy concealment or sometimes not being aware of the pregnancy until there were no other options available to them.

I also asked if many people change their minds and decide to parent themselves. Apparently up to half of the birth parents who initially start the process choose to parent the child themselves in the end. I'm kind of glad of that. It means that they are getting good advice and counseling, and not being pressured into anything.

Based on what our coordinator pointed out as important on the adoption profile, we also found out that the main thing that birth parents want is young parents. I am the youngest approved applicant in the pool at 27, and even Murray at 34 is on of the youngest, with a lot of applicants sitting at around 40 years old. That's really exciting for us, knowing that hopefully with a great profile showing who we are, along with people wanting younger adoptive parents, that we could really be in with a chance!!!

So once the profile is done, it could be any day now! Once we get the phone call to say that we have been chosen, we need to get into the agency office either that afternoon on the next day to start the adoption plan process. We will start the handover of care straight away with visits to the foster carers house, before slowly having longer visits at our house, and within two weeks, taking over full time care of the child. We are recommended to have an action plan ready to go with who will do what to help us get set up because of the quick turnaround. We are lucky that we have so much of the big stuff already such as a cot, pram, high chair etc thanks to friends and wishful thinking in our early IVF days. It's mainly the little things like clothes, blankets and setting up the nursery that will need to be done when the call comes through. That and of course finishing up at work!!!

So much to do - fertility treatment is just a dot in the background. We are focusing everything on this, and we really feel this is where we should be - just waiting for our son or daughter to arrive!

WA Public Fertility Clinic

We finally had our appointment at the Reproductive Medicine Clinic at KEMH this afternoon. They took a full history of all of our diagnosis's, previous treatment cycles, and current medical status. We met with a resident, then Dr Richard Muphy, and finally Prof Roger Hart, to talk about our treatment options.  They all think that we have a great chance of falling pregnant through fertility treatment with such significant weight loss.

The problem is that the hospital outsources its public IVF to Concept Fertility, and as of July they have suspended the program due to disagreement over costs. So essentially there is currently no publicly funded IVF program. The doctors are hoping that it should be resolved soon, but they initially thought it would only be for a few weeks and that has stretched out to four months at this point so I'm not holding my breath.

I asked about if we could do donor insemination in the meantime, and surprise surprise, the health department doesn't include DIUI under their public fertility services anymore. So really our options are just to keep trying naturally, however unlikely that is, and also to do every screening and diagnostic test under the sun to make sure nothing has been missed along the way. That means having a specialised 3D ultrasound to make sure that everything is perfect in my uterus and to monitor blood flow. I'm also getting tests done to check my blood clotting and insulin levels.

The one thing that they all agreed on is that I'm a different person now physically to what I was when we went through all of our other treatment cycles, and that we need to treat any fertility treatment from now on as a fresh start. Everything we have done in the past, while important, isn't nearly as relevant because it was essentially done on a different person.

The news about not doing IVF straight away isn't as devastating as it potentially could have been, thanks to a very positive adoption meeting that we had this morning. More coming on that very soon!!!

The next steps - planning for placement

We are booked in to see the placement coordinator on November 11th to discuss what our preferences are for placement. We have been emailed two forms to read over before the meeting to help us decide what will and wont work for us in a placement.

The first form is mainly about birth parents contact and adoption plans. How often do we want contact, what type of contact (email/phone etc), and what would be no-go's for us e.g. violence, partner in jail etc. This is something I've thought a bit about and we feel relatively comfortable that we could provide an open adoption with a reasonable amount of contact as long as it was safe for our child. We would also be happy to provide extended birth family members with contact with our child, once again on the proviso that it is a safe environment.

The second form we received is a little trickier for us to work through. As we have been approved for moderate special needs, we need to complete a checklist of different health issues that we will and wont be prepared to work with. This includes the parents alcohol/drug history while pregnant, through to intellectual and physical disabilities the child might have.

At this point, we sat down separately to do our lists so that we wouldn't influence each other. Our lists for the most part were very similar, although mine was slightly more inclusive whereas Murray made some strong arguments on some of the health conditions that I hadn't thought of.

It's terribly hard. A friend of mine recently had a baby with Down Syndrome, which was unknown prior to birth. I admire her for how she is handling everything, and I am hopeful that we would cope as well if we were to give birth to a child with DS, but if you had a choice, would you actively choose a child to parent with DS if you knew that in advance? Or Spinal Bifida, Muscular Dystrophy or Cerebral Palsy? Those are four of the conditions we have chosen not to be eligible for, however I doubt they would be considered 'moderate' special care needs anyhow.

Some of the things we have included in our special needs list include health conditions like Asthma, Albinism, physical birth defects eg missing a limb or cleft palate, hearing loss, global development delay, Hepatitis B Carrier, sleep apnoea, or at risk of childhood cancer.

We are lucky in the sense that if we adopt, this will be our only child, and we will be able to invest time and resources into getting our child the best assistance possible. Regardless of our child's health, we can't wait to be a part of it!