Well, my personal goal of writing at least once a month has slipped by me, but I'll work harder on this. Life just moves too quickly these days.
Regardless, we don't have any specific adoption updates to share, but I'm jotting down a couple of things going on in our life right now.
First: Justin and I just returned from six days in New York City. We are equal parts refreshed and exhausted, but I feel so grateful that we were able to go. (Why is it that you always seem to need a vacation after a vacation?)
We love to travel. If I were to boil it down, I would say that one of the main reasons I work my butt off is to support my family and our future, and to travel. In 2009, not long after we were married, Justin and I took our first trip to New York City and fell head over heels for the city. We are both suburb-born-and-raised, but are drawn to the bustle, walkability, and culture of a metropolitan life. We call NYC our "second home", and often daydream of our retirement plans, which typically includes owning a home or renting long-term properties in various areas across the City. Since that first trip, we've gone back about every other year, but put this on pause when I got pregnant. When we began the adoption journey, 16 months after Eisley was born, we decided to pause any "major" life choices (or, I should say, any MORE major life choices).
And here we are: 19 months since the start of this journey, 10 months into the "referral-ready" phase. We don't know if baby K will be referred to us any time soon, or at all. Things still appear to be moving for others in Haiti, although at molasses speed. In many ways it feels as though we're holding our breath. So, we decided to plan a trip, and breathe for a minute. We are blessed to have two sets of grandparents nearby who willingly/lovingly took Eisley for the week, so it was just the two of us. It was an incredible trip filled with sunshine, music, walking, and reconnecting as a couple. Oh, and so. much. good. food.
Second: We've decided to sell our house and move.
When we bought our home in 2008 we were young, newly married, and had no idea what our future truly held. We knew that we wanted kids and that we wanted to live closer to Seattle. Now that we are raising one child and preparing for another, the itch to be in the city has become stronger. Many of our friends (nearly all of our friends with kids) live in Seattle. We work in Seattle. Eisley's fabulous school is in Seattle. We find ourselves driving there most weekends for activities, and we are oh-so-tired of this commute. But, as we worked to complete our home study, we made the decision not to move until after the adoption finalized and our little girl had been home for some time, so as to create the least amount of unnecessary transition for her. We know that our schools nearby are well-rated and fairly diverse, but our neighborhood and community is not very diverse. Our daughter needs (deserves) access to racial mirrors.**
We again began kicking around the idea of moving earlier this year, quickly talking ourselves out of it because of all of the work it would take, and because of the sheer craziness of choosing to buy a house in one of the hottest and most expensive markets in the country right now. And honestly, there's something in my brain that has said "If you just stay put for one more minute...one more week...one more month...your referral will come through." I know this is unrealistic (superstition?), but it is part of what's been helping me feel tethered. Either way, I am working to breathe, let this go (and let God), and keep living a full life. To cap this off, we were also both blessed in crazy and unexpected ways at work this year, and so we decided to take the plunge.
Moving will mean redoing part of our home study (paperwork and fees, which our agency ensured us is not totally abnormal), and investing a ton of work into packing/selling/buying in an insane market. We have honed in on a couple of key neighborhoods (Beacon Hill and West Seattle), met with our real estate agent, secured a mortgage provider, and begun the process of packing and purging and cleaning. We have discussed contingency plans for what to do if we sell, but cannot quickly buy (a distinct possibility). I have spent hours poring over neighborhood blogs, maps, and school reviews. I am crazy stressed about this (because, yes, it is crazy), but know that we are doing the right thing for our family.
To close this train of thought out, I'll note that this was even more clear to me after our time in NYC. Walking the streets, we were surrounded by a plethora of people, languages, cultures...It was a dream. We even looked up Haitian restaurants and had multiple options to choose from!
[See earlier note of "so. much. good. food." We had a delicious lunch: me, a plate of legumes and diri ak pwa (vegetables with red beans and rice), and Justin, poulet creole (chicken stew). We both tried a good dose of pikliz on our meal, too (a spicy cabbage/vinegar condiment, often made with scotch bonnet peppers). I'll be building my heat tolerance for that!]
So, if you have an interest in cleaning carpets and roofs, running countless loads of donations to Goodwill, or are an expert at carefully piling items into boxes, your services are welcome!
N a we pita! (See you later!)
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**Additional, important thoughts about racial mirrors:
Mirrors for my Daughter's Bookshelf
Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids In School
From "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl" by Issa Rae: "You guys know about vampires?" Diaz asked. "You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn't see myself reflected at all. I was like, "Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don't exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."
